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More "Spectre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were naturally extremely annoying, but what really distressed him most was that he had been unable to wear the suit of mail. He had hoped that even modern Americans would be thrilled by the sight of a Spectre in armour, if for no more sensible reason, at least out of respect for their natural poet Longfellow, over whose graceful and attractive poetry he himself had whiled away many a weary hour when the Cantervilles ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... first appearance of a handful of soldiers, were represented as the prelude to a vast Socialist revolution from which the coup d'etat, and that alone, had saved France. Terrified by the re-appearance of the Red Spectre, the French nation proceeded on the 20th of December to pass its judgment on the accomplished usurpation. The question submitted for the plebiscite was, whether the people desired the maintenance of Louis ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... true that he entered the dreaded shades with fear, yet no spectre ever crossed his path. But perhaps that was because the thoughts of the old man were pure, or perhaps because he never entered the forest without singing a hymn in ...
— Undine • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... from the shrine Not aid but agony is mine. As a spider he creeps and he clutches his prey, And he hales me away. A spectre of darkness, of darkness. Alas and alas! well-a-day! O Earth, O my mother! O Zeus, thou king of the earth, and her child! Turn back, we pray thee, from us his ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... not see; they were so real that I knew just where they were in the room, and the peculiar terror they excited lay largely in the feeling that I was just going to see them. If by chance I came across a ghost story it haunted me for months, for I saw whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one horrid old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and who made my going to bed a terror to me for ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... a wraith, no grisly spectre, no half-nebulous Shape. He was Peter Grimm, rugged, homespun, the man whose iron individuality had undergone and ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... the sack had completely whitened his fellow-traveller and given him a most unearthly appearance. The frightened miller was "putrified," as Mrs. Malaprop would say, at the sight, and a push from the white spectre brought the unfortunate man to the ground, when away rode the gallant quartermaster with his sacks of flour, which, at length bursting, made a ludicrous spectacle ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... ravaged rack and box as if it had been the wreck of weeks instead of minutes, and the level rays of the setting sun flashed and blazed into its windows as though fire had been added to the ruin. But even this presently faded, leaving the abandoned coach a rigid, lifeless spectre on ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... his voice the spectre started and looked up; and then, without betraying either surprise or a disposition to beat a mysterious retreat, advanced to meet the soldier, walking rapidly, and waving his hand all the while with an impatient gesture, as if commanding ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... of the skeleton which hung in the mahogany case in the waiting-room, had lighted it up behind the eyes and the ribs, and was carrying it aloft before him, approaching round the corner, and thus confronting the effigy. The spectre moved steadily on, while the people fled. It made straight for Sir William Hunter, who now seemed for the first time disposed to shift his place. He did so with as much slowness and dignity as were compatible with the urgency of the circumstances, edging his horse ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... Street; too ill, in real truth, for Potsdam society on those new terms. Does not quit Francheville's "till March 5th;" and then only for another Lodging, called "the Belvedere", of suburban or rural kind. His case is intricate to a degree. He is sick of body; spectre-haunted withal, more than ever;—often thinks Friedrich, provoked, will refuse him leave. And, alas, he would so fain NOT go, as well as go! Leave for Plombieres,—leave in the angrily contemptuous shape, "Go, then, forever and a day!"—Voltaire can at once have: but to get it in the friendly ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... were gray days, too, which only served to make more golden the sun-kissed ones; days when no observations could be taken with the sextant, to the huge disgust of the officer in charge of such work; days when the distant mountains loomed spectre-like through the mist, their sharp outlines vignetted into the sky. Occasionally the fog would lift a bit, just enough to reveal the rain-drenched islands around us, and then suddenly wipe them out of existence again, leaving the ship alone on ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... Elizabeth's treatment, might join the French and the exiles.[310] Perplexed to know how to dispose of her, the ambassador and the chancellor thought of sending her off to Pomfret Castle; doubtless, if once within Pomfret walls, to find the fate of the second Richard there: but again the spectre of Lord ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... Perpetua," over which thou porest, for under all thy dignity and formalism there beats a loving father's heart. The shadows are gathering, dear sir, around thy fifth son in a far country, and in the gathering shadows there stalks, noiselessly, relentlessly, that grim, gray spectre, Death. On thy knees, then, oh Rector of St. Agnes, and blend thy prayers with the feeble petitions of her who even now, for thy house, entreats the Throne of Grace. Pray, oh thou on whom the bishop's hands have been laid, that the golden bowl be not broken ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... steppe of Debreczin, and which a young Prussian Baron, a great traveller, whom he met at Constantinople in '44, told him he always carried in his valise. And in conclusion he will say, in order to show the opinion which he entertains of the power of Scott as a writer, that he did for the spectre of the wretched Pretender what all the kings of Europe could not do for his body—placed it on the throne of these realms, and for Popery what Popes and Cardinals strove in vain to do for three centuries—brought back its mummeries and ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... dreaded spectre, though a beneficent angel with healing on his wings in truth, will push yet many traitorous or cowardly sycophants from the stools they disgrace, and substitute in their stead men who will quiet Agitation by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... parting breath, Whilst thou wert struggling in the pangs of death. Could tears have turn'd the tyrant in his course, Could sighs have check'd his dart's relentless force; Could youth and virtue claim a short delay, Or beauty charm the spectre from his prey. Thou still had'st liv'd, to bless my aching sight, Thy comrade's honour, and thy friend's delight: Though low thy lot, since in a cottage born, No titles did thy humble name adorn, ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... my jewel. Some dark oaken room, with ugly wo-begone portraits that stare dismally at one, and about which the housekeeper has a power of delightful stories of love and murder. And then a dim lamp, a table with a rusty sword across it, and a spectre all in white to draw aside one's ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... it—and how it was written when the plague was raging at Florence, the great plague that carried off Petrarch's Laura, and those other thousands of whom the world knew nothing then and knows nothing now. Some, too, have heard that the plague swept over Europe—desolating, devastating—the spectre with the swinging scythe mowing down broad swathes of men. Some, when they hear of it, picture to themselves Pope Clement VI. at Avignon, sitting in that vast palace that overlooks the Rhone, the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... was undoubtedly saved by a French Canadian. But for Jacques Baby, the grim spectre Starvation would have stalked through the little fortress. Baby was a prosperous trader and merchant who, with his wife Susanne Reaume, lived on the east shore of the river, almost opposite the fort. He had a farm of one thousand acres, two hundred of which were under ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... supernatural; The Romance of the Forest, and her use of suspense; heroines: The Mysteries of Udolpho; illustrations of Mrs. Radcliffe's methods; The Italian; villains; her historical accuracy and "unexplained" spectre in Gaston de Blondeville; her reading; style; descriptions of scenery; position in the history ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... at the small bridge near Olevano where the road takes a turn. A few hundred yards up the glen on your left is a fountain whose waters are renowned for their purity; the bridge itself is not a favourite spot after sunset; it is haunted by a most malignant spectre. That adds considerably, in my eyes, to the charm of the place. Besides, here stands an elder tree now in full flower. What recollections does that scent evoke! What hints of summer, after ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... last year began, after four months of sickness and idleness, all my plans gone to water, myself starting alone, a kind of spectre, for Nice - should I not be grateful? Come, let us ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... faded. It made a difference, certainly—but was it right to try to make one's hair look thicker and wavier than it really was? Between that and rouging the ethical line seemed almost impalpable, and the spectre of her rigid New England ancestry rose reprovingly before her. She was sure that none of her grandmothers had ever simulated a curl or encouraged a blush. A blush, indeed! What had any of them ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Phoebe heal'd the wound, With vigour arm'd him, and with glory crown'd. This done, the patron of the silver bow A phantom raised, the same in shape and show With great AEneas; such the form he bore, And such in fight the radiant arms he wore. Around the spectre bloody wars are waged, And Greece and Troy with clashing shields engaged. Meantime on Ilion's tower Apollo stood, And calling Mars, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... is formed of flakes of black cloud, with rents and openings of intense and lurid green, and at least half of the impressiveness of the picture depends on these openings. Close them, make the sky one mass of gloom, and the spectre will be awful no longer. It owes to the light of the distance both its size and its spirituality. The time would fail me if I were to name the tenth part of the pictures which occur to me, whose vulgarity is redeemed by this circumstance alone, and yet let not the ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... guise of the beloved. The result would be his death within three days, and, as a matter of fact, he died. This is the groundwork of the old Breton ballad of Le Sieur Nan, who dies after his intrigue with the forest spectre.(1) A tale more like a common modern ghost-story is vouched for by Mr. C. J. Du Ve, in Australia. In the year 1860, a Maneroo black fellow died in the service of Mr. Du Ve. "The day before he died, having been ill ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... saw rising the wistful figure of the poor man doomed to conditions which he could not change—born, it may be, like Pinetop, self-poised, yet with an untaught intellect, grasping, like him, after the primitive knowledge which should be the birthright of every child. Even the spectre of slavery, which had shadowed his thoughts, as it had those of many a generous mind around him, faded abruptly before the very majesty of the problem that faced him now. In his sympathy for the slave, whose bondage he and his race had striven ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... away than they were. Some of these men, however, were less distinguished for cleverness than for malignity, and shrieked for blood and the display of brute force in terms that would have done dishonor even to a St. Bartholomew assassin or anti-Albigensian crusader. Monsieur Romieu held up Le Spectre Rouge to the eyes of a generation incapable, from fright, of distinguishing between a scarecrow and the Apollo. The Red Spectre haunted him, and the people for whom he wrote, as relentlessly as the Gray Spectre came upon the chiefs ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... highways, On the road are many wonders, Three times Death appears to frighten, Thrice destruction hovers over!" Spake the reckless Lemminkainen, These the words of Kaukomieli: "Death is seen by aged people, Everywhere they see perdition, Death can never frighten heroes, Heroes do not fear the spectre; Be that as it may, dear mother, Tell that I may understand thee, Name the first of all destructions, Name the first and last destroyers!" Lemminkainen's mother answered: "I will tell thee, son and hero, Not because I wish to speak it, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel in his heart by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... was that night when there was an alarm of fire. I went close up to you to take Master Archibald from your arms; and, as sure as I am now standing here, I believe that for the moment my senses left me. I thought I saw a spectre—the spectre of my dead lady. I forgot the present; I forgot that all were standing round me; that you, Madame Vine, were alive before me. Your face was not disguised then; the moonlight shone full upon it, and I knew it, after the first few moments ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... angry bearing of the cardinal, in the scornful face of Eck, even in the thoughts of his own soul. He knew how powerful they had been in Rome. Even in his youth apparitions had tormented him; now they reappeared. From the dark shadows of his study the spectre of the tempter lifted its claw-like hand against his reason. Even while he was praying the Devil approached him in the form of the Redeemer, radiant as King of Heaven with the five wounds, as the ancient Church ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... his eyes; then, as he partook of our breakfast, he cross-examined us on my statement, and even tried to persuade us that the phantom in the ruin was Emily; and on her observing that she could not have seen herself, he talked of the Brocken Spectre and fog mirages; but we declared the night was clear, and I told him that all the rational theories I had ever heard were far more improbable than the appearance herself, at which he laughed. Then he scrupulously demanded whether this—this (he failed to ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cognisant of the report, which was confirmed in their minds by the late duke's conduct at her death. Lady Elizabeth, as we shall still by way of distinction call her, was then so emaciated as to resemble a living spectre; but the lines of a rare and commanding beauty still remained. Her features were regular and noble, her eyes magnificent, and her attenuated figure was upright and dignified, with the step of an empress. Her complexion of marble ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... under the table. The intrepid Don opens the door. There is a clap of thunder, and there enters the ghost of the Commandant in the form of his statue as seen in the churchyard. The music which has been described in connection with the overture accompanies the conversation of the spectre and his amazed host. Don Giovanni's repeated offer of hospitality is rejected, but in turn he is asked if he will return the visit. He will. "Your hand as a pledge," says the spectre. All unabashed, the doomed man places his hand in that of the statue, which closes upon it ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... gazed searchingly at the little old ghost, but to save his life he could not utter a word. He nearly suffocated with longing to possess the secret and know where the treasure lay, but he dared not ask; and all the time the spectre stood staring at him with unwinking scornful eyes, as if the sight of the cowardly, trembling man gave ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... difficult to distinguish a dream from a reality. On the contrary, he that composes himself to sleep, in case of any uncouth or absurd fancy, easily suspects it to have been a dream."[88] On this principle, Hobbes has ingeniously accounted for the spectre which is said to have appeared to Brutus; and the well-known story told by Clarendon, of the apparition of the duke of Buckingham's father will admit of a similar solution. There was no man at that time in the kingdom so much the topic of conversation as the duke; and, from the corruptness ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... the River. The God after having regarded you with a Look that spoke at [once [1]] his Pity and Displeasure, flew away. Immediately a kind of Gloom overspread the whole Place. At the same time I saw an hideous Spectre enter at one end of the Valley. His Eyes were sunk into his Head, his Face was pale and withered, and his Skin puckered up in Wrinkles. As he walked on the sides of the Bank the River froze, the Flowers faded, the Trees shed their Blossoms, the Birds dropped from off the Boughs, and fell ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... assassinate him. Seizing the Persian cimeter [156] that lay beside him, he plunged it in the breast of the intruder, and the object of his passion fell dead at his feet. "From that hour," says the biographer, "he could rest no more!" A spectre haunted his nights—the voice of the murdered girl proclaimed doom to his ear. It is added, and, if we extend our belief further, we must attribute the apparition to the skill of the priests, that, still tortured by the ghost ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sally, jolted by the train, which towards the small hours seemed to be trying out some new buck-and-wing steps of its own invention, slept ill, and presently, as she lay awake, there came to her bedside the Spectre of Doubt, gaunt and questioning. Had she, after all, wrought so well? Had she been wise in tampering with this ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... panic-terror pervaded the halls, and like an evil-announcing night-spectre passed over the heads of the stiffened, lifeless crowd the dismal rumor—"The regent and the princess are at variance; the regent is speaking to her with vehemence, ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... fashion, to congenial wayfarers. The more Field saw of the Waller lot, the more completely did the old New England hankering after a homestead, with acres instead of square feet of lawn and trees, take possession of him; and the spectre of ten years' rent for inconvenient flats and houses rose in his memory and urged him to buy land and build for himself. This finally resulted in the following letter to the old friend to whom he always went in any financial emergency, and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... climbing over the roof, making branches creak, springing out of the trees upon the chimney, popping its head into the flue, and shrieking and blaspheming at every corner of the walls. As in the old story, the assailant was a spectre which could be felt but not seen. She had never before been so struck with the devilry of a gusty night in a wood, because she had never been so entirely alone in spirit as she was now. She seemed ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... from the gray twilight into which the clouded sky and the heavy foliage had darkened the noontide, that he knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow. It may be that his pathway through life was haunted thus by a spectre that had stolen out from ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... will be banished from among mortals. God, take yourself away! for, from this day forth, cured of your fear and become wise, I swear, with hand extended to heaven, that you are only the tormentor of my reason, the spectre of my conscience. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... up like a plug in his throat to hinder his breathing, for he saw a headless horseman coming over the ridge behind him, blackly defined against the starry sky. Setting spurs to his nag with a hope of being first to reach Sleepy Hollow bridge, which the spectre never passed, the unhappy man made the best possible time in that direction, for his follower was surely overtaking him. Another minute and the bridge would be reached; but, to Ichabod's horror, the Hessian dashed alongside ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... shutting out every ray of light and hope. It makes the wretched falsely believe they will be wretched ever. It is the most fatal of all dangerous delusions; and it is only when this necromantic night-mare of the mind begins to vanish, by being resisted, that it is discovered to be but a tyrannic spectre. All grief, like all things else, will yield to the obliterating power of time. While despair is preying on the mind, time and its effects are preying on despair; and certain it is, the dismal vision will fade away, and Forgetfulness, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of the pine, Making their summer lives one ceaseless song, Were the sole echoes, save my steed's and mine, And vesper bell's that rose the boughs along; The spectre huntsman of Onesti's line, His hell-dogs, and their chase, and the fair throng Which learn'd from this example not to fly From a true lover,—shadow'd my ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... suspicious significance of the disappearance of the will, which was the sole obstacle that debarred her from her grandfather's wealth. Although sustained by an unfaltering trust in the omnipotence of innocence, she was tormented by a dread spectre that would not "down" at her bidding; how could she prove that the money and jewels had been given to her? Would the shock of the tidings of her arrest kill her mother? Was there any possible way by which she might be kept in ignorance of this ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... vain struggles, his love for Anne grew stronger, more overpowering. He was hollow-eyed and gaunt, ravenous with the hunger of love. A spectre of his former self, he watched himself starve with sustenance at hand. Bountiful love lay within his grasp and yet he starved. Full, rich pastures spread out before him wherein he could roam to the end of his days, blissfully gorging himself,—and yet he starved. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... the picquet line which extended from Pembina Mountain to Lake of the Woods (150 miles), was nowhere visible, and I. began to think that the whole thing was only a myth, and that the Red River revolt was as unsubstantial as the Spectre of the Brocken. But just then, as I stood on the high roof of the "International," from whence a wide view was obtained, I saw across the level prairie outside the huts of Pembina the figures of two horsemen riding at a rapid pace towards the north. They were on the road ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... pursue in order to elude the vigilance of McDermot, the detective; and then, if all proved vain, I could but perish! For I would have walked cheerfully over the burning ploughshares of old, lived again through the hideous nightmare of the burning ship and raft, nay, clasped hands with the spectre of La Vigne himself, had it offered to lead me to purgatory, rather than have married the knave, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Sidorovitch?" Razumov was conscious of meeting this advance with odious, muttering boorishness. The professor was obviously too astonished to be offended. All this was bad. And all this was Haldin, always Haldin—nothing but Haldin—everywhere Haldin: a moral spectre infinitely more effective than any visible apparition of the dead. It was only the room through which that man had blundered on his way from crime to death that his spectre did not seem to be able to haunt. Not, to be exact, that he was ever completely absent from it, but that there he had ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Because, in the first place, such homes are being destroyed and made impossible now by the very causes against which Socialism fights, and because in this world at the present time very few homes are at all like this ideal. In reality every poor home is haunted by the spectre of irregular employment and undermined by untrustworthy insurance, it must shelter in insanitary dwellings and its children eat adulterated food because none other can be got. And that, I am sorry to say, it is only too easy to prove, by a second appeal ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... for a moment spell-bound; for she beheld in that countenance without the possibility of doubt, the resemblance of the deceased Lady Greville, whose portrait, in a similar dress, hung in the picture gallery at Silsea Castle. She shuddered; for the eyes of the spectre remained steadfastly fixed upon her; and its lips moved as if about to address her—"Mother of God—protect me!" exclaimed Helen convulsively, and she fell ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... feet. But she, for whom the greeting was intended, did not observe this mute courtship, for her eyes followed the travellers, and especially the young man, as if spellbound. As soon as the three were far enough off not to hear her, the girl asked with a shiver, as if some desert-spectre had passed by-and in a low voice ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... from his ship the Topaze, and on his way home. He was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the house as to my thoughts and remembrances of it, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... made himself emperor. He did not take up the crown that had fallen from the head of the Bourbons; he created a new one for himself—a crown which the French people and Senate had, however, offered him. The revolution still stood a threatening spectre behind the French people; its return was feared, and, since the discovery of the conspiracy of Georges, Moreau, and Pichegru, the people anxiously asked themselves what was to become of France if the conspirators ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... I was a boy," said Rev. J. A. James, "a school-fellow gave me an infamous book, which he lent me for only fifteen minutes. At the end of that time it was returned to him, but that book has haunted me like a spectre ever since. I have asked God on my knees to obliterate that book from my mind, but I believe that I shall carry down with me to the grave the spiritual damage I ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... book before her. They both looked very sad, I thought. I tapped at the window, which opened to the ground, to call their attention, and grinned a "How-d'ye-do" through the glass. No sooner did Alice see my face, than letting her book fall, she gave a loud scream, as if she had seen a spectre. ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... be so immune from timidity Never a spectre could fill them with fright, Men who could keep their accustomed placidity Were they to meet in the gloom of the night Lady Hermione tramping the corridor, Wicked Sir Guy with his fetters adrag, Or a plebeian who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... supporters were estranged from them or had actually turned {112} against them. The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel probably thought that their wisest course would be to let Lord Grey and Brougham and their friends try what they could do with the monstrous spectre of reform which they had conjured up, and wait till the country had recovered its senses before again undertaking to act ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... any one enter her apartments. When the mulatto chambermaid came there, in the ordinary course of her duties, she would shrink back in her chair and shade her eyes, as if some hideous spectre had crossed her path; but, if Agnes Barker entered, this nervous shock became unendurable, and it was with the greatest effort that she could refrain from rushing madly into the next room, and holding the door against ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... interest produced by that dreadful scream. All turned their eyes for a moment in the quarter whence it proceeded; when presently, from behind the groups of Canadians crowning the slope, was seen flying, with the rapidity of thought, one who resembled rather a spectre than a being of earth;—it was the wife of Halloway. Her long fair hair was wild and streaming—her feet, and legs, and arms were naked—and one solitary and scanty garment displayed rather than concealed ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... of our thoughts; it was the atmosphere of our feelings; a something as all-pervading and impalpable as the air we drew into our lungs. And suddenly this danger, this breath of our life, had taken this material form. It was material and expected, and yet it had the effect of an evil spectre, inasmuch as one did not know where and how it was vulnerable, what precisely it would do, how one should defend ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... make the best of my life and could when by myself be cheerful, even in the recollection of the past fun; but there was that about me now which brought sorrow over to me. The instant I saw her, she checked my smile, sneered at my past, moaned over my future, was a nightmare to me, a very spectre. ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... the dead man, 'mid that beauteous scene Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright Rose, with his ghastly face, a spectre ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... accept any sort of a task whatever. And all the more so, since his mother had not given up hope of making him accept one of those fine careers in which an industrious young fellow may win esteem and fortune. The "spectre of the daily grind" stared him in the face, and although he had escaped a notary's career, through the death of the man to whose practice he was to have succeeded, they gave him to understand that the sombre portals of a government position ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... rabbits' tails behind their backs, who fishes for their wigs, who sticks up pins in his friends' chairs, who carries a hideous mask in his pocket to frighten little children, and who is himself frightened into repentance by a spectre with a speaking trumpet, is a very objectionable, though an excellent dramatic character. The part of the spectre is played by the groom; this is ill contrived in a drama for children; grooms should have nothing to do with their entertainments; and Caesar, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... un long bruit de taillis qui tressaille, Comme si quelque bete en passant l'eut trouble, Et l'ombre du rocher tenebreux a semble Plus noire, et l'on dirait qu'un morceau de cette ombre A pris forme et s'en est alle dans le bois sombre, Et maintenant on voit comme un spectre marchant La-bas dans la clarte sinistre ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... the shouts of "The granaries, the granaries—merciful heaven, all is consumed!" came with such appalling consciousness on every ear, that for a brief while, the stoutest arm hung powerless, the firmest spirit quailed. Famine stood suddenly before them as a gaunt, terrific spectre, whose cold hand it seemed had grasped their very hearts. Nobles and men, knights and soldiers, alike stood paralyzed, gazing at each other with a blank, dim, unutterable despair. The shrill blast of many trumpets, the roll of heavy drums, broke ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... tormenting them until suitable burial was performed. Pliny the Younger[113] relates the story of a ghost which haunted a house and terrified to death all the inhabitants of the dwelling; a philosopher who was brave enough to follow it discovered at the place where the spectre stopped some bones which had not been buried in the proper manner. The shade of the Emperor Caligula wandered in the gardens of the palace; it was necessary to disinter the body and bury it anew in ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... by what he had been doing, for it was inevitable that there should be a certain emotion in calling up the spectre of dishonor before a family a thousand years old. But he went back to the inn and contrived to wait there, deliberately, for the next two hours. He thought it more than probable that Urbain de Bellegarde would give no sign; for an answer to his challenge, in either sense, would be a confession ...
— The American • Henry James
... hands of the hateful Gaveston. They bid higher and higher, but at length Dickson stops, unable to go farther. Gaveston feels assured of his triumph, when George Brown, recalling his vow to the white Lady, advances boldly, bidding one thousand pounds more. Anna is beside him, in the shape of the spectre, and George obediently bids on, till the castle is his for the price of three hundred thousand pounds. Gaveston in a perfect fury, swears avenge himself on the adventurer, who is to pay the sum in the afternoon. Should he prove unable to do so, he shall be put into prison. George, who firmly ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... wish to go in. He declared that the door was closed. She pushed it, and slipped into the immense nave, where the inanimate trees of the columns ascended in darkness. In the rear, candles were moving in front of spectre-like priests, under the last reverberations of the organs. She trembled ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... during that eventful journey,—that youth, whose features are imprinted on my memory, is the very individual forester who this day rescued us in the forest. I cannot be mistaken; and connecting these marvellous appearances with the spectre which I saw while at Gay Bowers, I cannot resist the conviction that Heaven has permitted my guardian angel to assume mortal shape ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... yet be no voluntary accomplice in the Sacrilege. With the commencement of a PUBLIC, commences the degradation of the GOOD and the BEAUTIFUL—both fade and retire before the accidentally AGREEABLE. "Othello" becomes a hollow lip-worship; and the "CASTLE SPECTRE," or any more recent thing of Froth, Noise, and Impermanence, that may have overbillowed it on the restless sea of curiosity, is the true Prayer of Praise ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... ever in Bryant's and Carrigan's minds was of that grim and implacable enemy, cold. Autumn had lasted amazingly; November yielded to December, with the days still fine; but who could tell when the white spectre, Winter, would lay his icy hand upon the earth? The peaks and upper slopes of the mountains were already mantled with snow. Each morning the engineer and the contractor marked with care the fall of the thermometer during the night, examined ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... Martineau—was in real fact the basic cause of the war, seemed to her as clear as anything in reason[857]. She had no patience with English anti-slavery people who believed Northern protestations, and she did not express concern over the horrors of a possible servile insurrection. Nevertheless this spectre was constantly appearing. Again the Spectator sought to allay such fears; but yet again also proclaimed that even such a contingency was less fearful than the consolidation of the slave-power in ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... goest," said Lord Huntinglen; "and I will have thee try, moreover, whether a cup of sack cannot bring some colour into these cheeks of thine. It were a shame to my household, thou shouldst glide out into the Strand after such a spectre-fashion as thou now wearest—Look to it, Dalgarno, for the honour of ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... his ragged uniform, haggard but eager, was standing like a gaunt spectre in the sunlight that flooded the terrace. The vagabond, with the eyes of all upon him, raised and lowered his arms thrice, and the face of ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... had appeared at the doorway, a worn, and troubled spectre of dismay, now put in a confirmatory word. "You are quite right, Simeon. That house reeks with the talk of wine-bibbers and those who make life a witticism. Such ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... stirred and sprung and answered Dane's words in her heart as he spoke them. And yet the sudden whirlabout to all her thoughts and habits and ways, was very confusing. So she sat thinking,with every dress she had in the world gravely presented itself, like a spectre, and all the glove buttons insisting upon being counted then and there. Suddenly, from the waves of blue silk a little foot started out into the firelight,a foot half smothered in trimming; rosetted, buckled, beribboned, belaced. Hazel gazed at it,and then gave up, and broke into a ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... language thus became a means for preserving the records of history, and it has also been a treasure house of stories, furnishing material for much of the poetry of Europe. One of these legends gave Scott the story of the combat between Marmion and the Spectre Knight. ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... himself trying to take an inventory of his own stock. And since the material question of money did not come in to cloud the horizon, he felt he could do it impartially. There are many now who, having sacrificed every prospect, find their outlook haunted by the spectre of want; there are many more, formerly engaged in skilled trades such as engineering or mining, who find that they have four years of leeway to make up in their profession—four years of increased knowledge and mechanical improvements—unknown to them, but not to their competitors, ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... rather than obtruded upon us are kept in the background, so as not to invite, nor indeed to render possible, the application of scientific tests. We may compare him once more to Miss Bronte, who introduces, in 'Villette,' a haunted garden. She shows us a ghost who is for a moment a very terrible spectre indeed, and then, very much to our annoyance, rationalises him into a flesh-and-blood lover. Hawthorne would neither have allowed the ghost to intrude so forcibly, nor have expelled him so decisively. The garden in his hands would have been haunted by a shadowy terror of which we could render ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the sacred mission has been fulfilled. By signs that cannot be doubted has it been shown that the spectre that brought desolation to the earth was slain by the magic arrow just seven settings of the ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... a hand as though he feared another blow. The gesture was so human and yet so humble that Mary looked into his face. Time, which turns the sweet-eyed girl into a withered spectre, must have touched him with its thumb. His eyes were ringed and ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... she felt frightened, and hastened on; and as she hurried on, many things she had heard in her childhood recurred to her thoughts, especially all the superstitious tales about "the apparition of the beach"—the spectre of the unburied that lay washed up on the lonely, deserted shore. The body thrown up from the deep, the dead body itself, she thought nothing of; but its ghost followed the solitary wanderer, attached itself closely ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... mercy, Mr. M'Crie!' And at morn they will rise with bloodshot eyes, And the very first thing they will see, When they dare to descend to their coffee and rolls, Sitting down by the scuttle, the scuttle of coals, With a volume of notes on its knee, Is the spectre ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... as to assist. She detested Mara, and Mrs. Hunter's ghastly face and white hair embodied to her mind the terror of which all were in dread. The bright sunshine and homely work were suggestive of rural pleasures rather than of dire necessity, and helped, for the time, to retire the spectre of danger to the background. The coming and going of many acquaintances and friends also helped to rally her spirits, and incite her to the semblance of courage. Mrs. Willoughby, Mrs. Bodine, and Mara had stanch friends who sought them out the moment comparative safety ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... bent for a few seconds over the still sprawling fakir, whipped him again twice, cursed him and kicked him, until he got up and ran like a spectre for the gloom beyond the trees. Then, with a rather stately sweep of the lamp, and a tremble in his voice that was probably intentional—designed to make Cunningham at least aware of the existence of emotion before he looked—he let the light fall on the ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... containing the inhabitants of the South understands better than you do the gravity of that great problem which confronts them. It is "like the pestilence that walketh in darkness, the destruction that wasteth at noonday." It confronts us all the day; it is the spectre that ever sits beside our bed. No doubt we make mistakes about it; no doubt there are outbreaks growing out of some phases of it that astound, and shock, and stun you, as they do ourselves. But believe me, the Anglo-Saxon race has set itself, with all its power, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... in a tone of such reverence that one might have imagined my father's spectre stood before him. 'It symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at, and the great and good John Ruskin scorns. But this design is only the predella beneath the picture "Faith and ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... grandfather's—a colonel of West India Militia, I believe. Now my grandfather had been a rather short man, but very broad and stout, particularly round the stomach. Old Clump was tall and thin as a spectre, so the epaulettes fell over his shoulders, the waist flapped loosely eight inches above his trousers, and the short swallow-tails did not sufficiently cover the spot which the venerable darky usually placed on the chair to hide a patch, the bigness of a frying-pan and of a different ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... dream of such a spectre at his heels to disturb his imagination, Alfred Stevens was pursuing his way toward Ellisland, at that easy travelling gait, which is the best for man and beast, vulgarly called a "dog-trot." Some very fine and fanciful people insist upon calling it a "jog-trot." We beg leave, in this ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... Bridge, our Bridge of Sighs. How many of these my brethren have sought refuge in the cold grey arms of the river from something worse than death? What drove them to this dreadful resting-place? What spectre hurried them to the leap? These things, too, are ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... of Finance-Minister Creutz, once a poor Regiment's Auditor, when his Majesty, as yet Crown-Prince, found talent in him? Can readers fish up from their memory, twenty years back, anything of a terrific Spectre walking in the Berlin Palace, for certain nights, during that "Stralsund Expedition" or famed Swedish-War time, to the terror of mankind? Terrific Spectre, thought to be in Swedish pay,—properly a spy Scullion, in a small concern ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... it were a world that had come to me and sought me out—wanted me to live in it. Hundreds and hundreds of times, when I am being civilised, have I not tried to do otherwise? Have I not stopped my poor pale, hurried, busy soul (like a kind of spectre flying past me) before a great book and tried to get it to speak to it, and it would not? It requires a world—a great book does—as a kind of ticket of admission, and what have I to do, when I am being civilised, with a world—the ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... night before, offered up to God in the solitude of his own chamber. And not only are the fables, which the chronicles of the times have handed down to us, enacted as veritable facts, but the poet has added miracles and prodigies of his own invention; and in particular, a certain spectre of a black knight—who appears to us to have been introduced as much for the sake of supporting the supernatural character of the piece as for any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... that glance, and he trembled like a leaf. He gazed upon the stranger like one who sees a spectre. And she met his glance, boldly at the first; then the light faded from her eyes, her head drooped, and she fell in a swoon upon the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... finest connaisseuses in Europe, or else is traveling about in Italy, Austria or England. Indeed the only contemporary of the old Emperor who still remains at Berlin, and who is occasionally to be seen at court, giving one the impression of a spectre of the past, is Prince George, who bears a startling resemblance to the old kaiser particularly when arrayed ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... became more threatening, the talk of peaceable secession growing out of a disinclination to accept civil war, commended itself to persons who thought a peaceful dissolution of the Union, if the slave-holding South should seek it, preferable to such an alternative.[634] But as the spectre of dismemberment of the nation came nearer, concessions to the South as expressed in the Weed plan, and, later, in the Crittenden compromise, commended itself to a large part of the people. A majority of the voters at the preceding election undoubtedly favoured such an adjustment. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Grim, relentless spectre who pursues them unceasingly, and from whose menacing, shadowy presence they are never free—from whom, so the Senator has now despairingly come to believe, they ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... spears, and other implements of destruction. The second column was commanded by a majestic matron, whose noble figure was clothed in a sacerdotal robe. On her right stood Superstition, a gloomy-eyed spectre, bearing in his hand a bow formed from the bones of the dead, and on his back a quiver filled with poisoned arrows. On her left hovered a wild, fantastically clothed figure, called Fanaticism, bearing ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... creation of human hands conquers the spectre, and, puffing and whistling, the locomotive breaks through the dark haze. Once again the iron serpent disappears into the bowels of the rock, and as it emerges it crosses another valley and is greeted by a clear heaven and a ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... stairs, I darted up towards my own room. My hand was already on the lock of the door before I recollected myself. I then paused, and a cold shivering came over me. I threw the door forcibly open, as children are accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side; but nothing appeared. I stepped fearfully in: the apartment was empty, and my bedroom was also freed from its hideous guest. I could hardly believe that so great a good fortune could have befallen me, but when I became assured ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... back from their country haunts, and Celeste and Mimi from Ostende. How gay it will be—this Quartier Latin then! How gay it always is in winter—and then the rainy season. Ah! but one can not have everything. Thus it was that Lachaume and I sat talking, when suddenly a spectre passed—a spectre of a man, his face silent, white, and ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... and something induced him to do that again. At the same moment another mighty roar ascended from the crowd, and the head of the great fire-escape rose like a solemn spectre through smoke, fire, and steam, not ten yards ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the case of Glam, the terrible spectre which Grettir had so much difficulty in overcoming. To all who appreciate a shudder may be recommended chap. xxxv. of "The Story of Grettir the Strong," translated from the Icelandic by E. Magnusson and W. ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... Almighty Homer is twice far above Troy and her towers, Olympus and Jupiter. First, when Priam bends before Achilles, and a second time, when the shade of Agamemnon speaks among the dead. That awful spectre, called up by genius in after-time, shook the Athenian stage. That scene was ever before me; father and daughter were ever in my sight; I felt their looks, their words, and again I gave them form and utterance; and, with proud ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... death No ghastly spectre stood—but from the porch Of life, the lip—one kiss inhaled the breath, And the mute graceful Genius lower'd a torch. The judgment-balance of the Realms below, A judge, himself of mortal lineage, held; The very Furies at the Thracian's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... a certain "wicked Lady Ferrers," who, disguised in male attire, robbed travellers upon the highway, and being wounded in one of these exploits, was discovered lying dead outside the walls of the house; and the malignant nature of this lady's spectre is said to have had so firm a hold upon the villagers that no local labourer could be induced to work upon that particular ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... we can do?" demanded Glaudot, whose dreams of galactic conquest were fading before the spectre ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... intrigues, the confidence of the people. Conspiracies against his life were formed: fortune no longer favoured his arms. His attempts to compel the Marquis Spinola to raise the siege of Breda were unsuccessful. This reverse of fortune preyed upon his mind. He thought himself haunted by a spectre of Barneveldt: he was frequently heard, during his last illness, to exclaim, "Remove this head from me!" "This anecdote," says the author of the Resume de l'histoire de la Hollande, "is related by all the republican historians of the United ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... insult, according to the disposition of the circumjacent powers, than to be the scourge and terror of them all: but out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... through the doorway from the outer world, or whether the vaults were open and they were the ghosts of some dead-and-gone congregation of long ago. And when I looked round again, there was the clergyman in a dingy surplice, as if he had risen like a spectre in his place. He stared at us all with his dull old eyes, and turned the leaves of a great book. And all at once he began to read, in a piping voice so thin and weak that it sounded just like the echo of some former service—as if it had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... the idea of the means had come to him, came now the spectre of the consequences to affright him. How would it fare with him on Robespierre's return? How angered would not Robespierre be upon discovering that his wishes had been set at naught, his very measures contravened—and this by fraud? And than Robespierre's anger there were few things ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... radiated in arid Tibet, than in the wooded and grassed mountains of Sikkim.] From the elevation of about 19,300 feet, which I attained on Donkia, I saw a fine illustration of that atmospheric phenomenon called the "spectre of the Brocken," my own shadow being projected on a mass of thin mist that rose above the tremendous precipices over which I hung. My head was surrounded with a brilliant circular glory or rainbow.* [Probably caused by spiculae of ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... advanced his face slowly towards that of the Indian, put on a dark frown, and stood for a few seconds without uttering a word. The savage shrank back and shuddered from head to foot. Then, with a noiseless step, Martin retreated slowly backward towards the door and passed out like a spectre—never for a moment taking his eyes off those of the savage until he was lost in darkness. On gaining the forest he fled with a beating heart to his former retreat; but his fears were groundless, for the Indian firmly believed ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... for the wind was contrary to them. And about the fourth watch of the night he comes to them, walking on the sea, and would have passed by them. (49)And they seeing him walking on the sea, supposed it was a spectre, and cried out; (50)for all saw him, and were troubled. And immediately he talked with them, and says to them: Be of good cheer; it is I, be not afraid. (51)And he went up to them into the ship; and the wind ceased. And they were sore amazed in themselves beyond measure, and wondered. ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... was burning. He entered his chamber, which was hung around with purple, but the walls of which now seemed to distil blood. He advanced a few steps, when, lo! a corpse appeared to rise slowly on his golden couch; his bed was occupied by a spectre, and near the costly lamp, which shed a pale light round the chamber, the chains of the martyr seemed to descend from the ceiling. Diocletian uttered a cry that might have penetrated the grave. His guards ran in, but instantly grew pale, drew back, and, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... slumber bound. Or, panting like the ocean, when a dream Of storm awakes her:—Heaven and Earth are still; In radiant loveliness the stars pursue Their pilgrimage, while moonlight's wizard hand Throws beauty, like a spectre light, on all. At Judah's tent the lion-banner stands Unfolded, and the pacing sentinels,— What awe pervades them, when the dusky groves, The rocks Titanian, by the moonshine made Unearthly, or yon mountains vast, they view! But soon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... a somewhat more agreeable life, as of late I have been associating more with other people. You could scarcely believe what a sad and dreary life mine has been for the last two years; my defective hearing everywhere pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear a misanthrope; and yet no one is in reality less so! This change has been wrought by a lovely fascinating girl [undoubtedly Giulietta], who loves me and whom I love. ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... the Comitia, the magistrates would cease to be ministers of the senate; for it was chiefly through a system of judicious prize-giving that the senate attached to itself the loyalty of the official class. There was perhaps less fear of what Gracchus himself might do than of the spectre which he was raising for the future. For in Roman history the events of the past made those of the future; there were few isolated phenomena in ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... running two fingers thoughtfully into his crisp, brown hair; "that would never do. How would it work to see the same ghost again, minus the overalls, and have gold bricks in the hod? That would elevate the spectre from degrading toil to a financial plane. Don't you think that would ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... a starr'd night. The fiend, tired of his dark dominion, swung above the rolling ball, part screen'd in cloud, where sinners hugg'd their spectre of repose. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... gone to Naples. He had been turned back by a spectre evoked from his own conscience—coward fear. He was on his way to the station when he suddenly discovered that he had lost the sheath of his dagger. A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead as this fact flashed upon him. What had he ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... vagabond, or worse!" Turned the great key and flung the portal wide; A man rushed by him at a single stride, Haggard, half naked, without hat or cloak, Who neither turned, nor looked at him, nor spoke, But leaped into the blackness of the night, And vanished like a spectre ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... are, and I bet you do a jolly rank paper too,' I said, remembering that the sceptic is sometimes vouchsafed revelations to which the most devout believer may not aspire. It is, for instance, always the young man who scoffs at ghosts that the family spectre chooses as his audience. But it required more than a mere sneer or an empty gibe to pump information out of Bradshaw. He took me up ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... a gaunt, yellow spectre of a man, reduced to his last chemise, and that a sad spectacle of ancient purity, starting from Lincoln's-Inn, and making all haste for Waterloo-bridge, the inference is rather natural, that he is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... lacked food amid even the unproductive flora and meagre fauna of the Coal Measures. With these ancient cockroaches a few locusts and beetles have been found associated, together with a small Tinea,—a creature allied to the common clothes-moth, and a Phasmia,—a creature related to the spectre insects. But the group is an inconsiderable one; for insects seem to have occupied no very conspicuous place in the carboniferous fauna. The beetles appear to have been of the wood and seed devouring kinds, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... our boys are coming to, as if we had any right to expect better treatment of them. I doubt if Jacob, in the whole course of his wizened little life, had ever a hand in an honest game that was not haunted by the spectre of the avenging policeman. That he was not "doing anything" was no defence. The mere claim was proof that he was up to mischief of some sort. Besides, the policeman was usually right. Play in such a setting becomes a direct incentive to mischief ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... Dave early on the trail, leading a saddled horse by his side. The hours were leaden for the girl all that day, and looking into the future she saw the spectre of her life shadowed down the years by an unutterable loneliness. How could she ever drop it all—all this wild freedom, this boundless health, this great outdoors, this life, life, how could she drop it all and go back into the little circle where ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... skeleton hands from their mittens, and raising them in an imploring gesture, Mookoomahn looked, as he stood there in the dim candlelight under the low log ceiling, more a spectre—a ghostly phantom visitor—than ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... portion of the tribe swept off by the fell disease which had left such marks on all who survived. There were no trees on this hill save one quite dead, which seemed to point, with its hoary arms, like a spectre to the tombs. A melancholy waste, where a level country and boundless woods extended beyond the reach of vision, was in perfect harmony with the dreary foreground of the scene. (See ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... regards ornamental design, and took the Great Exhibition to witness the fact. We have also pointed to that strange phenomenon, the rise anew of monastic institutions among us, long after their object is accomplished, giving a spectre-like expression to an obsolete idea; we have exposed, likewise, the inclination of the working-classes to trust to the protection, and, on every emergency, claim as a matter of right the aid of the wealthy, thus wilfully and deliberately returning to the condition of serfdom: we have now to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... retorted. "I never does hear of but one; that's a apparition which enlists the attentions of Peets and Old Man Enright a lot. It's a spectre that takes to ha'ntin' about one of Enright's Bar-B-8 sign-camps, an' scarin' up the cattle an' drivin' 'em over a precipice, an' all to Enright's disaster an' loss. Nacherally, Enright don't like this spectral play; an' him an' Peets lays for the wraith ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... opening the flood-gates of language, as the Spanish say. Rembrandt exerts an especial fascination. Fra Angelico is a saint, Michelangelo is a giant, Raphael is an angel, Titian a prince, Rembrandt is a spectre. What else can this miller's son be called? Born in a windmill, he arose unexpectedly without a master, without example, without any instruction from the schools, to become a universal painter, who depicted life in every aspect, who painted figures, landscapes, sea-pieces, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... which may satisfy it, have undoubtedly the effect of binding us to earth and earthly conditions; they come between us and faith in true immortality. They cannot restore to us what death takes away. They cannot lay the spectre ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... gradually a strange, unreasoning fear came upon me. I suppose it was the immensity of the prairies, the terrible loneliness of it all, and my own state of health, but the dread grew from day to day and from night to night. I tried to busy self, to keep my mind active, to throw off the spectre that haunted me, but day and night I was oppressed with a sense of impending danger. We had no wooden door on the house; we hadn't money to buy the boards to make one, and all my protection was a blanket hung in the doorway. I used to watch that ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... That old Greek question again;—yet unanswered. The unconquerable spectre still flitting among the forest trees at twilight; rising ribbed out of the sea-sand;—white, a strange Aphrodite,—out of the sea-foam; stretching its grey, cloven wings among the clouds; turning the light of their sunsets into blood. This has ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... of our orgies—one of our high festivals, I mean—he glided in, like the ghost in "Macbeth," and seated himself, as usual, a little back from the table, in the chair we always placed for "the spectre," whether it chose to fill it or not. I saw by his face that he was suffering from the effects of an overdose of his insidious comforter; but nobody spoke to him, and he spoke to nobody. A few sidelong glances, and a whispered observation, that "the ghost ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... while her excitement and enthusiasm died away, and life began to look gaunt and bare. Even her Saviour's face seemed hidden, and she only saw an ugly spectre in the ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... like a human being—it was nothing but seaweed. Still she felt frightened, and hastened on; and as she hurried on, many things she had heard in her childhood recurred to her thoughts, especially all the superstitious tales about "the apparition of the beach"—the spectre of the unburied that lay washed up on the lonely, deserted shore. The body thrown up from the deep, the dead body itself, she thought nothing of; but its ghost followed the solitary wanderer, attached itself closely to him or her, ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... those things for which he is most fitted, let them be what they will. He now felt free to tell the vicissitudes of thought and will he had passed through this twelvemonth, and how the idea of giving up all had affected him.] "The spectre of a wasted life has passed before me—a vision of that servant who hid his talent in a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... grief-stricken man, whose eyes seemed quenched in tears, passed often down the street, hardly able to drag himself along; it was Monsieur de Lamotte, who lodged, as we have said, in the rue de la Mortellerie, and who seemed like a spectre wandering round a tomb. The crowd made way and uncovered before him, everybody respected such terrible misfortune, and when he had passed, the groups formed up again, and continued ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... private they besought the latter that to the double merit of having vanquished the enemy and reconciled the parties he would add the third and yet greater service of preserving internal peace to his country, and banishing the fearful spectre of civil war with which they were threatened. Whatever could tell on a vain, unskilful, vacillating man—all the flattering arts of diplomacy, all the theatrical apparatus of patriotic enthusiasm—was put ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Ha Balder! thou hast slain him! Ah, forgive me! My dream confuses me—thou see'st I tremble. I heard the fall of gods—the gods lamenting; And bloody by the Hall there stood a spectre: Big was the ruddy wound whereto it pointed. Like one deep musing it conceal'd its visage; But big the tears were through its fingers streaming: Ah, the pale son of night was ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... matter how the wind blew. Hanz Toodleburg called the Fire Fly an invention of the devil, and nobody else. The bright blaze of her furnaces, and the long trail of fire and sparks issuing from her funnel of a dark night, gave a spectre-like appearance to her movements, that rather increased a belief amongst the superstitious that she was really an invention of the evil one, ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... certainty, all friends, far and near, were roused, and thronged along the banks of the stream. Torches flashed in boats that put off in the terrible search. Hawthorne, then living in the Old Manse, was summoned, and the man whom the villagers had only seen at morning as a musing spectre in his garden, now appeared among them at night to devote his strong arm and steady heart to their service. The boats drifted slowly down the stream—the torches flared strangely upon the black repose of ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... a battalion was pressing past, the spectre of annihilation. West groaned. Then a figure sprang from the shadowy ranks and called West's name, and when he saw it was Trent he cried out. Trent seized him, ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... had listened in an agony of terror to the colloquy, and at the exclamation of Primus, availing himself of his post as steersman, turned the bow of the boat towards the opposite shore, to place as great an interval as possible between himself and the spectre. The action had not passed unnoticed, though neither of his companions made any remark upon it. Repeatedly his head had flown round over his shoulder, to catch a glimpse of what he dredded to see, but, notwithstanding the excitement of his ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... so much pain, judge what I must suffer. The affection you show them makes me feel most acutely my unhappiness in having none." These words sounded in Josephine's ears like a funeral knell. She saw the spectre of divorce rising before her, and turned pale. From Genoa they went to Turin. Napoleon heard there of the coalition preparing against him, and left suddenly for France with Josephine. Non-commissioned officers of the Grenadiers ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the house as to my thoughts and remembrances of it, any ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Another spectre that rose to haunt my last days in prison, and long stood between my parole and final pardon, was the story of one John McMath, a corporal in an Indiana cavalry company, in Pleasanton's command, ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... remained only for a time. I kept up secret devotions very carefully. I never missed my daily prayers, but my life was inconsistent and God-dishonoring. The lives of real Christians rebuked me, and the mockery of my empty profession haunted me like a spectre. ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... of the first week of war was indeed serious, and the grim spectre of unemployment was in the air. But ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... this was one of the last he would have wished to meet at any time; but, now that he recognised in him only the patron and protector of Nicholas, he would rather have seen a spectre. One beneficial effect, however, the encounter had upon him. It instantly roused all his dormant energies; rekindled in his breast the passions that, for many years, had found an improving home there; called up all his wrath, hatred, and ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... to leave Mount Music on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Larry was to be married to Tishy Mangan. What room was there for phantom fears when these things were certainties? What spectre from the other world has power to ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... one, the glorious day, the burning one, the founder of cities, the renewer of sanctuaries, the provider of feasts for all the Igigi, without whom no feast took place in E-kura. Like Nebo, he bore the glorious spectre, and it was said of him that he attacked mightily in battle. Without him the sun-god, the judge, ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... to see a coral dawn Gladden to a crocus glow! Day's a spectre dim and wan, Dancing on the furtive snow; Night's a cloud upon my brain: Oh, to see the ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... dress'd in blue; I've seen a cupid burn a wing; I've known a Neptune lose a shoe; I've heard a guilty spectre sing. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... dashed into the valley, below us now, as if this rolling along of a heavy victoria, a lot of luggage, and three travellers, was an agreeable episode in her career of toil. But on the mind of her owner, the spectre of the free-thinkers was still hovering like an evil spirit. During the next hour he gave us a long and exhaustive exposition of the changes wrought by ces messieurs qui nient le bon Dieu. Among their crimes was to be numbered that of having disintegrated the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... 'Between them and me there is a great gulf fixed. I watch them pass, and I say to myself: "There are the living—that is how they look, how they speak! Realise once for all that you have nothing to do with them. Life is theirs—belongs to them. You are already outside it. Go your way, and be a spectre among the active ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... must be mad, and I retreated backward before this advancing spectre. I kept moving away, making a sign with my hand,' as if to drive the phantom away, that gesture which you have noticed—that gesture which has remained with me ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... building which evidently had once been a dwelling of importance, but for quite a century it had been tenantless and almost entirely dismantled: the home of the owl and the lizard, of the spectre and ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... me. No longer guest-right I bestow; The door is open, art free to go. But what do I see in the creature? Is that in the course of nature? Is't actual fact? or Fancy's shows? How long and broad my poodle grows! He rises mightily: A canine form that cannot be! What a spectre I've harbored thus! He resembles a hippopotamus, With fiery eyes, teeth terrible to see: O, now am I sure of thee! For all of thy half-hellish brood The Key of Solomon ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... weeks kept Amy company. Through her nights and days it had stalked, a pale spectre. And now Maxwell was saying: "You'll be well in a month. Of course you'll come! There's room for half a dozen. You three ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... the focal and foremost fire, Out of the hospital walls as dire, Smitten of grape-shot and gangrene— Eighteenth battle and he sixteen— Spectre such as you seldom see, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... dread of some indefinable tragedy. Mobs and riots of much greater magnitude than the John Brown uprising had frequently occurred in the free States, and they were put down by the firm authority of law, without the dread hand of a spectre behind which might in a moment light the horizon with the conflagration of homes, and subject wives and daughters to a fate of nameless horror. Instead, therefore, of arresting the spread of Republican principles, the mad scheme of John Brown tended to develop and strengthen ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... a stout, stumpy fellow, about four feet ten, with a head somewhat too large for his body, and extremely long arms. Ever since the plague had broken out in Drury-lane, it haunted him like a spectre, and scattered the few faculties he possessed. In vain he tried to combat his alarm—in vain his mother endeavoured to laugh him out of it. Nothing would do. He read the bills of mortality daily; ascertained the particulars of every case; dilated upon the agonies of the sufferers; ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... carried her long hair to her lover, who, urged by a frantic despair, hurried to the spot to assure himself of the truth of the tale, and shortly after threw himself, in battle, on the swords of his countrymen. After this event, the Indians were never successful in their warfare, the spectre of their victim presenting itself continually between them and ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... it was a spectre-play of some sort; but this was nothing to be afraid of, thought he. It wasn't any dangerous trolls, or any other evil—such as he always dreaded to encounter at night. Both the wall and the gate were so beautifully ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... counsel, as one of them told Sir Walter Scott, knew that their clients were guilty. A witness had seen them in the act. But the advocate (Lockhart, a Jacobite) made such fun out of the ghost that an Edinburgh jury, disbelieving in the spectre, and not loving the House of Hanover, very logically disregarded also the crushing evidence for a crime which was actually described ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... of adoration—that it alone proves him incapable of so refined a sentiment. If any doubt remained, it would be removed by his utter inability to rise above the sensual sphere. The Australian is absolutely immoral and incredibly licentious. Here, however, we are confronted by a spectre with which the sentimentalists try to frighten the searchers for truth, and which must therefore be exorcised first. They grant the wantonness of savages, but declare that it is "due chiefly to the influence of civilization." This is one of the favorite subterfuges of Westermarck, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... more solitary by the knowledge that between the benighted sojourner herein and all kindred humanity are those three concentric walls of earth which no being would think of scaling on such a night as this, even were he to hear the most pathetic cries issuing hence that could be uttered by a spectre-chased soul. I reach a central mound or platform—the crown and axis of the whole structure. The view from here by day must be of almost limitless extent. On this raised floor, dais, or rostrum, harps have probably twanged more or less tuneful notes in celebration of daring, ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... evil and apparent injustice, there rises up before us at the very outset the threatening spectre of universal evil and injustice. This problem is so closely bound up with our subject that we are compelled to spend a short time in ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... thrown into the streets here, or reduced to borrow, and become the slave of somebody, for a morsel of bread. Thank God, no! Nay, of late I begin entirely to despise that whole matter, so as I never hitherto despised it: "Thou beggarliest Spectre of Beggary that hast chased me ever since I was man, come on then, in the Devil's name, let us see what is in thee! Will the Soul of a man, with Eternity within a few years of it, quail before thee?" Better, however, is my good pious Mother's version of it: "They cannot take God's ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in the body,—in the very body, as to all essential properties, and to all practical intents and purposes, in which you live now. I am not to live as a ghost, a spectre, a spirit, I am to live then as I live ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... ship the Topaze, and on his way home. He was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... had been easily arranged. On that foggy night when she had fled from Leonard Dowson, terrified by the spectre of a future life which his words had evoked, she had run, without in the least realizing her direction, straight to the railway station; and the idea of London had at once presented itself to her mind. A train was just starting, and Toni hastily took a ticket and jumped into a carriage ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... me in the face every waking hour, like a grisly spectre with bloody fang and claw, is the extermination of species. To me, that is a horrible thing. It is wholesale murder, no less. It is capital crime, and a black disgrace to the races of civilized mankind. I say "civilized mankind," because ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... can also Partly see what causes this. 'Tis men; 'Tis men that force you to it: they themselves Have cast away their own nobility, Themselves have crouch'd to this degraded posture. Man's innate greatness, like a spectre, frights them; Their poverty seems safety; with base skill They ornament their chains, and call it virtue To wear them with an air of grace. Twas thus You found the world; thus from your royal father Came it ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... burned in his mouth at the sight of it. He turned away and saw the hot, unshaded mountains wrinkled in the sun, glazed and shrunk, gullied like the parchment of an old man's throat; and then he saw a man in a steeple-hat. He could no more lay the spectre that wasted his mind than the thirst-demon which raged in his body. He shut his eyes, and then his arm was beating at something to keep it away. Pillowed on his saddle, he beat until he forgot. A blow at the corner of his eye ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... for hours and for hours You are alone with your husband and lord. There is a skeleton hid in yon flowers; There is a spectre at bed and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... to indulge fresh hopes of fortune in another place. He would again offer himself to the Medici. In April he set off for Tuscany, and alighted at the convent of Monte Oliveto, near Florence. Nobody wanted him; he wandered about the Pitti like a spectre, and the Florentines wrote: actum est de eo.[59] Some parting compliments and presents from the Grand Duke sweetened his dismissal. He returned to Rome; but each new journey told upon his broken health, and another ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... The sulphurous steam of Albula suggests to him several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna without recollecting the Spectre Huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini without one thought of Francesca. At Paris, he had eagerly sought an introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that at Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not sustain a comparison, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fields it is not Vintage, Drunk and weary wavers home— 'Tis a spectre, meagre, gloomy, As a ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... 'Thereupon the spectre told me exactly where the treasure lay, and how to find it. It might be only yesterday so well do I remember every word ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... is it not a doom to be Solecism incarnate! A new Roi Faineant, King Donothing; but with the strangest new Mayor of the Palace: no bow-legged Pepin now, but that same cloud-capt, fire-breathing Spectre of DEMOCRACY; incalculable, which is enveloping the world!—Was Louis no wickeder than this or the other private Donothing and Eatall; such as we often enough see, under the name of Man, and even Man of Pleasure, cumbering ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Torch out of his Hand into the River. The God after having regarded you with a Look that spoke at [once [1]] his Pity and Displeasure, flew away. Immediately a kind of Gloom overspread the whole Place. At the same time I saw an hideous Spectre enter at one end of the Valley. His Eyes were sunk into his Head, his Face was pale and withered, and his Skin puckered up in Wrinkles. As he walked on the sides of the Bank the River froze, the Flowers faded, the Trees shed their Blossoms, the Birds dropped from off the Boughs, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... But now the common life has come, The blotting cloud a dappled pack, The grasses one vast underhum. A City clothed in snow and soot, With lamps for day in ghostly rows, Breaks to the scene of hosts afoot, The river that reflective flows: And there did fog down crypts of street Play spectre upon eye and mouth:— Their faces are a glass to greet This magic of the whirl for South. A burly joy each creature swells With sound of its own hungry quest; Earth has to fill her empty wells, And speed the service of the nest; ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... in the two sexes; and we should, therefore, expect to find that in some cases the special protection given to the female was in the male less in amount or altogether wanting. The facts entirely confirm this expectation. In the spectre insects (Phasmidae) it is often the females alone that so strikingly resemble leaves, while the males show only a rude approximation. The male Diadema misippus is a very handsome and conspicuous butterfly, ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... what they can do to us. That accounts for our politeness. Death, universal and inevitable, is none the less a villainous institution. Every other antagonist can be ignored or bribed or circumvented or crushed outright. But here is a damnable spectre who knocks at the door and does not wait to hear you say, 'Come in.' Hateful! If other people think differently it is because they live differently. How do they live? Like a cow that has stumbled into a dark hole, and now spends its time wondering how it managed ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... mine, unknowing and unknown, [45]With deans deceased, to sleep beneath the stone." As tearful thus, and half convulsed with spite, He lengthen'd out with plaints the livelong night, At that still hour of night, when dreams are oft'nest true, A well-known spectre rose before his view, As in some lake, when hush'd in every breeze, The bending ape his form reflected sees,[46] Such and so like the Doctor's angel shone, And by his gait the guardian sprite was known, Benignly bending o'er ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... dog we have, no spectre, here! He growls and stops, crawls on his belly, too, And wags his tail,—as ...
— Faust • Goethe
... returned forthwith to Thomas Putnam's house. Ann told them that Goody Corey had not troubled her, nor her spectre appeared, in their absence. She was not inclined to afford them an opportunity to apply the test of the dress. Both the women showed great acuteness and caution. As Corey expected the visit, and had heard ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... dead, then, since he rose of a sudden, like a spectre, took up his wife in his arms, and descended from the pyre in the midst of the clouds of smoke, which only heightened ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... hideous images of Death. Its name was Contagion—it rushed forward with an indescribable movement. Dismay and confusion overwhelmed all that quarter of the crowded scene, that was particularly threatened by its first advance. The affrighted multitude rolled back like a tumultuous sea. The horrid spectre stopt; and left a wide interval between itself and the retiring host. A ray of heavenly light illumined the vacant space. I fixed my eye on the brilliant spot, and soon beheld the meek and gentle form of HOWARD advancing, without fear or arrogance, ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... remorse attends, While his heart loaths the cause his tongue defends; Hourly he acts, hourly repents the sin, And is all over grandfather within: By day that ill-laid spirit checks,—o' nights Old Pickering's ghost, a dreadful spectre, frights. Returns of spleen his slacken'd speed remit, And crump his loose careers with intervals of wit: While, without stop at sense, or ebb of spite, Breaking all bars, bounding o'er wrong and right, Contented Roger ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... aunt, preceding me, had taken possession. Mr. Warder was reduced to a condition of abject obedience, and for a month and more my aunt hardly left her girl-boy's pillow. Indeed, it was long before I was let to see him, and then he was but a spectre of himself, with not enough blood to blush with. Our officers very promptly left for New York the day after our fight, and we heard ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... though he beheld a spectre, but seeing that the young man was about to sink to the floor exhausted, he sprang to his feet and ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... good scene supposed to have happened between Sam Rogers and a lady of fashion—the reporter, Lord Dudley. Sam enters, takes a stool, creeps close to the lady's side, who asks his opinion of the last new poem or novel. In a pathetic voice the spectre replies—"My opinion? I like it very much—but the world don't like it; but, indeed, I begin to think the world wrong in everything, except with regard to you." Now, Rogers either must have said this somewhere, or he has it yet to say. We ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... at the blacksmith's, to whom the passing of the coach is an event fruitful of much speculation. The smith, with the horse's heel in his lap, pauses as the vehicle whirls by; the Cyclops round the anvil suspend their ringing hammers, and suffer the iron to grow cool; and the sooty spectre in brown paper cap, labouring at the bellows, leans on the handle for a moment, and permits the asthmatic engine to heave a long-drawn sigh, while he glares through the murky smoke and sulphureous gleams ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... moon or stars, without cloud or sky, with only a blank density around and about, Ralph seemed to see in fitful flashes that came and went—now on the right and now on the left of him, now in front and now behind, now on the earth at his feet and now in the dumb vapor floating above him—the spectre of that riderless horse. Sometimes he would stop and listen, thinking he heard a horse canter close past him; but no, it was the noise of a hidden river as its waters leapt over the stones. Sometimes he thought he heard the neigh of a horse ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... besides the characters already named, Rolla, Penruddock, Lothaire, Othello, George Barnwell, Octavian, Osmond (Castle Spectre) Hotspur, Frederick in Lovers Vows, Petruchio, Gondebert, and many others, if not all with equal excellence, at least with so much as to rank him among the first masters ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... interrupted yesterday. The ghost is laid for a time in a red sea of port and claret. The spectre is the famous Wilkes. He appeared the moment the Parliament was dissolved. The Ministry despise him. He stood for the City of London, and was the last on the poll of seven candidates, none but the mob, and most of them without votes, favouring him. He then offered himself to the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... in the bottom of a bucket overnight was frozen into a thick cake in the morning, the thermometer indicating 18 degrees. The nights I pass in these fearful regions are more dreadful than the days, for "night is the time for care, brooding o'er days misspent, when the pale spectre of despair comes to our lonely tent;" and often when I lay me down I fall into a dim and death-like trance, wakeful, yet "dreaming dreams no mortals had ever dared ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... stalactites. blaze in front of you; fluted columns and draperies in broad folds with a formation that resembles the finest hemstitching may be seen all around you, while Pluto's chasm, a wide rift in the walls, contains a spectre clothed in shadowy draperies. One wonders how long this grim, ghastly person has stood here. Long ages came and went in that shadowy and evanescent time with no record save these stony ghosts, and over all a black pall of mystery ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... hair. Dry sorrow in his stupid eyes appears, For, wanting nourishment, he wanted tears: His eye-balls in their hollow sockets sink, Bereft of sleep, he loathes his meat and drink. He withers at his heart, and looks as wan As the pale spectre of a murder'd man: That pale turns yellow, and his face receives 530 The faded hue of sapless boxen leaves: In solitary groves he makes his moan, Walks early out, and ever is alone: Nor, mix'd in mirth, in youthful pleasures shares, But sighs when songs and instruments he hears. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... a sight that made those present tremble when they saw the old gray woman, a sublime spectre, standing beside her grandchild's pillow. Terror and vengeance wrote their fierce expressions in the wrinkles that lined her skin of yellow ivory; her forehead, half hidden by the straggling meshes of her gray hair, expressed a solemn anger. She read, with a ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... because her heart is lonely, And yet she hath no strength to stand alone,— Once she had playmates, fancies of her own, And she did love them. They are past away As fairies vanish at the break of day; And like a spectre of an age departed, Or unsphered angel woefully astray, She glides ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... by rappings, it is a curious fact that there is not a ghost in the House of Strange Stories. On my earliest visit to this mansion, I was disturbed, I own, by a not unpleasing expectancy. There must, one argued, be a shadowy lady in green in the bedroom, or, just as one was falling asleep, the spectre of a Jesuit would creep out of the priest's hole, where he was starved to death in the "spacious times of great Elizabeth," and would search for a morsel of bread. The priest was usually starved out, sentinels being placed in all the rooms and passages, till at last hunger ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... 'Tis the first virtue, vices to abhor; And the first wisdom, to be fool no more. But to the world no bugbear is so great, As want of figure, and a small estate. To either India see the merchant fly, Scared at the spectre of pale poverty! See him, with pains of body, pangs of soul, Burn through the Tropic, freeze beneath the pole! Wilt thou do nothing for a nobler end, Nothing, to make philosophy thy friend? To stop ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... to meet with the less credit among all men of sense; and nothing but the duke's imprudent bigotry could have convinced the whole nation of his change of religion. Popery, which had hitherto been only a hideous spectre, was now become a real ground of terror being openly and zealously embraced by the heir to the crown a prince of industry and enterprise; while the king himself was not entirely free from ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... to the mind. In Pump Court we encounter the brisk little spectre of Mr. Frederick Minchin, and who can forget that his club was The Oxford and Cambridge, than which what better could he desire? Mr. Thackeray himself was a member of The Garrick, The Athenaeum, and The Reform, but the clubs of many of his characters, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... men, however, were less distinguished for cleverness than for malignity, and shrieked for blood and the display of brute force in terms that would have done dishonor even to a St. Bartholomew assassin or anti-Albigensian crusader. Monsieur Romieu held up Le Spectre Rouge to the eyes of a generation incapable, from fright, of distinguishing between a scarecrow and the Apollo. The Red Spectre haunted him, and the people for whom he wrote, as relentlessly as the Gray Spectre came upon the chiefs of Ivor. He ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... debauchee with dreams, Of the victim of his schemes; Paint her with dishevelled hair, Streaming eyes, and bosom bare, And with aspect pale and sad, As a spectre's from the dead, Weeping o'er her new-born, child, Her name reproached, her fame despoiled: Let her groanings reach his ear, Pierce his heart, and rouse his fear Of the retribution given, To such deeds ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... balustrades, and broken windows of which seemed ready to fall at the first tempest. The north wind whistled through these ruins, to which the moon, with her indefinite light, gave the character and outline of a great spectre. But the colors of those gray-blue granites, mingling with the black and tawny schists, must have been seen in order to understand how vividly a spectral image was suggested by the empty and gloomy carcass of the building. Its disjointed stones and paneless windows, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... spectacle of horror, where Were six score loathsome corpses upright there, Whilst jammed between them, in the filthy den, Were twenty-three more miserable men, Who hardly could be said to be alive, So fearfully did death among them strive To make them all his own, leaving no trace Of aught but spectre life in that vile place. This dreadful history cannot fail to show, How fatal consequences surely flow, From disregard of the Creator's laws, For these foul poisonous vapours were the cause Of five score agonising deaths, within The space ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... still stood by her door, like a spectre in the sunshine, her thin hands clasped together as she gazed away over ...
— The Indian's Hand - 1892 • Lorimer Stoddard
... will solve the enigma. Here, without doubt, has occurred some grand disturbance of nature. The walls of this apartment, its casements, its decorations, have been witness to some fell crime. The spectre of ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... is the name of a night spectre, said to have been Adam's first wife, but who, for her refractory conduct, was transformed into a demon endowed with power to injure and even destroy infants unprotected by the necessary ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... through the stalwart figure's heart, and he bows his head, and thinks—it is but justice! In the same instant, a cry of intensest pain and horror escapes him: the deadly arrow, additionally poisoned by the blood it has just shed, has passed quite through the spectre of his former pupil, and is buried up to the feather in Professor Valeyon's own vitals! This shock effectually wakened the old gentleman—for, after all, he had only been having an uneasy nap in his straight-backed chair!—and he started ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... strained and quivering, his eyes were lit with something very much like horror. Some words certainly left his lips, but they did not carry to the hearing of any one of those three people. He looked at Maraton with the fierce, terrified intentness of one who looks upon a spectre! ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... distressed, and would have clasped her, but upon her appearance of loathing it desisted, only moving its jaw upward and downward, as if it would cry for help but could not for want of its parts of speech. At length, she growing more and more faint, and likely to die of fear, the spectre suddenly, as if at a thought, began to swing round its hand, which was loose at the wrist, with a brisk motion, and the finger bones being long and hard, and striking sharply against each other, made a loud noise like to the springing of ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... were a mass of acicular crystals; it was a true easterly fog. I galloped on, hoping to get through it, unable to see a yard before me; but it thickened, and I was obliged to subside into a jog-trot. As I rode on, about four miles from the cabin, a human figure, looking gigantic like the spectre of the Brocken, with long hair white as snow, appeared close to me, and at the same moment there was the flash of a pistol close to my ear, and I recognized 'Mountain Jim,' frozen from head to foot, looking a century old with his snowy hair. It was 'ugly' altogether, certainly a 'desperado's' grim ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... lying on the floor, holding the half- perused paper in my hand. Grief and horror had locked up the avenues of complaint, and I sat as one petrified to stone. My father entered. At the sight of me, he started as if he had been a spectre. His well- known features opened at once my agonized heart. With fearful cries I cast myself at his feet, and putting the letter into his hand, clung, almost expiring, to ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... will be disappointed. The government will make sure work this time, and leave not a clan in all the Highlands able to do them hurt. As for me, it will not matter. I shall either be dead or taken by this time to-morrow. I have seen the Bodach Glas—the Grey Spectre." ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... experiments in the "explained" supernatural; The Romance of the Forest, and her use of suspense; heroines: The Mysteries of Udolpho; illustrations of Mrs. Radcliffe's methods; The Italian; villains; her historical accuracy and "unexplained" spectre in Gaston de Blondeville; her reading; style; descriptions of scenery; position in the history of the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... something induced him to do that again. At the same moment another mighty roar ascended from the crowd, and the head of the great fire-escape rose like a solemn spectre through smoke, fire, and steam, not ten ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... frozen with horror as he remembers the doom. For the first time the grey spectre of Death confronts him face to face as ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... yet I shall return To dare the weeds of death, And plunge through the coned pink bloom, And cry on that spectre set In its silent ring of gloom, And stay my youth to learn The thing ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... for a Ceylon elephant-hunter would be the first view of a herd of African elephants—all tuskers! In Ceylon, a "tusker" is a kind of spectre, to be talked of by a few who have had the good luck to see one. And when he is seen by a good sportsman, it is an evil hour for him—he is followed till ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... who cares fur kings or queens, Mix'd in a nation's broil, They nivver benefit the poor— The poor mun ollas toil. An' thou gilded spectre, royalty, That dazzles folks's een, Is nowt to me when I'm wi thee, Sweet Lass o' ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... "all augurs ill for this affair. The strange discovery by the instinct of a dog, the revival of this Scottish knight, who comes into the lists like a spectre,—all ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... was unnecessary," said the Lord Keeper, relieved from his silence, as a spectre by the voice of the exorcist, "and I am obliged to you, Master of Ravenswood, for breaking the ice at once, where circumstances—unhappy circumstances, let me call them—rendered self-introduction ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... black, and that the innumerable white Americans she saw at our house were merely a multitude of exceptions. But with all her ignorance, she had no superstitions of a gloomy kind: the only ghost she seemed ever to have heard of was the spectre of an American ship captain which a friend of Piero's had seen at the Lido. She was perfectly kind and obedient, and was deeply attached in an inarticulate way to the baby, which was indeed the pet of the whole palace. This young lady ruled arbitrarily over them all, and was forever being ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... man fell forward on the floor so prone that the agitated spectators thought him dead. At that instant Madame de la Chanterie appeared like a spectre at the door of her room, against the frame of which she ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... business life. The cloud which, under certain atmospheric conditions, rests like a pall over our great cities, will not even permit at times of a single ray of sunshine permeating it. No one knows whence it rises, nor at what hour to expect it. It is like a giant spectre which, having lain dormant since the carboniferous age, has been raised into life and being at the call of restless humanity; it is now punishing us for our prodigal use of the wealth it left us, by clasping us in its deadly arms, cutting off our brilliant sunshine, ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... he considered the utmost indelicacy, and he pitied poor Felicite. How was it possible to be beloved by that sublime creature and not adore her on his knees, not believe her on the faith of a glance or a smile? He felt a desire to turn and rend that cold, pale spectre of a man. Ignorant he might be, as Felicite had told him, of the tricks of thought of the jesters of the press, but one thing he ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Spectre she espied, The fear-struck damsel faintly said, "What wou'd my Thomas?"—he replied, "Oh! Molly Dumpling! I ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... you die to-night, O Sweet, and wail, A spectre at my door, Shall mortal Fear make Love immortal fail— I shall but love you more, Who, from Death's house returning, give me still One moment's comfort in ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... putting on the glasses that suit him best, (ay, using a spy-glass, if he likes,)—and make a full report. What, probably, will he spy?—what will he select to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre of himself. He will see several meeting-houses, at least, and, perhaps, that somebody ought to be assessed higher than he is, since he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take Julius Caesar, or Immanuel Swedenborg, or a Fegee-Islander, and set him up there. Or suppose all together, and let them compare ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... The Spectre Butterfly.—Another butterfly, but belonging to a widely different group, is the "sylph" (Hestia Jasonia), called by the Europeans by the various names of Floater, Spectre, and Silver-paper fly, as indicative of its graceful flight. It is found only in the deep shade of the damp ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... if Cedric's words had raised a spectre; for, scarce had he uttered them ere the door flew open, and Athelstane, arrayed in the garments of the grave, stood before them, pale, haggard, and like something arisen from ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... shallow waters, experience strange things when none are by to credit them," suddenly exclaimed his assistant—a mentally deficient youth of the villages whom Ten-teh charitably employed because all others rejected him. "Behold, master, a spectre ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... cannot have them sooner in readiness. If you, Mr. Temple, can contrive to pass this week at Mr. Percy's, let me not detain you. There is no fear," added he, smiling, that "in solitude I should be troubled by the spectre which haunted the minister in Gil ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... existence, with its ordinary pleasures and interests, did not satisfy her at all. Clancy's former question in regard to her devotion to the past and the dead, "What goodwill it do?" haunted her like a spectre. He had again made the dreary truth more clear, that there was nothing in the future to which she could give the strong allegiance of her soul. She would work for nothing, suffer for nothing, hope for nothing, except her daily bread. As she said, ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not superstitious, yet he felt his heart move quickly when the horseman galloped past him, and old legends about spectres rose up in his mind. Perhaps the rider was the wild huntsman of whom he had heard so much, or what was more likely, it was no spectre, but a robber. This last possibility frightened Pierre very much. He bent down and took a pistol out of the saddle-bag. He cocked the trigger and continued on his way, while he muttered ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... lord, the landlord began a weird tale, suggested by the speech of the Palmer. As Marmion listened, he gathered from the legend that not far from where they sat, a knight might learn of future weal or woe. He might, perchance, meet "in the charmed ring" his deadliest foe, in the form of a spectre, and with it engage in mortal combat. If victorious over this supernatural antagonist, the omen was victory ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... Stone steps, leading down to a trap-door. Shall I help you down, or—no, I will go alone. When I open the door, a hollow groan will be heard, and the clank of iron fetters. Would you rather have me descend to Hades with a loud squeak, or shall a headless spectre arise, grinning and—beg pardon! anatomy at fault; grinning requires a head. That's the way! my genius is always checked in its soaring flight, and pulled back to earth by ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... had strength to quell Hope the spectre and fear the spell, Clear-eyed, content with a scorn sublime And a faith superb, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... sharp, beady eyes looked straight into those of the youth, and held him. His small, round head, with its low brow and grizzled locks, waved snake-like on the man's long neck. His tall form, in its black cassock, bent over the lad like a spectre. His slender arms, of uncanny length, waved constantly before him; and the long, bony fingers seemed to reach into the boy's very soul and choke the springs of life at their origin. His reasoning took the form of suggestion, bearing the indisputable ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... pledged himself to make all that good with a few yards of tarpauling, and Aunt M'riar and Dolly went to bed, with sore misgivings as to whether they would wake alive next day. Dolly woke in the night and screamed with terror at what she conceived was a spectre from the grave, but which was really nothing but a short length of scaffold-pole standing upright at the foot of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... back to the fireplace and placed several chunks of wood on the blaze. A bright orange glow leaped out from the hearth and danced mockingly over his pallid brow, hiding his lank jowls in the shadows cast by the cheekbones. Like some grim spectre he rose up, towering above the little Dutchman. Peter had only to look into his eyes to see the imperative request that lingered behind ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson
... and confusion, and distraction bound his senses; he refused all company, would neither eat, nor sleep, nor talk, and he looked as white and wan as a spectre. A stupid weight, a dismal sullen stillness succeeded the storm of shame and grief; and he felt himself to be the most forlorn of human beings. If it had been only possible to undo things done! he would have bought the privilege ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... whole literature of wonder and imagination. Such sagas as that which Dr Douglas Hyde has translated with consummate art from the Irish, "Teig O'Kane and the Corpse," which Mr W.B. Yeats called a little masterpiece; or Boccaccio's story of the spectre-hounds that pulled down the daughter of Anastasio, or Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale," or Hawker's "Cruel Coppinger," or Edgar Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher," are of their kind not to be beaten. ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... their admiration of so much gorgeous wall-colouring; there were flaunting ladies in bonnets of the latest fashion and marvellous petticoats, who criticized the curtains and pointed the parasol of scorn at faded draperies; people who felt the heavy hand of the spectre of departed glory, and people who exulted at beholding the hidden recesses of an Imperial mansion laid bare to the jokes and ribaldry of Belleville and La Villette. Every class of Parisian society was represented in the throng that swayed and hustled ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... book. A man cannot have a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous at the same time, and if he be imaginative as well as sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the amount of his imagination. It is perfectly true that what we call the world, in these affairs, is nothing more than a mere Brocken spectre, the projected shadow of ourselves; but as long as we do not know it, it is a very passable giant. We are not without experience of natures so purely intellectual that their bodies had no more concern in their mental doings and sufferings than ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... had passed her by when she missed her little brother from the cradle; but still it had never stood by her side and said, "Lo, I am here!" Her circle of love was so small that it seemed as though the dread spectre could not enter. She saw it afar off; she thought upon it sometimes in her poetical dreams, which clad the imaginary shape of grief with a strange beauty. It was sweet to be sad, sweet to weep. She even tried to make a few delicious sorrows ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... that dreadful apparition; its attitude seemed to be either menacing or warning. The terrified woman, under the influence of a painful fascination, could not avert her gaze from it; and the spectre stood until the candle was entirely consumed, and the room was wrapped in profound darkness. Then the Form glided to the bedside, and laid its cold hand upon her brow. 'Thou shalt see me again!' it whispered, and then ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... The boy, grown old in lust, goes thence to be an hour alone, to ponder for an hour on this God, this resurrection, and this truth, of which the Jew, in such uncourtly phrase, has harangued him. To be alone, until the spectre of a dying mother rises again to haunt him, to persecute him and drive him forth to his followers and feasters, where he will try to forget Paul and the Saviour and God, where he would be glad to banish them forever. He does not banish ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... the boy led the pair of us a lively dance. I shall not soon forget the anxiety of Mr. Jaffrey the night Andy had the scarlet-fever—an anxiety which so infected me that I actually returned to the tavern the following afternoon earlier than usual, dreading to hear that the little spectre was dead, and greatly relieved on meeting Mr. Jaffrey at the door-step with his face wreathed in smiles. When I spoke to him of Andy, I was made aware that I was inquiring into a case of scarlet-fever that ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... look at her, of the figure of Isy before him, with its gaze fixed motionless upon him, and began at last to wonder vaguely whether she might not be dead, and come back from the grave to his mind a mysterious thought-spectre. But at the close of the sermon, when the people stood up to sing, she rose with them; and the half-dazed preacher sat down, exhausted with emotion, conflict, and effort at self-command. When he rose once more for the benediction, ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... can't mean that in earnest," so gave forth no sound, and stood as though he were made of stone. Then the youth shouted out to him the third time, and as that too had no effect, he made a dash at the spectre and knocked it down the stairs, so that it fell about ten steps and remained lying in a corner. Thereupon he tolled the bell, went home to bed without saying a word, and fell asleep. The sexton's wife ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... girl whom he had loved long ago and who had died. Since her death he had put aside love as a passion. Now and then—not often—a sort of travesty of love had come to him, the spectre of the real. It is difficult for a young, strong man in the pride of his life never to have any dealing either with love or with its spectre. But Isaacson was right. Nigel's life had been much purer than are most men's lives. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... were mute as they. Not a word, whether of sympathy or of animosity, greeted the silent procession. On went the noiseless, spectre-like train until it reached the market-place. There the superior stopped, and the brothers gathered around him in ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... convictions: these had better give us a reason, when they feel internal pressure for explanation, that there is no weathercock at Kilve; this would do for all cases. But persons of real inquiry will see that first, experience does not bear out the asserted frequency of the spectre, without the alleged coincidence of death: and secondly, that if the crowd of purely casual spectres were so great that it is no wonder that, now and then the person should have died at or near the moment, we ought to expect a much larger proportion of cases ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... was taken with a panic; she fancied herself deserted in a giant tomb, with dead men gathering about her. She herself was in truth the grisliest spectre there, in her white satin gown and feathers, and the horror of her hideous face. But she took to flight, and the key remained ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... sentiment rather than a manly pledge. As spoken, they were so ominous that the loving woman might well have trembled and lost her girlish flush. But even through the lurid hopes and vague prospects created by dangerous stimulants, Mr. Jocelyn saw, dimly, the spectre of coming ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... that point everything had been going nicely, but then and there I spoiled it. Moved by I know not what folly, I wrote her a yet more roundabout letter, which, however, was very pressing. In attempting to fan her flame I kindled myself—for a spectre—and at ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... dependent on me, and was resolved to invest my little fortune in such a way that I might have a modest competence, so that the dreadful spectre of poverty might never ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... loss. Do you remember asking me who a tall elderly lady in mourning was, that you saw getting into her carriage one day, at South Audley-street chapel, as we passed by in our way to the park? That was Lady Lawless: I believe I didn't answer you at the time. I meet her every now and then—to me a spectre of dismay. But, as Harriot Freke said, certainly such a man as poor Lawless was a useless being in society, however he may be regretted by a doting mother. We should see things in a philosophical light, if we can. I should not have suffered half as much as I did if he had been a man of a stronger ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... sincerely sorry to lose him from the 3rd Brigade. He was ever a good and true friend, and took a deep interest in his men. But the immediate effect of his departure, as far as I was concerned, was to remove out of my life the hideous spectre of No. 2 General Hospital, and to give me absolute liberty in wandering through the trenches. In fact, as I told him sometime afterwards, I was beginning a little poem, the first line of which was "I never knew what freedom ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... opened with a decided preference for fiction. Washington Irving, reverting to the Spectator, produced his sketches, and, following the trend of his time, looked forward to a new form and wrote The Spectre Bridegroom and Rip Van Winkle. It is only by a precise definition of short-story that Irving is robbed of the honor of being the founder of the modern short-story. He loved to meander and to fit his materials to his story scheme ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... huge wooden shoes, some hobnailed ones, and over their shoulders or in their hands protruded their weapons—pitchforks, scythes, flails, knives, clubs, and rusty guns. All must have been several thousand, collected from every hamlet in his territory. They seemed like a legion of some spectre army of Hunger and Ignorance. In the commander Germain recognised his ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... to thy parting breath, Whilst thou wert struggling in the pangs of death. Could tears have turn'd the tyrant in his course, Could sighs have check'd his dart's relentless force; Could youth and virtue claim a short delay, Or beauty charm the spectre from his prey. Thou still had'st liv'd, to bless my aching sight, Thy comrade's honour, and thy friend's delight: Though low thy lot, since in a cottage born, No titles did thy humble name adorn, To me, far dearer, was thy artless ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... comes out fizz—bang! and that's the end of it; there's not so much as the quaver of an echo. You drink it, and instead of seeing cool vineyards and purple waters and cataracts of icicles in your glass, you find a pale, gaunt spectre, or a poor, half-drowned Bacchus, staring at you. It's just so with your Landon Snowe. You, and other people, too, have a habit of admiring him, a great creature with eyes of milky blue, who goes about disbursing his small coin like some old Aladdin! Why, my dear children, the man, I ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in check by natural restraints: neither chains nor dungeons could bind it down or confine it. You might load the witch with irons, you might bury her in the lowest cell of a feudal prison, and still it was believed that she could send forth her imps or her spectre to ravage the fields, and blight the meadows, and throw the elements into confusion, and torture the bodies, and craze the minds, of any who might be the objects ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... little water left in the bottom of a bucket overnight was frozen into a thick cake in the morning, the thermometer indicating 18 degrees. The nights I pass in these fearful regions are more dreadful than the days, for "night is the time for care, brooding o'er days misspent, when the pale spectre of despair comes to our lonely tent;" and often when I lay me down I fall into a dim and death-like trance, wakeful, yet "dreaming dreams no mortals had ever dared ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... left is a group of mourners, a seated girl and a woman prostrate in grief. On the right are the two struggling figures; Hercules' superb form and tossing lion-skin contrasting finely, both in action and colouring, with the tall and coldly grey-robed spectre of Death, who presses forward to the bed where Alcestis lies, whence he is thrust back by the mighty Hercules. The exquisite figure of Alcestis with her statuesquely draped robes and their pure and delicate colouring, forms ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... tyrannies of civil law; and it wears their lives out, and breaks their spirits. When it does not break their spirits it curdles their blood and they become socialists, nihilists, internationalists, anything that will promise them riddance of their spectre and give them vengeance. We in Italy are all of us afraid of socialism, we who have anything to lose; and yet we let the syndics, and their secretaries, conciliators, and chancellors sow it broadcast in dragon's teeth of petty injustices and petty cruelties, that soon or late will spring up armed ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... years, our great seaboard merchants, our shippers, our factors, have given their patronage to pro-slavery journals and their votes to pro-slavery politicians, with intent to preserve the Union and lay the red spectre of civil war. Their recompense is found in the repudiation of the immense debts for merchandise due them from the South, and a gigantic war waged by the Slave Power for the overthrow of the Union. The profits of a lifetime of obsequious ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... George D'Hymbercourt looks as sad as thou dost.—How now, sirs? Have you found no game? or have you lost your falcons? or has a witch crossed your way? or has the Wild Huntsman [the famous apparition, sometimes called le Grand Veneur. Sully gives some account of this hunting spectre. S.] met you in the forest? By my honour, you seem as if you were come to ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... his weak side to my power?" and Angelique pressed her foot hard upon the floor as the answer returned ever the same: "The heart of the Intendant is away at Beaumanoir! That pale, pensive lady" (Angelique used a more coarse and emphatic word) "stands between him and me like a spectre as she is, and obstructs the path I have sacrificed so ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... then, if all proved vain, I could but perish! For I would have walked cheerfully over the burning ploughshares of old, lived again through the hideous nightmare of the burning ship and raft, nay, clasped hands with the spectre of La Vigne himself, had it offered to lead me to purgatory, rather than have married the knave, the ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... understood it in a moment. Mr Enderby had possessed himself of the skeleton which hung in the mahogany case in the waiting-room, had lighted it up behind the eyes and the ribs, and was carrying it aloft before him, approaching round the corner, and thus confronting the effigy. The spectre moved steadily on, while the people fled. It made straight for Sir William Hunter, who now seemed for the first time disposed to shift his place. He did so with as much slowness and dignity as were compatible with the urgency of the circumstances, edging his horse further and ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... rim dips: the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; 200 With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... them no introspective [greek]cnzhi seauton overexcites the consciousness of self. But with us; as with those of old possessed of devils, it comes to startle and stays to distress. Too apt is it to prove an ever-present, undesirable double. Too often does it play the part of uninvited spectre at the feast, whose presence no one save its unfortunate victim suspects. The haunting horror of his own identity is to natures far less eccentric than Kenelm Chillingly's only too common a curse. To this companionship, paradoxical though it sound, is principally due the peculiar ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... issue tell? We ran our course—my charger fell; What could he 'gainst the shock of hell? I rolled upon the plain. High o'er my head, with threatening hand, The spectre took his naked brand - Yet did the worst remain: My dazzled eyes I upward cast - Not opening hell itself could blast Their sight, like what I saw! Full on his face the moonbeam strook - A face could never be mistook! I knew the stern vindictive look, And held my breath for awe. I saw the face ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... have taken along the path of Love is a bad business, and that the farther you have elected to venture, so much the more distressing must be your return. And he would have to return. In the absence of a miracle, that journey could not be avoided. For an instant the spectre of Reckoning leaned out of the future.... Then Patch flushed a stray pig, and Valerie laughed joyously, and—the shadow was gone. Cost what it might, Anthony determined to pluck the promise of the ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... phenomena attend this state of the atmosphere, known as the Fata Morgana of Sicily, the Mirage of the Desert, the Spectre of the Brocken, and the more common exhibitions of halos, coronae, and mock suns. The Mountain House at Catskill has repeatedly been seen brightly pictured on the clouds below. Rainbows are also due to this condition of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... a glance into the binnacle was preparing to go down the bridge steps when a cry from the Look-out made him wheel round. Suddenly, and as if evolved by magic from the blackness, the vague spectre of a vast ship shewed up ahead on the port bow making to cross their course. Thundering along under full canvas without lights and seemingly blind, she seemed only a ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... ever-helpful Diary: "Sept. 20. Now I hear from Salem that about 18 years agoe, he [Giles Cory] was suspected to have stamp'd and press'd a man to death, but was cleared. Twas not remembered till Ann Putnam was told of it by said Cory's Spectre the Sabbath day ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... those intimate studies of Anglo-Indian life that ALICE PERRIN has made specially her own. The tragedy of it is sufficiently conveyed by the title. Separation, of husband from wife or parent from child, is of course the spectre that haunts the Anglo-Indian home. It was, chiefly at least, for the health of their child Winnie that Guy Bassett was forced to let her and his wife abide permanently in Kensington while he himself continued his Eastern career as a grass-widower. Very naturally, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 14, 1917 • Various
... with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head. In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... fingers thoughtfully into his crisp, brown hair; "that would never do. How would it work to see the same ghost again, minus the overalls, and have gold bricks in the hod? That would elevate the spectre from degrading toil to a financial plane. Don't you think that would ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... of our belief that there is a future. One cannot be at the Front very long before he is compelled to examine his thoughts in regard to immortality. Death is brought home very closely. The grim spectre points his finger at a man—perhaps in the first flush of manhood—who has just commenced to appreciate the joy of living. Death challenges, and with no shadow of faltering, but perhaps with a smile, the challenge is accepted, and the lad goes ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... He held his breath, listened, and peered through the branches. Soon a man appeared,—a Navajo; but whether it was Nacaytzusle or not, he could not discover. The Indian glided across the open space as noiselessly as a spectre, and disappeared in a northerly direction. Tyope remained in his concealment for a while, and as nothing more was heard or seen, he crawled to the nearest shrub to the west. There he again listened and watched, then rose to his feet and moved ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... hoped I feared, Since I hoped I dared; Everywhere alone As a church remain; Spectre cannot harm, Serpent cannot charm; He deposes doom, ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... reader the key to this most intelligible and authentic narrative. The traveller was acknowledged by all to have been the spectre of the suicide, called up by the Evil One to tempt the convivial sexton into a violation of his promise, sealed, as it was, by an imprecation. Had he succeeded, no doubt the dusky steed, which Bob had seen saddled in attendance, was destined to have carried back a double burden to the place ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... sprung by the insensibility of Cass, an overwhelming awareness of parting, and he gave to the landscape the expression of sentiment he had yearned to give his friend. His fear of seeing the spirits of the drowned sailors, or as he passed the churchyard gate of perceiving behind that tamarisk the tall spectre of his grandfather, which on the way down from Pendhu had seemed impossible to combat, had died away; and in his despair at losing this beloved scene he wandered on past the church until he stood at the edge of the tide. On this humid ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... main reason why you want him to go. You think if he really asserted himself, really knocked down the spectre of his old distrust and stamped on it, he would be a different man. If he had once proved himself, as we say of younger chaps, he could go ...
— Different Girls • Various
... Done is done! What thou hast written thou hast written; and neither thou nor anybody else can blot it out.' Hence the despair into which awakened consciences are apt to drop, and the feeling, which dogs the sense of evil like a spectre, of the hopelessness of all attempts to make oneself better. Brethren, they are both lies; the lie that we are pure is the first; the lie that we are too black to be purified is the second. 'If we say that we ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... above our heads; anon a hissing swoop would plant a shell close to our whereabouts. Lights rose and sank, flickering. Red and green rockets, as if to ornament the tragedy of war, were dancing in the sky. Occasionally a gust of foul wind, striking the face, could make one fancy that Death's Spectre marched ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... which a great deal of nonsense has been written by English writers on the early history of Canada, most of whom have been able to see nothing but the spectre of paternalism in every domain of colonial life. It is quite true, as Tocqueville tells us, that the physiognomy of a government can be best judged in its colonies, for there its merits and faults appear as through a microscope. ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... piled numerous withered branches and limbs of trees, forming no unsuitable emblems of mortality. There were no trees on this hill, save one quite dead, which seemed to point with its hoary arms, like a spectre, to the tombs. A melancholy waste, where a level country and boundless woods extended beyond the reach of vision, was in perfect harmony with the dreary ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... all the world of the absurdity of such vain superstitions; and yet it has been reserved for another learned profession, the Law, to produce in one trial at the Staffordshire assizes, a year or two ago, such a host of witnesses, who firmly believed in witchcraft, and swore to their belief in spectre dogs and wizards, as to show that, in the Midland counties at least, such traditions are anything but extinct. If so much of the bad has been spared by steam, by natural philosophy, and by the Church, let us hope that some of the good may still linger ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... which might destroy the enchantment. The third girl is on her feet, dancing before this areopagus of idiots, with their lanky locks and pot-hats. What a shock when she turns round! She wears over her face the horribly grinning, death-like mask of a spectre or a vampire. The mask unfastened, falls. And behold! a darling little fairy of about twelve or fifteen years of age, slim, and already a coquette, already a woman—dressed in a long robe of shaded dark-blue china crape, covered with embroidery representing ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... vanish into the gold of the sun through the copper color of the columns. And I was quite alone in the "thinking-place" of Rameses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark sapphire blue, without even the spectre of a cloud, or any airy, vaporous veil; the heat already intense in the full sunshine, but delicious if one slid into a shadow. I slid into a shadow, and sat down on a warm block of stone. And the silence flowed upon me—the silence of ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... handwork, drill in needlework. The extreme point was reached when babies of three had thimble and needle drill long before they began needlework. There were also conduct drills; Miss Grant, of Devons Road School, remembers a school where the babies "practised" their conduct before the visit of the "spectre," as they called him, he being represented as a stick set up on a chair. There is a curious ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... told him his trouble, how he was sore distressed, for the Philistines made war upon him, and God had departed from him, and answered him not. It was a dreadful sight, so the woman herself told me afterwards, a king abasing himself before a spectre of a priest and craving mercy. The worst foe whom Saul had in the land would have felt his heart touched, and the wicked woman herself was moved with great compassion. If success could not be promised, at least some comfort ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... sockets, and a yell more appalling than the former rang through the room. The man sprang from his chair, which he overturned in his fright, and stood for an instant with his one-eyeball starting from his head, and glaring upon the spectre; his cheeks deadly pale; the cold perspiration streaming from his face; his lips dissevered, and his teeth chattering in ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... rest. Upon this I resolved to discover myself to them, and learn something of their condition; immediately I marched as above, my man Friday at a good distance behind me, as formidable for his arms as I, but not making quite so staring a spectre-like figure as I did. I came as near them undiscovered as I could, and then, before any of them saw me, I called aloud to them in Spanish, "What are ye, gentlemen?" They started up at the noise, but were ten times more confounded ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... the ranks of the alarmists. But members generally were of his opinion. In vain did Fox, Erskine, Grey, and Sheridan deprecate the attempt to confuse moderate Reform with reckless innovation. Burke illogically but effectively dragged in the French spectre, and Windham declared that the public mind here, as in other lands, was in such a state that the slightest scratch might produce ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... climbed the steep paths where the spectre-like fir Moaned of death in the distance; we ceased not to spur! Death! what that to us, with our duty before! Then onward, still on our stern hoof-thunder bore. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... completely vanished. The huge solid shell is full of expression; it looks as if it had been hollowed out by the sincerity of early faith, and it opens into a cloister as impressive as itself. Wherever one goes, in France, one meets, looking backward a little, the spectre of the great Revolution; and one meets it always in the shape of the destruction of something beautiful and precious. To make us forgive it at all, how much it must also have destroyed that was more hateful than itself! Beneath the church of Montmajour ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... been able to procure a collection of such illustrated trials, a century or so old, is deemed fortunate among collectors, for he can at any time raise up for himself the spectre as it were of the great mystery and exposure that for weeks was the absorbing topic of attraction for millions. The curtains are down—the fire burns bright—the cat purrs on the rug; Atticus, soused in his easy-chair, cannot be at the trouble ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... well." She turned away, and with bent head left the room. So it came about that both Chrysophrasia and Cutter on the same evening struck a blow at the new-found happiness of the cousins, raising between them, as it were, the spectre of the ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... had cramped my limbs to such a degree it pained me to move. I clambered down and took a few turns about the room as if I had naught to do but exercise. But at every turn the hideous face and whitened eyes of Broussard dogged my footsteps as a spectre. Look where I would, it was only that I saw. Hour after hour crawled by. Jerome ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... officers could torture themselves with the thought of five turkeys ordered in Port Said and unlimited mess stores lying sixty miles away at Romani. But at the last moment all was changed. A parcel mail came in—and the spectre of bully unrelieved vanished—the five turkeys, personally conducted by a versatile officer's servant, made their appearance—together with sufficient Daily Telegraph plum puddings for every one to get a piece, and last but not least, a determined Brigadier held up a ration convoy, and refused ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... I imagined that he was your spectre, when you spoke of Harley Street. Does he send you ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Appears:—concenter'd as one mighty heart, A million lie, in mutest slumber bound. Or, panting like the ocean, when a dream Of storm awakes her:—Heaven and Earth are still; In radiant loveliness the stars pursue Their pilgrimage, while moonlight's wizard hand Throws beauty, like a spectre light, on all. At Judah's tent the lion-banner stands Unfolded, and the pacing sentinels,— What awe pervades them, when the dusky groves, The rocks Titanian, by the moonshine made Unearthly, or yon mountains vast, they view! But soon as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... as every member boasts, Was founded with the object of investigating Ghosts! Now Ghosts, the modern species, are of very various sorts, For like some plants, as botanists say, they seem to run to "sports." I used to think a spectre was a spectre, but I find The "Psychical" can furnish Spooks of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... STOUGHTON). He was afraid of nothing on earth, or off it, but ghosts, and he despised the weedy young man who was in love with his daughter. So the weedy young man dared him to come to a haunted cottage at midnight, and, dressed up as a spectre, terrified the soldier into something more than a strategic retreat, with the result that he surrendered his daughter. In real life of course it is different. I know a colour-sergeant, and somehow ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... from the palms to the tips of the fingers was a mass of lambent flame. When Bill saw this fearful apparition he screamed with hearty good will; but the noise he made was nothing to the yell of terror that came from beneath the shroud of the Yew-lane Ghost, who, on catching sight of the rival spectre, fled wildly up the lane, kicking the white sheet off as he went, and finally displaying, to Bill's amazement, the form and features of Bully Tom. But this was not all. No sooner had the first ghost started, than the second (not to be behind-hand) ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... common property by writers of fiction in all generations; it occurs at least thrice in the Ingoldsby Legends; Sir Walter Scott gives a terrible instance in his story of the Scotch judge haunted by the spectre of the bandit he had sentenced to death {2}, which appears to be founded on fact; and indeed the present narrative was suggested by one of Washington Irving's short stories, read by the writer when a ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... had been painting, and painting very inartistically, so little was the red shaded into the surrounding white. Now this was certainly not beautiful. Indeed, it occasioned a strange feeling, almost of terror, at first, for she reminded one of the spectre woman in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." But when I got used to her complexion, I saw that the form of her features was quite beautiful. She might indeed have been LOVELY but for a certain hardness which showed through the beauty. This might have been the result of ill health, ill-endured; ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... anything else—I get to the end of all the logic about non-resistance, and there, like an excluded middle, stands the huge spectre of man as he is and always will be. And this spectre stands right beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoi's, and the other logical necessity of Nietzsche's—" Amory broke off suddenly. ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... these vain struggles, his love for Anne grew stronger, more overpowering. He was hollow-eyed and gaunt, ravenous with the hunger of love. A spectre of his former self, he watched himself starve with sustenance at hand. Bountiful love lay within his grasp and yet he starved. Full, rich pastures spread out before him wherein he could roam to the end of his days, blissfully ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... appear more terrible than a black and dismal face, with a large white circle drawn round each eye. In general waved lines were marked down each arm, thigh, and leg; and in some the cheeks were daubed; and lines drawn over each rib, presented to the beholder a truly spectre-like figure. Previous either to a dance or a combat, we always found them busily employed in this necessary preliminary; and it must be observed, that when other liquid could not be readily procured, they moistened the clay with their own saliva. Both sexes are ornamented with scars upon ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... coming as it were from that merry and populous chamber of life and health, once again I met the Spectre I derided, a red-headed, red-visaged Thing that chose me out to stop and grin at. Somehow I was not minded to ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... of course, and proceeded to turn the spectre to good account. I addressed it, in a moderate tone; though I think that I used some gesticulation. Said I: Personation of the Slave-power! predatory, grasping, black! thinkest thou a panting fugitive lies hid under my "delusion?" ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... king ordered that his position should be changed. Even in the midst of the flames he still continued to direct his dying glance toward the king, until the latter, abashed, was compelled to withdraw from the window. For days Henry declared that the spectre haunted his waking hours and drove sleep from his eyes at night; and he affirmed with an oath that never again would he witness so horrible a scene.[567] Happy would it have been for his memory had he adhered, in the case of Anne du Bourg, to so ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... peace to his colleague before the eyes of all; in public and in private they besought the latter that to the double merit of having vanquished the enemy and reconciled the parties he would add the third and yet greater service of preserving internal peace to his country, and banishing the fearful spectre of civil war with which they were threatened. Whatever could tell on a vain, unskilful, vacillating man—all the flattering arts of diplomacy, all the theatrical apparatus of patriotic enthusiasm—was put in motion to obtain the desired result; and—which was the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... you perceive a gaunt, yellow spectre of a man, reduced to his last chemise, and that a sad spectacle of ancient purity, starting from Lincoln's-Inn, and making all haste for Waterloo-bridge, the inference is rather natural, that he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... night. The question, "Was it prophetic?" kept ringing in my ears, answerless save by a superstitious feeling of fear. Then the horrid thought that I had only by a mere chance missed becoming a murderer came upon me, and again was crowded from my mind by the memory of Dorothy and the hovering spectre which had hung over her head on ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... wonderful winter to the Bean family. Never before had Mrs. Bean known what it was to be free from the oppressing spectre of want. No longer was she forced to worry about household supplies; neither was it necessary for Steve to go to the store each week with his basket of eggs and a few rolls of butter. He carried, instead, an order from Lois, and Andy Forbes was only too willing ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... to string himself for the contest. The picture Mr. Falkland had drawn was prophetic. It described what Mr. Tyrrel chiefly feared; and what in its commencements he thought he already felt. It was responsive to the whispering of his own meditations; it simply gave body and voice to the spectre that haunted him, and to the terrors of which ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... for magic, because they know not how they are produced. Eyes that are diseased do not see things as others see them, or else behold them differently. A drunken man will see objects double; to one who has the jaundice they will appear yellow: in the obscurity people fancy they see a spectre, where there is but the trunk of ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... The spectre army fades Far up the glimmering hill, But, vaguely lingering still, A group of shuddering shades Infects the pallid air, Growing dimmer as day invades The hush of the dusky square. There is one that seems a King, As if the ghost of a Crown Still ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... probable that by guest is meant an allusion to the spectre dog of Yorkshire (the Barguest), to which the ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... man can improve upon it. There have been, he admits, revolutions in the moral as well as the physical world; and inspired reformers, who were born to carry them on; but these men are rare and portentous as the physical agencies to which they correspond, and whether "dervish (desert-spectre), swordsman, saint, lawgiver," or "lyrist," appear only when the time is ripe for them. Meanwhile, the great machine advances by means of the minute springs, the revolving wheel-work, of individual lives. Let each of these be content with ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... side, and it was impossible to catch them; his brows were knit, his lips seemed to be twisted on one side.... What had happened to my Joseph Most Fair,[23] to my quiet lad? I cannot comprehend it. "Can he have gone crazy?" I say to myself. He roams about like a spectre by night, he does not sleep,—and then, all of a sudden, he will take to staring into a corner as though he were completely benumbed.... It ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... on through the heavy door, and a spectre passed into the room before his eyes. And upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... herself in a manner so extraordinary that he could not distinguish her from the other dancers. He thought, however, that he had kept his eyes upon her, and seized on one of the dancers; but alas! it was only a horrible spectre which held him fast, and threw its wide waving shroud around him, so that he could not make his escape, while, at the same time, some of the subterraneous black demons pulled at his legs, and wanted to bear him down along with them into their ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... the floor, holding the half- perused paper in my hand. Grief and horror had locked up the avenues of complaint, and I sat as one petrified to stone. My father entered. At the sight of me, he started as if he had been a spectre. His well- known features opened at once my agonized heart. With fearful cries I cast myself at his feet, and putting the letter into his hand, clung, almost expiring, to ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... room, which was then sealed up. And now Paganini became a terror to the ignorant peasants and fishermen, who crossed themselves as they hurried past the spot where the excommunicated remains lay. It was said that in the dead of night the spectre of Paganini appeared and played the violin outside ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... Derek Vane found himself trying to take an inventory of his own stock. And since the material question of money did not come in to cloud the horizon, he felt he could do it impartially. There are many now who, having sacrificed every prospect, find their outlook haunted by the spectre of want; there are many more, formerly engaged in skilled trades such as engineering or mining, who find that they have four years of leeway to make up in their profession—four years of increased knowledge and mechanical improvements—unknown ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... Then she went to the bed and bent over it,—after a pause of several minutes, she turned and made a beckoning sign with her finger. Gueldmar advanced a little,—when a sudden eldritch shriek startled him back, almost curdling the blood in his veins. Out of the deep obscurity, like some gaunt spectre rising from the tomb, started a face, wrinkled, cadaverous, and distorted by suffering,—a face in which the fierce, fevered eyes glittered with a strange and dreadful brilliancy—the face of Lovisa Elsland, stern, forbidding, and already dark with the shadows ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... her along the tunnel to the telephone, she set down the lantern and pressed the spring that opened the panel door. Another moment and she would be embarked on her great adventure in the finality of action. That little ear-piece became a spectre of conscience. She drew back convulsively and her hands flew to her face; she was a rocking shadow in the thin, reddish ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... advancing on his sure And stealthy mission. Well I know his step, The wily traitor! when I mark my short, Quick respirations; and his call I know, As, in the hush of night, my ear alarmed By the heart's death-march notes, repeats its strange And audible beatings. Down! grim spectre, down! Flap not thy wings across my face, nor let Thy ghastly visage, horrible shadow! freeze My staring eye-balls! Let me fly, O Death! Thy chilling presence, and implore thy soft And merciful brother,[2] dewy Sleep, to drip Papaverous ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... swiftly three full years—years crowded with work and play and many rare experiences—and less darkly shadowed by the spectre that had stalked beside them ever since their marriage. For this short space he knew what it was to live like a man, not like a "pallid weevil in a biscuit," and she, though her vigilance was never relaxed for a moment, breathed somewhat more freely. The days ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... contributing to her mother's comforts, all was joy and congratulation. Her incurable disease was for the time forgotten, and although pain would occasionally draw down the muscles of her face, as soon as the pang was over, so was the remembrance of her precarious situation. Wan and wasted as a spectre, she indulged in anticipation of again mixing with the fashionable world, and talked of chaperoning Isabel to private parties and public amusements, when she was standing at the brink of eternity. Isabel sighed as she listened to her mother, and observed her attenuated ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to swift flight for your protection. Very well, my Lord, you are now confronted with something against which your stout arm is as unavailing as it would be if an apparition stood in your path. There is before you the spectre of subtlety. Use arm instead of brain, and you ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... yonder, In the blaze of the ball-room gay, My lady sits; while round her flits A skeleton slender and grey. And the ghastly spectre standeth By the side of my lady fair So mournfully bland, and with bony hand It plays with her costume rare. And this is the song the ghostly guest Sings, ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... Causes Celebres et Interessantes, is one entitled, Le Spectre, ou l'Illusion Reprouve, reported by Guyot de Pittaval [vol. xii. edition La Haye, 1749], in which a countryman prosecutes a tradesman named Auguier for about twenty thousand francs, said to have been lent to the tradesman. It was ...
— Trial of Duncan Terig, alias Clerk, and Alexander Bane Macdonald • Sir Walter Scott
... term Second Sight, seems to be meant a mode of seeing, superadded to that which Nature generally bestows. In the Earse it is called Taisch; which signifies likewise a spectre, or a vision. I know not, nor is it likely that the Highlanders ever examined, whether by Taisch, used for Second Sight, they mean the power of ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... conversations industriously circulated about the town, and talked on the benches of this House, attributed his conduct to motives low and unworthy, and as groundless as they are injurious. I do not affect to be frightened with this proposition, as if some hideous spectre had started from hell, which was to be sent back again by every form of exorcism, and every kind of incantation. I invoke no Acheron to overwhelm him in the whirlpools of his muddy gulf. I do not tell the respectable ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... you been so long at Glennaquoich, and never heard of the Grey Spectre? though indeed there is a certain reluctance among us to ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... a woolen wheel, being taken very strangely out of an house at Salem Village, was used by a spectre as an instrument of torture to a sufferer, not being discernible to the standers by until it was by the said sufferer snatched out of the spectre's hand, and then it did immediately appear to the persons present to be ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... coming in, though nearly at the height, and Grimes floated merrily to land. After hauling the boat ashore, he stood for a moment looking towards the sea, when he saw, dancing like a spectre on the very edge of the wave that broke in a thousand bubbles at his feet, the identical box he had taken such pains to commit to the safe keeping of that perilous deep. It was evidently pursuing him. He would have fled, but fear had arrested his footsteps. He did not recollect ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... was being led into a cunningly devised trap. His mental operations were slow, but he was swift and tenacious enough in prejudice. He stopped still, and the two stood silently facing each other, the same vague spectre of suspicion alive ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... with the word rikon, signifying a "shade," "ghost," or "spectre," and the word by[o], signifying "sickness," "disease." An almost literal rendering would be "ghost-sickness." In Japanese-English dictionaries you will find the meaning of Rikomby[o] given as "hypochondria;" and doctors really use the term in this ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... was brought on board the Minden, having been attacked with the fever, and never was there such an evidence of the racking of a bad conscience. In his ravings he shrieked for mercy, and then would blaspheme in the most awful manner. At one moment the spectre of his dead comrade would be invoked by him, requesting it to depart, or desiring those around him to take it away. At others, the murdered man was standing at his bed-side, and he would attempt to run, that he might flee ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... troops were armed with swords, spears, and other implements of destruction. The second column was commanded by a majestic matron, whose noble figure was clothed in a sacerdotal robe. On her right stood Superstition, a gloomy-eyed spectre, bearing in his hand a bow formed from the bones of the dead, and on his back a quiver filled with poisoned arrows. On her left hovered a wild, fantastically clothed figure, called Fanaticism, bearing a blazing torch. These two phantoms, with ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... shape of a hearse bearing the arms of Austria. A few days afterwards my poor mother was removed to Saint Denis. Four or five days before the horrible death of our adorable Henrietta, the arrows of Saint Denis appeared to me in a dream covered in dusky flames, and amid them I saw the spectre of Death, holding in his hand the necklaces and bracelets of a young lady. The appalling death of my cousin followed close upon this presage. Henceforth, the view of Saint Denis spoils all these pleasant landscapes for me. At ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Rip Van Winkle with which the American writer Washington Irving has made us so familiar, the ne'er-do-weel Rip wanders off into the Kaatskill Mountains with his dog and gun in order to escape from his wife's scolding tongue. Here he meets the spectre crew of Captain Hudson, and, after partaking of their hospitality, falls into a deep sleep which lasts for twenty years. The latter part of the story describes the changes which he finds on his return to his native village: nearly ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... Bonaparte did not make himself king, he made himself emperor. He did not take up the crown that had fallen from the head of the Bourbons; he created a new one for himself—a crown which the French people and Senate had, however, offered him. The revolution still stood a threatening spectre behind the French people; its return was feared, and, since the discovery of the conspiracy of Georges, Moreau, and Pichegru, the people anxiously asked themselves what was to become of France if the conspirators should succeed in murdering Bonaparte; and when ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... reader ever hear of Finance-Minister Creutz, once a poor Regiment's Auditor, when his Majesty, as yet Crown-Prince, found talent in him? Can readers fish up from their memory, twenty years back, anything of a terrific Spectre walking in the Berlin Palace, for certain nights, during that "Stralsund Expedition" or famed Swedish-War time, to the terror of mankind? Terrific Spectre, thought to be in Swedish pay,—properly a spy Scullion, in a small ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... perception of the main forms and facts in the creature; and, secondly, in the grandeur of line by which their forms are abstracted and insisted on, making every asp, ibis, and vulture a sublime spectre of asp or ibis or vulture power. The way for students to get some of this gift again (some only, for I believe the fulness of the gift itself to be connected with vital superstition, and with resulting intensity of reverence; people were likely to know something about ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... against the gray stone. He saw the Indian's plume, a single feather waving silver-white. Then it became riveted on the bubbling, refulgent spring. The pool was round, perhaps five feet across, and shone like a burnished shield. It mirrored the moon, the twinkling stars, the spectre trees. ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... he could to his captain, and said, "Oh dear! in that house there is a gruesome witch, and I felt her breath and her long nails in my face; and by the door there stands a man who stabbed me in the leg with a knife, and in the yard there lies a black spectre, who beat me with his wooden club; and above, upon the roof, there sits the justice, who cried, 'bring that rogue here!' And so I ran away from the place as fast as ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... in a voice that might well have been that of a spectre. "Leave me," she added, as if with the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... enough to bear already without having to listen to us doing our imitation of the Two Macs. Always willing to oblige, I dismissed Jeeves with a nod, and he flickered for a moment and was gone. Many a spectre would have ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... all thy dignity and formalism there beats a loving father's heart. The shadows are gathering, dear sir, around thy fifth son in a far country, and in the gathering shadows there stalks, noiselessly, relentlessly, that grim, gray spectre, Death. On thy knees, then, oh Rector of St. Agnes, and blend thy prayers with the feeble petitions of her who even now, for thy house, entreats the Throne of Grace. Pray, oh thou on whom the bishop's hands ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... till next week. I have some papers to arrange, which I should wish to show him, and I cannot have them sooner in readiness. If you, Mr. Temple, can contrive to pass this week at Mr. Percy's, let me not detain you. There is no fear," added he, smiling, that "in solitude I should be troubled by the spectre which haunted the minister in Gil Blas in ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... carnage by the drear Red Sea— Another efflux of a sea more red! Another bruising of the hapless head Of a wrong'd people yearning to be free. Another blot on her great name, who stands Confounded, left intolerably alone With the dilating spectre of her own Dark sin, uprisen from yonder spectral sands: Penitent more than to herself is known; England, appall'd ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... Must leave, I fear me. No longer guest-right I bestow; The door is open, art free to go. But what do I see in the creature? Is that in the course of nature? Is't actual fact? or Fancy's shows? How long and broad my poodle grows! He rises mightily: A canine form that cannot be! What a spectre I've harbored thus! He resembles a hippopotamus, With fiery eyes, teeth terrible to see: O, now am I sure of thee! For all of thy half-hellish brood The Key of Solomon ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... of the other, Attusah of Kanootare, this was necessary in the event that submission to the British government became inevitable. For since he claimed to be a ghost, surely never was spectre so reckless. He had indeed appeared to so many favored individuals that the English might fairly have cause to doubt his execution in satisfaction of his crimes against the government; and the breach of faith ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... wishes, not what I supposed you would require," replied she. "But aside from that, you can surely imagine it must be painful to have my life haunted by this dreadful spectre of slavery." ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... fear, he turn'd.—His guide was gone; A broad chaotic cloud appear'd alone. His limbs no more their chilly weight sustained, A deathlike torpor o'er his bosom reign'd, His stony eyeballs fix'd in silent trance Met the terrific Spectre's withering glance. And lo! the Phantom waves, with sudden glare, His burning sceptre thro' the starless air! High o'er the bark the booming billows spread, The deafening waves were closing o'er his ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... of renewing examination fees consequent on your callous failures," he had said, "terrifies me. I am haunted by the spectre of ruin. The Bank of England could ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... Macarius became angry because an insect bit him and in penitence flung himself into a marsh where he lived for weeks. He was so badly stung by gnats and flies that his friends hardly knew him. Hilarion, at twenty years of age, was more like a spectre than a living man. His cell was only five feet high, a little lower than his stature. Some carried weights equal to eighty or one hundred and fifty pounds suspended from their bodies. Others slept standing against the rocks. For three ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... in an age whose faith was stronger in ghosts than ours, yet which perhaps had less skill in describing them. There are some circumstances which seem to indicate that the author of the Castle Spectre lighted his torch at the altar of the French muse. Athalia thus narrates her dream, in which the spectre of Jezabel, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... make a fellow almost wish—' Andrew's fingers worked over his poll, and then the spectre of righteous wrath flashed on him—naughty little man that he was! He knew himself naughty, for it was the only time since his marriage that he had ever been sorry to see his wife. This is a comedy, and I must not preach lessons of life here: but I am obliged to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... well up; the smoke clouds had been scattered by the breeze; the sky was studded with diamonds. Zen had a feeling of being very happy. True, a certain haunting spectre at times would break into her consciousness, but in the companionship of such a man as Grant she could easily beat it off. She studied the face in the moon, and invited her soul. She was living through a new experience—an experience she could not understand. In spite of the discomfort ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... in the wizard arms Of the foam-bearded Atlantic, An isle of old enchantment, A melancholy isle, Enchanted and dreaming lies; And there, by Shannon's flowing In the moonlight, spectre-thin, The ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... been so interested in the other that they had seen nothing else. But now the road led through an open space where every tree was torn and broken; Mildred stopped to wonder at the splintered trunks; and out of the charred spectre of a great oak crows flew and settled among the rocks, in the fissures ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... Fire is Ashes, The Ocean's tempest dashes Wrecks and the dead upon the rocky shore: True Passion must the all-searching changes prove, The Agony of Pleasure and of Pain, Till Nothing but the Bitterness remain; And the Heart's Spectre flitting through the brain Scoffs at the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... view General Convention is likely to take of its sayings and doings, and even disestablishment might proceed without our being called into consultation. And yet the Concordat difficulty will have to be reckoned with; and the dire spectre of a possible disowning of us by our mother the Church of England will have to be laid, before any alterations in the Book of Common Prayer will be accounted by some ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... half-mad. He knew no peace, and at last one Thursday he refused to have any one with him. He ordered the waiting-maids to bring him his food and drink, and then to leave him directly, so that he remained alone like a spectre. ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... ragged uniform, haggard but eager, was standing like a gaunt spectre in the sunlight that flooded the terrace. The vagabond, with the eyes of all upon him, raised and lowered his arms thrice, and the face of Baldos ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... his face grows frozen with horror as he remembers the doom. For the first time the grey spectre of Death confronts him face to face ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... inhabitants of the South understands better than you do the gravity of that great problem which confronts them. It is "like the pestilence that walketh in darkness, the destruction that wasteth at noonday." It confronts us all the day; it is the spectre that ever sits beside our bed. No doubt we make mistakes about it; no doubt there are outbreaks growing out of some phases of it that astound, and shock, and stun you, as they do ourselves. But believe me, the Anglo-Saxon race has set itself, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... they rose, laughing and yawning to take up their candles, it was, after all, after a rather animated discussion, with many a hair-raising ghost story brought in for proof between brother and sister, as to exactly how many times that snuff-coloured spectre had made his appearance; and, with less unanimity still, as to the precise manner in which he was in the habit of ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... the light Burned dimly in my room, there came to me, As noiselessly as shadows of the night, The spectre of a woe that ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and the car we were in and caused them to tremble. The flash of the light of the passing train, as it sped on its way, was so quick by us that it was impossible to see whether it was a light or not. It appeared like the ghost of a light or a spectre in its flight through the darkness, for a moment and it was gone. It left no trace behind that I could see. There had two or three of those trains of cars passed us before I was able to make out what ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
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