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More "Wraith" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the supernatural, yet there was in him also a vein of sentiment, shown in his poem on the death of Clidna—"Clidna the fair-haired, long to be remembered," who was tragically drowned at Glandore harbor in the south, and whose sad wraith still moans upon the bar, in hours of fate for the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... in its center the supper table stood stripped of its cloth and candles. Only the pale light from the windows dispelled the growing dark. Like a little white wraith Arlee fled through the room and turned the handle of the door at the head of the haremlik stairs. ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... down some steps into gardens stretching along beside the river—gardens blazing with flowers and sweet with blossomed fruit trees. It was so unexpected, so splendidly beautiful, it surpassed a dream of fairy-land. We passed on, saw a shadowy lady among the flowers on the lawn, knew it was the wraith of the unhappy and guilty Dearvorgill. Stole out of the farther gate—at least I did— feeling naughty and intrusive. Found ourselves in the clean little town of Drumahaire, a pretty little village, straggled over a hillside ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... the eye of faith! Ah, I have heard that wail far, far away In distant lands, by many a sheltered bay, When slumbered in his cave the water-wraith And the waves gently kissed the classic shore Of France or Italy, beneath the moon, When earth lay tranced in a dreamless swoon: And every time the music rose—before Mine inner vision rose a form sublime, Thy form, O Tree, as in my happy prime ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... I could to bid her be of good cheer, but the comfort of a hopeful spirit was dead within her; and she told me, that by many tokens she was assured her bairn was already slain.—"Thrice," said she, "I have seen his wraith—the first time he was in the pride of his young manhood, the next he was pale and wan, with a bloody and gashy wound in his side, and the third time there was a smoke, and, when it cleared away, I saw him in a grave, ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... beauty of silence and seclusion,—a splendor of abandoned glory. All the stir of life (if, indeed, one may dream of life in Pisa) is far away on the other side of the city; to this corner is left the wraith-like haunted atmosphere, where only shadows flit over the grass, and the sunset reflections linger on the Tower. A statue of Cosimo di Medici was near; the Lanfranchi palace, where Byron had lived, was not far ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... in this work that he paid not attention to what was taking place around him, and consequently did not see the shadowy figure that came flitting from tree to tree like a wraith of the great pinelands, finally reaching the oak against which ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... conviction. The pale ghost of a laugh is in the dying eyes. The wraith of Beauvayse's old voice comes back again ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... honor and happiness of shaking hands with him not fifteen minutes ago. I was driving up St. James Street, and caught a glimpse of him on the steps of Fenton's Hotel. At first sight I could not credit my eyes. I had to look again to see whether it were a wraith or a mortal man. Such a pallid shadow of his former self. You used to think him rather handsome, Gwen—you should see him now! He has grown ten years older in as many months—his hair is absolutely streaked with gray, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... she, to whom everything uncouth and primitive was repugnant, would smile beside him in those equatorial tangles, or, at any rate, that she would do so in his dream of her. In the camp surrounded by a hedge of thorns, in the firelight flickering on the shoulder blades and teeth of the negroes, the wraith of her living self would sit at his side, radiant in the dress that she had worn last night. "Real as you'll seem to me," he said, "I sha'n't have to worry about the striped mosquitoes stinging you on the shoulders; and when we ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... the chamber, silently as the wraith of a disembodied soul, the swift jungle creature moved from the path of the charging Titan that, guided solely in the semi-darkness by its keen ears, bore down upon the spot toward which Tarzan's noisy entrance into its lair had attracted it. Along the further wall the ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... required enormous self-control to go slowly. While among the lighted streets the urge to flee at top speed was strong. But he clenched his teeth. A car makes much less noise when barely in motion. He made it drift as silently as a wraith under the trees and ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... boy was creeping towards him—creeping, as it seemed to him, from the shadows in the tunnel. Who—who was it? Was it really a being of flesh and blood? At first it seemed to him that it must be the wraith of the little fellow about whom he had been speaking—Hibbert—but even as the thought filtered through his mind the boy was kneeling beside him, ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... bewilderment; was it himself, or his ghost, his shadow. He tried to think, but everything melted before him in a mist. The girl by his side was a wraith; they were dead, and this was some strange unaccountable happening in another world. The marble felt cold to his knees. Velasco tried to move, to rise, but the hand of the priest held him down. The ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... still standing there in the moonlight, like a little wraith of silver, smiling with absent eyes at Johnny's muttered words, withdrawing, in childish panic, from Johnny's close pressing ardor. She knew that if he persisted . . . but before her soft detachment, her half laughing evasiveness of his mood, ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... almost undividedly, except for the aid she had from her friend Grace Barrow and from Miss Colesworth. Mrs. Adister O'Donnell was a nurse in name only. 'She'll be seen by Philip like as if she were a nightmare apparition of his undertaker's wraith,' Captain Con said to Jane, when recommending his cousin to her charitable nature, after he had taken lodgings at a farmhouse near Mrs. Lackstraw's model farm Woodside on the hills. 'Barring the dress,' as he added, some such impression of her frigid mournfulness ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that had been so carefully tended ran wild, the boar rooted among them, and the porcupine made a home in their shade. As evening closed in, the wreck of the great house became vague and shadowy, a thing without outline, the wraith of the home that had been. Grey owls and spectral bats sailed or fluttered from the walls. They might have been past owners or servitors who had suffered metamorphosis. The sight set me thinking of the mutual suspicions of the Bedouins ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... thought of lilacs blown by light breezes, of clouds on a May morning, of the drift of white petals from blossoming trees. Was she a woman or a wraith, this slender thing swaying in ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... already full of people who claimed to see the sights of the other world as spirits see them, and fully expected to have my clairvoyant faculty opened. But I saw no 'sudden Ianthe;' and to this day have never seen even a kobold, a wraith, or a doeppelganger! This was doubtless fortunate; for I was nearly driven into lunacy by the things I heard before I reached the end of this 'youthful adventure.' I should have gone 'clean daft' if the bugaboo had been permitted to show me the ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... insignificant, scrofulous wraith of a man with green eyes and straight, fair hair. He whined complaint of his boss, the ranch, his bad luck, his ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... sometimes, it rises suddenly in deep-toned wrath, smiting the face of the cliff, booming through the low-mouthed caves, curling its great green curls and combing them out to frothing ringlets along the strips of beach, winding itself about the rock of Conca in a heavily gleaming sheet and whirling its wraith of foam to heaven, the very ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... discourage me," she said, "because I want all the spirits I am capable of to carry it through. It has to be done with a light heart, else it will deceive nobody. And so, my dear, to-morrow you will say 'good-bye' to me, and have a sort of wraith of me instead for a little while. Oh, Alice, I hope it ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... gate, with his arm about her, and herself willingly nestling against him, trembling now and again; looking out at the sheeny surface of the slow flowing stream from which, in the imperceptible night breeze, stole away wraith after wraith of water mist to float and lose themselves in the ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... he had to. It was better to face a ghost than disobey Bucko Lynch. That is what the rest of us thought, too. We were all afraid to go aft, but more afraid not to. So we huddled close upon the second mate's heels, and clumped noisily upon the deck, as though to rout the wraith with our racket. ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... tried to picture his face and figure till presently it seemed as if I saw him,—indeed I could have sworn that a man's shadowy form stood immediately in front of me, bending upon me a searching glance from eyes that were strangely familiar. Startled at this wraith of my own fancy, I half rose from my chair—then sank back again with a laugh at my imagination's too vivid power of portrayal. A figure did certainly present itself, but one of sufficient bulk to convince me of its substantiality. This was the captain of the 'Diana,' ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... well were sure that it was only a mater of days when the sickness would catch them and carry them off. And yet, believing this with absolute conviction, they somehow lacked the nerve to rush the frail wraith of a man with the white skin and escape from the charnel house by the whale-boats. They chose the lingering death they were sure awaited them, rather than the immediate death they were very sure would pounce upon them if they went up against the master. That he never slept, they knew. That he ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... American opened his right fist and held to the light that which had been concealed, close wadded in his grasp,—a square of sheer linen edged with lace, crumpled but spotless, and diffusing in the unwholesome den a faint, intangible fragrance, the veriest wraith of that elusive perfume which he would never again inhale without instantly recalling that night ride through London in the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... grew loud apace, The water—wraith was shrieking; And in the scowl of heaven eachface, Grew dark as ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... was I, in Ku-ki'i, in Ha'e-ha'e, I saw a wraith of lehua, a burning bush, A fire-tree beneath the lava plate. Magnificent Puna, fertile from rain, 5 At all times weaving its mantle. Aye Puna's a land of splendor, Proudly bedight with palm and lehua; Beauteous above, but horrid below, And miry the plain of Mau-kele. 10 Apua ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... lynx, moving with great bounds on his huge swathed paws, shot past between the iron-hard tree-boles; a fox followed, scudding like the wind on the frozen crest; a hare, white as a waste wraith, flashed by, swift as a racing white cloud-shadow; a goshawk screamed, and drew a straight streaking line across a glade. And then came the men, side by side, deadly dumb, with set faces, the pale sun glinting coldly cruel upon the snaky, lean barrels of their slung rifles, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... "real! Why they are much more real than most of the people we know. Horace is a mere wraith compared ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... had come to insult her, is conquered by her candor and truth, and stays to sympathize with her and lend her the support of her presence. But just as the king comes to lead her out to face the populace, the wraith of her father rises upon the threshold and she falls back dead. It is learned afterward that Professor Ernst had died ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the wraith, or phantom, however, in the broad-shouldered figure in a wide-brimmed Stetson sitting in the office watching ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... in the wraith-like gloom, and a vengeful shot that sped; A howl that would thrill a cream-faced corpse— and the demon fox lay dead. . . . Yet there was never a sign of wound, and ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... my opinion that Mercer has seen his wraith," he remarked sententiously. "There's a grave, dour look about his pale countenance which a man who is long for this ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... Send yon woman away—if she be a woman and not a wraith (spirit)," he added, as he turned his face from ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... think that his eyes must be playing him some curious trick, for the figure at which he was staring remained strangely still and motionless. Was it possible that his mind, dwelling constantly on Flossy, had evoked her wraith? But, no, looking up in startled silence at the still figure standing before him, he realized that not so would memory have conjured up the pretty, bright little woman of whom he had once been proud. Flossy still looked pretty, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... North of Ireland is called wraith, as in Scotland. The Fetch is a spirit that assumes the likeness of a particular person. It does not appear to the individual himself whose resemblance it assumes, but to some of his friends. If it is seen in the morning, it betokens long life; if ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... They made what search in Venice they could, without rousing a scandal, and Ashe rushed out to join it, using the special means at a minister's disposal. But it was fruitless. Kitty vanished like a wraith in the dawn; and the living world of action and affairs ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the canty auld wife cam till her braith, And she thocht the Bible micht ward aif scaith; Be it benshee, bogle, ghaist, or wraith— ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out until in this pattern, this ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... that a part of my youth which in some strange way seems to have acquired an individuality, of its own dwells, and will for ever dwell, among these scenes. And I shall never be so ill-advised as to seek it, for the wraith, like a mocking dryad, would flit from tree to tree, as beautiful and as ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... changed trains and were headed for New York, with their destination only a few hours away, Stuart, again in the vestibule of the car, looking out through the closed entrance door upon a dull landscape passing like a misty wraith through the November fog and twilight, ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... lyrical Flushes and glows With a wraith of florescence That tempers or lessens The light of ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... hardly can persuade myself Whether to laugh or pull a solemn face At seeing you. It is preposterous! I thought that you were dead—a myth—a wraith. ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... with superstition, and the enlightened editor of the eighteenth century excised all the scene of Mrs. Donne's wraith as too absurd. But Walton is a very fair witness. Donne, a man of imagination, was, he tells us, in a perturbed anxiety about Mrs. Donne. The event was after dinner. The story is, by Walton's admission, ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... stranger than complete oblivion. But he soon convinced himself that a slight hazy vision he conjured up of a wedding years and years ago was only a reflex image—an automatic reaction—from his recent marriage. For did not the wraith of his present wife quietly take its place before the altar where by rights he should have been able to recall her predecessor? It was all confusion; no ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... great sigh of doubt she recognised him. Was it a vision? Was he dead? She dragged herself to him upon her hands and knees and listened for his breathing, if perchance he still breathed and was not a wraith. Then it came, strong and slow, the breath of ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... a week but only four, When mournfu' as I sat on the stane at the door, I saw my Jamie's wraith,—for I couldna think it he, Till he said, 'I'm come hame ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... earth's diadems and rewards are fashioned, but the incorruptible crown that fadeth not away, which His hand will give, should fire our hope, and shine before our faith. Not Naaman's gifts but God's approval is Elisha's reward. Not the praise from lips that will perish, or the 'hollow wraith of dying fame,' but Christ's 'Well done! good and faithful servant,' should be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... "Have I made you understand?" she returned a wan wraith of a smile, pitiful with entreaty, while one of her hands ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... caught sight of the pile of manuscripts in the corner. Then the wheels of memory slipped ahead through four years of time, and he was aware of the present, of the books he had opened and the universe he had won from their pages, of his dreams and ambitions, and of his love for a pale wraith of a girl, sensitive and sheltered and ethereal, who would die of horror did she witness but one moment of what he had just lived through—one moment of all the muck of life ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... time to time advance suddenly, only to drop back to desolating driblets the following night. These gains were due to the work of the loyal Hugh as advertising agent, or to some desperate discount sale to a club on the part of Westervelt, who haunted the front of the house, a pale and flabby wraith of himself, racking his brain, swearing strange, German oaths, and perpetually conjuring up new advertising devices. His suffering approached ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... of the tribe. The future was revealed to him in a trance. He saw the Cherokees and his own band, brightly painted for war, move forward to battle under the leadership of a ghostly semblance of himself. Suddenly a musket rang out and a bullet sped from the enemy's line. His wraith was struck full in the forehead and fell to earth in the agony of death. On rejoining his comrades he related his vision and foretold that in the battle about to take place he should meet death. He said also, however, that, ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... 'wraith' of a small box whose image was out at the right, appeared above the other image off at the left and it was turned with a corner to the front. Again, at the central position each image was duplicated, the ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... anaesthesis which had held me. My breath was coming in quick, short gasps, cold sweat stood out from every pore of my body, and the ancient experiment of pinching revealed the fact that I was anything other than a wraith. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... saw her. She was pretty enough, but very quiet and self-absorbed, a slender, nervous creature with that pathetically eager look peculiar to her age and caste in France, starving for the life she might not live till marriage should set her free. A pale and ineffective wraith beside Eve, whose beauty, relieved in candleglow against the background of melting darkness, burned like some rare exotic flower set before a screen of lustreless black velvet. And like a flower to the sun she responded to the homage ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... round in despair. Could no one else see what was so plain to her? She was tempted to go home. She felt she could not bear the strain of watching that little figure perched on the grey beast that looked like a wraith, like a warning. But she did not go, and she learnt to be glad to have shared with Francis the horror of the moment when the mare, out of control and mad with excitement, tried a fence topping a bank, failed, and fell ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... I know now—he is in that room in there! And he has heard everything! And seen everything! And the man who sees his own wraith dies! ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... for a brief time had loomed so large in our imaginations, faded into a sort of wraith. Years passed, bringing with them great changes for me. I left California and settled in England. I wrote a book which excited a certain amount of interest, and inspired some of my old school-fellows to renew acquaintance with me. By this time I had forgotten Johnson. He was part of a distant country, ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... marveled, and smiled to think that, had one stayed at home, one might never know these things. Forgotten was the wraith of Leung Kai Chu, the jungle trail of Hallman, and even the trepidation with which we had awaited the sailing ship's boat. I was soon to be in those enchanted archipelagoes, and to see for myself those mighty swimmers and those sleepers upon the sea. I ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... again, I am afraid," he thought, as his eyes followed the wraith-like flash of the white burnous, as the Bedouins glided to and fro in the chiar-oscuro of the encampment; now in the flicker of the flames, now in the silvered luster of the moon. "It is the conflict of the races, as the cant runs, and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... belief that on account of the loss of the stone, in which he felt his life bound up, the chariot of death was urgent on his footsteps; I bore in mind his memory of his grandfather dying in agony just seventy years ago after seeing his own wraith by the churchyard-wall; I knew that such a man could not be struck by the sudden, the terrific shock of seeing himself sitting in the chair before the mirror (the chair, you remember, had been placed there by Ul-Jabal) without dropping down stone dead on the spot. ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... he muttered, "you are a wraith, an exquisite ghost that will haunt me all my days, but on which I ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... shy, bewildered, she fled away from all her dearest joys, and stayed by herself in the flower-room with the bar across the door, only emerging timidly at mealtimes and stealing into the long room like a little wraith; a rosy wraith now, for at last she had learned to blush. Waring was angry at this desertion, but only the more in love; for the violet eyes veiled themselves under his gaze, and the unconscious child-mouth began to try to control and conceal its changing expressions, and only succeeded ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... anger when a shadowy figure darted for the door. The intruder moved as fast as any wraith but the two former gods were too quick for him. A brief struggle, then they dragged the eavesdropper before the throne where ...
— Satan and the Comrades • Ralph Bennitt
... dark wraith of sin faded, and there was no music in the air, and her cheek was cool, while she looked all the world in the face with the fearless eyes of a child-empress. Again the monotonous, good day rolled ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... lives in my body's house, And you have both the house and her— But sometimes she is less your own Than a wild, gay adventurer; A restless and an eager wraith, How can I tell what she will do— Oh, I am sure of my body's faith, But what if my soul broke ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... Maud was sitting reading in the drawing-room, when the door opened, the servant pronounced a name which thrilled her with surprise, and, looking up, she beheld Ned Talbot standing before her,— Ned Talbot, or the wraith of Ned, for so pale did he appear, so worn and haggard, that it needed no words to tell the nature ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... loath. Either he was not the bravest in the party, or else he had the keenest appreciation of the odds against an exposed position. In a very few minutes the dory was a mere gray wraith on the water, but there it hung. Evidently the rower was overruled by others less cautious, or of the certain conviction that at the distance the yacht was a better ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely worse—the agonized, twisted, dying face of Jess Tatum leaping at him out of shadows. But now, thank God, that ghost of his own conjuring, that wraith never seen but always feared, was laid to rest forever. Never again would conscience put him, soul and body, upon the rack. This night he would sleep—sleep as little children do in the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... wavering mist Waned the wonder out of sight, To a sigh of amethyst, To a wraith of scented light. Flower and magic glass had gone; Near the clutching fire we sat Dreaming, dreaming, all alone, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... though gleaming with moonlight, it seemed to shine. Its glow was silvery, with a greenish cast almost phosphorescent. Was it standing on the path? I could not tell. It was too far away; too much in shadow. But I plainly saw that it had the shape of a man. Wraith, or substance? That ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... time. He arrived at the lawyer's house just at the hour of sundown, when the heavy clouds were scattering and the sun sent shafts of golden light to turn the mists overhanging the towers and pinnacles of Rome's palaces and temples into filmy veils. It looked like a wraith-city, ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... door stood open (as Peter Rolls observed when he "happened" to pass, about the time the Monarchic neared the Statue of Liberty) and nothing reminiscent remained save a haunting perfume of "Rose-Nadine" sachet powder, a specialty which might have been the lingering wraith of a dryad. ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... architecture, especially when it has become pretty antique, and they have a passion for neglected door-yards. The place lacked nothing that I could see to make it attractive to even the most fastidious wandering wraith. As I say, I think this was not my first impression, but certainly it was about the next one, and I could see by her face ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of wilderness peaks rose sheer and forbidding about a valley through which a narrow river flashed its thin loop of water. Down the steep slopes from a rain-darkened sky hung ragged fringes of cloud-streamer and fog-wraith. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... leap from a height King Modred drew his dreadful sword: Then as a snow-wraith, silent, white, He stared and passed without ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... his head, he screamed, in a shrill and discordant voice, "Soh! you will not take my warning? you revile me—you flout me! 'Tis well! your fate shall prove a warning to all unbelievers—they shall remember this night, though you will not. Fool! fool!—your doom has long been sealed! I saw your wraith choose out its last lodgment on Halloween; I know the spot. Your grave is dug already—ha, ha!" And, with renewed laughter, Peter ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... had been no serious friction during the past eighteen years. Probably the knowledge that a Fox Cabinet, dominated by the Prince of Wales, was the only alternative to Pitt had exerted a chastening influence on the once headstrong monarch; but now even that spectre faded away before the more potent wraith of mangled Protestantism. The King was a sincerely religious man in his own narrow way; and arguments about the Coronation Oath were as useless with him as discussions on ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... elf, dwarf, urchin; Puck, Robin Goodfellow; leprechaun, Cluricaune[obs3], troll, dwerger[obs3], sprite, ouphe[obs3], bad fairy, nix, nixie, pigwidgeon[obs3], will-o'-the wisp. [Supernatural appearance] ghost, revenant, specter, apparition, spirit, shade, shadow, vision; hobglobin, goblin, orc; wraith, spook, boggart[obs3], banshee, loup-garou[Fr], lemures[obs3]; evil eye. merman, mermaid, merfolk[obs3]; siren; satyr, faun; manito[obs3], manitou, manitu. possession, demonic possession, diabolic possession; insanity &c.503. [in jest, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... leafless branches stretching up like dumb pleading hands toward the pitiful sky. I grew so interested seeking out specially picturesque forest growths, and glimpses into the still woodland depths under the white snow wraith which I might come again to study more closely, and put on my canvas, that I so far forgot the business of the hour as to find myself a half hour after the appointment at still some distance from Linden Lane. Shutting my eyes resolutely on the rarest bits of landscape ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... on through the night. Anxiety came, wraith-like at first, drifting into her busy brain. She had hardly had time to be anxious in the rush of preparation and departure. But restlessness paved the way. She began to ask herself with growing uneasiness what could be awaiting her at the ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... were wide, the story saith, Out of the night came the patient wraith, He might not speak, and he could not stir A hair of the Baron's minniver—- Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin, He roved the castle to seek his kin. And oh,'twas a piteous thing to see The dumb ghost follow his enemy! ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... gifts which should act as sponges to absorb her tears. But Fate took the whole matter out of my hands. This is how it happened. One evening in the jessamine arbor, in the fragrant darkness of the warm spring night, the end came: Christine was won. She glided in like a wraith, and I, divining at once what had happened, followed her into her little room, where I found her lying on her bed, her hands clasped on her breast, her eyes open and veiled in soft shadows, her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... still holding her hand in his. There stirred in his pulses the thrill Kathleen Eppes had always wakened—a thrill of memory now, a mere wraith of emotion. He was thinking of a certain pink-cheeked girl with crinkly black-brown hair and eyes that he had likened to chrysoberyls—and he wondered whimsically what had become of her. This was not she. This was assuredly not Kathleen, for this woman had a large mouth—a humorous ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... it were better in its right abode, Heartless and happy lackeying its god. How com'st thou, little tender thing of white, Whose very touch full scantly me beseems, How com'st thou resting on my vaporous dreams, Kindling a wraith there of earth's vernal green? Even so as I have seen, In night's aerial sea with no wind blust'rous, A ribbed tract of cloudy malachite Curve a shored crescent wide; And on its slope marge shelving to the night The stranded moon lay quivering ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... a bell rang. It was like a summons. The wraith of his own making vanished. He wiped his eyes, now with one fringed sleeve, now with the other, stooped and felt round just inside the little room for his scrap of mattress and the quilt, took them up, softly shut the door, ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... making all inquiries in my power, I venture to appeal to you. His letter was written in deep dejection of spirit, and mentioned that he feared a judgment had come upon him for wishing to appear as a Scotchman on Scottish soil, as he had one moonlight night shortly after his arrival seen his 'wraith'. He evidently alluded to the fact that before his departure he had procured for himself a Highland costume similar to that which we had the honour to supply to you, with which, as perhaps you will remember, he was ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... would be safely in the hands of those to whom they were written in England. The pony's unshod hoofs had made hardly any sound on the turf as he cantered off, and Lara's boy, in his loose shirt and shabby clothes, and his bare feet hanging stirrupless on each side of the pony, disappeared like a wraith. There was a week to wait before he would come with ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... feet in the witchery of its rhythm and set them moving upon the sand-covered floor of the Temple. Yet there was no smile on her lips as, moved by whatever it is that causes us to do strange things in the East, she danced like a wraith or a sylph, or a leaf in the wind, in and out of the columns and out into the light of the moon, and through the granite door onto the terrace where once had been planted the incense trees which had come with the spoil from Punt to perfume the air ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... mother, perhaps the doubt of me, the burden of the whole disastrous secret was too much. And it was my fault, Willits—all my fault!" He turned to the window to hide his working face. "Do you wonder," he added softly, "that her poor little wraith comes back to ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... back to the entrance way again. At last with a cautious glance around, a pause to rub a match skilfully over the woolen cloak, and to light a fuse in a hidden corner, he vanished out upon the street like the passing of a wraith, and ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked by shames ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... the sky-line with intent eyes. Teether was busily engaged in drawing by degrees his own pink toes up to his rosy lips in an effort to get his foot into his mouth, an ambition that sways most mortals from their seventh to tenth month. A thin wraith of Miss Alford's personality had been drifting through the singer lady's consciousness for some days, but she was positively stunned at this sudden materialization. There come moments in the lives of most women when they get glimpses into ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... and I saw all the northern sky glow red as glows the light of a burning town on the low clouds when the host that has fired it looks back on its work. And plain and clear in the silver moonlight against the crimson sky sat the wraith of a king, throned on the sand at the very water's edge, and round him stood shadowy ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... Of this earthly air, And my wraith asks: Why, Since these calm lie, Are not Five ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... when—Ah, faded, spectral sheet, Wraith of long-perished wrong and time, Forbear! the spirit starts to meet The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... tears in her eyes and the wraith of a smile on her lips. A little drop escaped and she dashed it away and her smile ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... the Psychical Society, where they exist in scores, and are technically styled "collective hallucinations." But neither a jury, nor a judge, perhaps, would accept the testimony of experts in Psychical Research if offered in a criminal trial, nor acquit a wraith. ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... Master Cilley," coaxed Becky, her hands on her hips and the soup ladle she still held standing out at right angles, "you will fade away into a wraith, my good man, so you will! Do you not eat a morsel nor a mouthful, and die in the night, how shall I bear to live with my conscience thereafter, tell ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... hope Mrs. HINKSON will make a novel about these two admirable people some day soon. Denys makes his own and his patron's fortune and I am sure lives happily ever after with Dawn, who is the palest wraith of a girl, owing to the shameful neglect of her author, who is too busy putting large sums of money into the pockets of the principal puppets. Indeed, for a West Coast of Ireland story a demoralising amount of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... he might lie with hands clinched across his brow to shut out the wraith of it that haunted him; though he might set his course by the faith that was in him, and put away the hope of the world—whose hope is love—the truth was there, staring, staring at him out of Eileen ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... his title-page, together with quotations at the heads of chapters, belongs to a past fashion. Fanshawe and Butler are powerful conceptions, but they are so purely embodiments of passion as to assume an air of unreality. Butler is like an evil wraith, and Fanshawe is as evanescent as a sad cloud in the sky, touched with the first pale light of morning. Fanshawe, with his pure heart and high resolves, represents that constant aspiration toward lofty moral truth which marked Hawthorne's own mind, and Butler is a crude example of the sinful ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... it pleaseth him? I forbid not the banns," replied Priscilla, the dim wraith of her old smile passing ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... beside him. Youth saved her face from being drawn as his, but the heat and horror had begun to undermine youth's powers of resistance. She looked more beautiful than ever, but no law lays down that a wraith shall be unlovely. She had tried the personal appeal with him a hundred times, and argument a thousand; now, she used both in a concentrated, earnest effort to prevail over his stubborn will. Her will was as strong as his, and yielded place to nothing but her sense of loyalty. There were ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... dwarf, urchin; Puck, Robin Goodfellow; leprechaun, Cluricaune^, troll, dwerger^, sprite, ouphe^, bad fairy, nix, nixie, pigwidgeon^, will-o'-the wisp. [Supernatural appearance] ghost, revenant, specter, apparition, spirit, shade, shadow, vision; hobglobin, goblin, orc; wraith, spook, boggart^, banshee, loup-garou [Fr.], lemures^; evil eye. merman, mermaid, merfolk^; siren; satyr, faun; manito^, manitou, manitu. possession, demonic possession, diabolic possession; insanity &c 503. [in jest, in science] Maxwell's demon. [person possessed ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... bold as he was by nature, in vain endeavoured to banish from his mind the gloomy impression which the startling interview with Cesarini had bequeathed. The face, the voice of the maniac, haunted him, as the shape of the warning wraith haunts the mountaineer. He returned at once to his hotel, unable for some hours to collect himself sufficiently to pay his customary visit to Miss Cameron. Inly resolving not to hazard a second meeting with the Italian during the ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... myself away to you. I walked beside you, a little wraith of love, through the silent night streets of your great city,—but you did not know me. There was no sky above us, only a hollow blackness, and the snow lay new and white upon the pavements; but ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... and with gentle artfulness lured him into reminiscences of his past campaigns. She was very frail to-day, and in her white robe, and with her large eyes which seemed to have outgrown her face, she looked like the wraith of a woman rather than a ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... have graced. And led its functions like a queen; Instead, her life has run to waste, The wraith of what it might ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... huge shadow floated out of the dark chaos and passed so close over the heads of Neewa and Miki that they heard the menacing purr of giant wings. As the wraith-like creature disappeared there came back to them a hiss and the grating snap of a powerful beak. It sent a shiver through Miki. The instinct that had been fighting to rouse itself within him flared up like a powder-flash. ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... I must get you out of this." In the darkness his face glowed wraith-like. Then she felt his hand ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... blame, blessing or banning are equally powerless to reach the unhearing ear or to agitate the unbeating heart. And when one of our small selves passes out of life, we hear no more the voice of censure or of praise, of love or of hate. Is it worth while to toil for the 'hollow wraith of dying fame,' or even for the clasp of loving hands which have to be loosened so surely ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... such thing as repose. We are always up and doing with a mind for any adventure. We act, strive, think, suffer and are glad to no purpose. We leave outside the portals of Sleep all troublesome incredulities and vexatious speculations as to probability. I float wraith-like upon clouds in and out among the winds, without the faintest notion that I am doing anything unusual. In Dreamland I find little that is altogether strange or wholly new to my experience. No matter what happens, I am not astonished, however ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... fresh experience. The sun sinks out of sight before the sultry atmosphere begins to cool. The weird "gecko," a large lizard which foretells rain, screams "Becky! Becky!" in the garden shadows, and a cry of "Toko! Toko!" echoes from another unseen speaker of a mysterious language, while wraith-like forms of his tiny brethren make moving patterns on the white columns, as the hungry little reptiles hunt ceaselessly for the mosquitos which form their staple diet. Lashing rain and deafening thunder at length ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... a light knock at the door. The face of the Grey One was like a wraith, motionless and staring at him. Vina Nettleton looked up from her soiled hands, which had streaked her face.... She moved suddenly to the door, but did ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... so black that the rising ground was exaggerated into a hill; against it, Helen's figure was like a wraith, yet Zebedee was acutely conscious of her slim solidity. He was also half afraid of her, and he had an easily controlled desire to run from the delight she gave him, a delight which hurt and reminded him ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... the way, as if instinctively, took note of this one. His nerves crisped at the noiseless slide of that form, as it stalked on from lamp to lamp, keeping pace with his own. He felt a sort of awe, as if he had beheld the wraith of himself; and even as he glanced suspiciously at the stranger, the stranger glanced at him. He was inexpressibly relieved when the figure turned ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... author, a sardonic wraith, snickering somewhat sadly over the fact. His shade, wherever it suffers, is favoured in these days by many such consolations, some of them of much greater horsepower. Think of the facts and arguments, even the underlying theories and attitudes, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... phenomenon in the world. Even on his physical side he is not a piece of dead matter, but is instinct through and through with spirit. And on his psychical side he is not an unsubstantial wraith, but a being inconceivable apart from outward embodiment. Perhaps the most general term which we may adopt is psyche or Soul—the living self or vital and animating principle which is at once the seat of all bodily sensation and the source ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... which my grief discovered, I laid dead Love with a passionate kiss, And over those soundless depths has hovered The sweet, sad wraith of my vanished bliss. ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... shell; but forth as light As the first sigh of dawn her spirit took flight Across the dusky plain to where fires gleamed And muffled guards stood sentry; and it streamed Within the hut, and hovered like a wraith, A presence felt, not seen, as when gray Death Seems to the dying man a bedside guest, But to the watchers cannot be exprest. So hovered Helen in a dream, and yearned Over the sleeper as he moaned and turned, ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... declined to make positive oath, that she had seen Meg Merrilies—at least a woman of her remarkable size and appearance—start suddenly out of a thicket; she said she had called to her by name, but, as the figure turned from her and made no answer, she was uncertain if it were the gipsy or her wraith, and was afraid to go nearer to one who was always reckoned, in the vulgar phrase, 'no canny.' This vague story received some corroboration from the circumstance of a fire being that evening found in the gipsy's deserted cottage. To this fact Ellangowan and his gardener bore evidence. Yet it seemed ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the storm grew loud apace, The water-wraith was shrieking; And in the scowl of heaven each face Grew dark ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... asked. Again he had forgotten the lady. But from one of memory's pantries her wraith peered out. "Ah, yes, of course! Well, we can stop by for it and you can run it over in the country to-night. You remember that you are to dine with me, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... I shall dance like a wraith. It seems almost a sacrilege to bob around and prattle in such surroundings. How silly their sainted ghosts ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... very soon, unless I get married, or commit a murder or some such enormity," rejoined Helwyse, his long mustache curling to, his smile. They shook hands,—the vigorous young god of the sun and the faded old wraith of Brahmanism,—with a friendly ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... sat motionless, evidently lost in reverie, and momentarily, at least, unconscious of the embarrassing predicament which was hers. So complete, indeed, seemed her abstraction that Maitland caught himself questioning the reality of her.... And well might she have seemed to him a pale little wraith of the night, the shimmer of grey that she made against the shimmer of light on the water,—a shape almost transparent, slight, and unsubstantial—seeming to contemplate, and as ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... wandered through the hills, his unhurt right hand began crying out for action and a brush to nurse. As he watched, day after day, the unveiling of the monumental hills, and the transitions from hazy wraith-like whispers of hues, to strong, flaring riot of color, this fret of restlessness became actual pain. He was wasting wonderful opportunity and the creative instinct ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... passed in pursuit of her—an elderly man in a black alpaca jacket that billowed. I saw that she had left a trail of little white things on the asphalt. I watched the efforts of the agonised short fat man to overtake her as she swept wraith-like away to the distant end of the terrace. What was the matter? What had made her so spectacularly angry with him? The three or four waiters of the cafe' were exchanging cynical smiles and shrugs, as waiters will. I tried to feel cynical, ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... of the big, deep chair, Molly came walking hesitatingly towards him. Like a little wraith miraculously tinted with bronze and blue she stopped and faced ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... himself and said— 'I know that Odin the Great is dead; Sure is the triumph of our Faith, This one-eyed stranger was his wraith.' Dead rides Sir Morten ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... 'tis an ass that—ha! O sweet vision for eyes human or divine! Do I see thee in very truth, thou damsel of disobedience, dear dame of discord, sweet, witching, wilful lady—is it thou in very truth, most loved daughter, or wraith conjured of thy magic and ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... caught sight of the white form fleeing from him like the very wraith it would have him believe it. Then he lost it again; and when he reached the spot where it disappeared, he fell headlong, his feet tangled in some white stuff. He swore audibly, picked himself ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... went vaguely off in the direction of the billiard-room. It was light and warm there, though the place was empty, and he decided upon a cigar as a proximate or immediate solution. He sat smoking before the fire till the tobacco's substance had half turned into a wraith of ash, and not really thinking of anything very definitely, except the question whether he should be able to sleep after he went to bed, when he heard a creeping step on the floor. He turned quickly, with a certain expectance in his nerves, and saw nothing more ghostly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... I wanted to cross the threshold over which he walked so often, to see the noise-proof room in which he used to write, to look at the chimney-place down which the soot came, to sit where he used to sit and smoke his pipe, and to conjure up his wraith to look in once more upon his old deserted dwelling. ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... he reached home safely at last. One of the most popular modern books of travel—Eothen—is a poem which gives us the very atmosphere and odor of the Orient, but nothing more; and the author floats before our vision in so dim and wraith-like a manner, that many readers have doubted whether the work was founded on actual experience. On the other hand, those old narratives, of which Robinson Crusoe is the ideal type, bear unmistakable stains of the soil on every page. You not only feel the vital personality of the traveler, but ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... mother's, and when the stranger, with the fatal resemblance to her absent son, presented himself before her in that strange way, at that strange hour, in that strange place, the fear had leaped to her heart that it was his wraith warning her of his death, and she ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... clouds, now, Marcella, like a wraith. Some day ye'll come down to airth. And it'll be with sic' a bang that ye'll find ye're very solid." She had not ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... depths. They would rise to a certain height, then suddenly fall, and rise again, just like a juggler's balls. Sometimes the breathing from below sucked the whole swarm right down, but it rose up again, veering hither and thither like a dancing wraith in the draught from the tunnel-like entry. The little girls would gaze at it, lift their petticoats, and take a few graceful steps. Olsen's Elvira had learned her first dance-steps here, and now she was dancing respectable citizens into the poor-house. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... stood there patient and unmoved, like one who has all time at its disposal, playing with the blue beads. I heard them tinkle against each other, which proves that it was human, for how could a wraith cause beads to tinkle, although it is true that Christmas-story ghosts are said to clank their chains. Her eyes roved idly and without interest over the semi-circle of terrified men before her. Then by degrees they fixed themselves ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... I exchanged glances. This was close to an assertion of downright dishonesty. At that moment Huroki stole in on padded feet, as noiseless as a wraith. ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... silently passed from one hammock to the other; each rolled a cigarette, and lit it. Paul blew a great smoke ring into the air; his companion blew a lesser one that shot rapidly after the larger halo, and the two were speedily blended in a pretty vapor wraith. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... seasoned with the art of badinage. To use the phrase of the time, she possessed the accomplishments, an antiquated charm now on the point of disappearing, so carefully has it been snubbed under whenever exhibited. The pursuing wraith of the young, it comes to sit, a ghost at every banquet, driving the flower of our youth to unheard-of exertions in search of escape, to dubious diplomacy, to dismal inaction, or to wine; yet time was when they set their hearts on ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... like a mist trailing over the hills. Still, we ought to be able to find in Masonry some trace of Rosicrucian influence, some hint of the lofty wisdom it is said to have added to the order; but no one has yet done so. Did all that high, Hermetic mysticism evaporate entirely, leaving not a wraith behind, going as mysteriously as it came to that far place which ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... words when last we met; My passion I as freely told him! Clasped in his arms, I little thought That I should nevermore behold him! Scarce was he gone, I saw his ghost; It vanished with a shriek of sorrow; Thrice did the water-wraith ascend, And gave ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... had chosen to pause was at the grave of old Patience Goodyear, and from the corner where we stood we could see their faces plainly as they turned and looked at each other with the moonbeams pouring over them. Was it fancy that made her look like a wraith, and he like some handsome demon given to haunting churchyards? Or was it only the sternness of his air, and the shrinking timidity of hers, which made him look so dark ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... sewer system up here; but it flows into South Harvey and the Valley towns, a great open ravine, because you people sitting here who own the property down there won't tax yourselves to enclose those sewers that poison us!" A faint—rather dazed smile ran over the congregation like a wraith of smoke. He felt that the smoke proved that he had struck fire. He went on: "Love, great aspiring love of fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, love stifled by fell circumstance, by cruel events, and love that winces in agony at seeing children and father and brother go down in the muck ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... black sea of Michiganon a vast black wraith; a thing horrible, tremendous, titanic in organic power. It howled, execrated, menaced; missed its aim, and passed. The little swaying house still stood! Under the sheltered log some tiny sparks of fire still burned, omen of the unquenchable hearthstones which the ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... Beverly to be double the length of ordinary miles. Still, she knew, that she could not go far astray if she kept between the railroad and the river, so plucking up her courage she fled through the sleeping town like a wraith. Once beyond it the roads branched and her first doubt had to be settled. Dismounting, she went close to the stone mile post and tried to read the sign. She managed to make out the name, but it might as well have been Greek. She ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... vestibule—locked in—was in the gallery, and there found Fausta, just awake, as she declared, from a comfortable night, reading her morning lesson in the Bible, and sure, she said, that I should soon appear. Nor ghost, nor wraith, had visited her. I spread for her a brown paper tablecloth on the table in the vestibule. I laid out her breakfast for her, called her, and wondered at her toilet. How is it that women always make themselves appear as neat and finished as if there were no conflict, dust, or wrinkle ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... and I were now, to the best of our belief, alone on the island, and a lonesomer spot it would be hard to imagine, or one touched at certain hours with a fairer beauty—a beauty wraith-like and, like a sea-shell, haunted with the marvel of the sea. But we, alas!—or let me speak for myself—were sinful, misguided men, to whom the gleam and glitter of God's making spoke all too seldom, and whose hearts were given to the baser shining of such ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... the light which she always placed in the window. Then the moon shone full upon his face, and Jessie Bain looked at him with eyes that fairly bulged from their sockets. His features were now clearly visible in the bright moonlight. It was Hubert Varrick in the flesh, surely, or his wraith! ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... however, restrain your natural impatience a little longer, until another night has passed. I will, if you please, myself spend some hours in the Grey Room after dark, and learn what the medieval spirits have to tell me. Shall I see the wraith of Prince Djem, think you? Or the ghost of Pinturicchio hovering round his little picture? Or those bygone, cunning workers in plaster who built the ceiling? They will at least talk the language of Tuscany, and I shall be at ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... embittered by the small success attending a vast effort, his moral nature already somewhat deteriorated and touched with the cynicism of experience and partial failure, shall encounter the strange figure of Aprile, the living wraith of a poet who has also failed, who "would love infinitely and be loved," and who in gazing upon the end has neglected all the means of attainment; and from him, or rather by a reflex ray from this Aprile, his own error shall be flashed on the consciousness of the foiled seeker ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... dog, dashing suddenly ahead, stopped at the corner of the shack and growled. So occupied had the herder been with his distracting duties that he had not taken much notice of the shack as he drew nearer to it; but now that the dog raised the alarm he looked and saw a blue wraith of smoke hovering over the roof. His fire-hole, it seemed, was lit. This was not unwelcome news, as any one may imagine who has lived even a few days so utterly alone. But whether the visitor was a stranger or a friend was made ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... reached the gloomy glade where, as Francis had told us, according to popular belief, the wraith of Charlemagne was still seen on the night of St. Hubert's Day galloping along with his ghostly followers of the chase. The rustling of leaves caught our ears; instantly we all lay prone ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... and closed her eyes. In the moonlight which blanched her streaming robe and her loosened hair that, falling to her knees, wrapped her in a mantle of spun gold, she looked a wraith, a creature woven of the mist of the stream below, a Loerelei sleeping upon her rock. Landless, still upon his knee beside her, watched her with a beating heart, while the Susquehannock, leaning upon his gun, bent his darkly impassive looks upon them ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... betraying a reckless impulse which lurked at the bottom of her dismay, to seize the head of d'Alcacer's Man of Fate, press it to her breast once, fling it far away, and vanish herself, vanish out of life like a wraith. The Man of Fate sat silent and bowed, yet with a suggestion of strength in his dejection. "If I don't speak," Mrs. Travers said to herself, with great inward calmness, "I shall burst into tears." She said aloud, "What could have happened? What have you dragged me in here for? Why don't ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... floated out of the dark chaos and passed so close over the heads of Neewa and Miki that they heard the menacing purr of giant wings. As the wraith-like creature disappeared there came back to them a hiss and the grating snap of a powerful beak. It sent a shiver through Miki. The instinct that had been fighting to rouse itself within him flared up like a powder-flash. ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... away from the business district. It required enormous self-control to go slowly. While among the lighted streets the urge to flee at top speed was strong. But he clenched his teeth. A car makes much less noise when barely in motion. He made it drift as silently as a wraith under the trees ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... personally the society of mediums, and in sickness he usually resorted to mental healers, mesmerists, and clairvoyants. Before making investments or embarking in his great railroad ventures, Vanderbilt visited spiritualists; we have one circumstantial account of his summoning the wraith of Jim Fiske to advise him in stock operations. His excessive vanity led him to print his picture on all the Lake Shore bonds; he proposed to New York City the construction in Central Park of a large monument that would ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... said one, "she's the wraith of a ship. When I was a lad I saw such a craft in the Indian seas, and afterward we foundered, and I and the cook's mate alone ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... lost no time. He arrived at the lawyer's house just at the hour of sundown, when the heavy clouds were scattering and the sun sent shafts of golden light to turn the mists overhanging the towers and pinnacles of Rome's palaces and temples into filmy veils. It looked like a wraith-city, hung ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... to a shadow for love of a gap-toothed ogress? No. He goes out into the fairy world, and, sending his ogress-wife to Jericho, becomes desperately enamoured of the elfin princess. There he is, great, ruddy, hairy wretch: there she is, a wraith of a creature made up of thistledown and fountain-bubbles and stars. He stares at her, stretches out his huge paw to grab a fairy, feathery tress of her dark hair. Defensive, she puts up her little hand. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... oh, late beneath the tree stood two! In awe and anguish wondering: "Is it true?" Two that were each most like to some wan wraith: Yet each on each looked with a living faith. And the moon ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... to avoid the wrath of Apollo the Far-darter. Then Apollo set Aineias away from the throng in holy Pergamos where his temple stood. There Leto and Archer Artemis healed him in the mighty sanctuary, and gave him glory; but Apollo of the silver bow made a wraith like unto Aineias' self, and in such armour as his; and over the wraith Trojans and goodly Achaians each hewed the others' bucklers on their breasts, their round shields ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... of the fallen foe, the supposed spectre shook his sword. Full on his face fell the moonlight, a face never to be mistaken. It was the wraith of Ralph de Wilton, who had been sent by Marmion to exile and to death. Thrice over his victim did the grim, ghast spectre shake his blade, but when Marmion, white with terror, prayed for life, the seeming vision dashed his sword into its sheath, sprang lightly ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... a dim white bulk seemed to hover above the ice. It was almost wraith-like in the moonlight. It flitted on like a huge bird, and seemed to ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... golden-haired glory Flits to and fro; She whom I loved—but 'tis just the old story: Dead, long ago. 'Tis but a wraith of love; yet I linger (Thus passion errs), Foolishly kissing the ring on my ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... get you out of this." In the darkness his face glowed wraith-like. Then she felt his hand upon ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... more tempestuous than the craven breeze-possessed deep, And tears that outweigh the salt of the woeful brine, Yet no sleep dream-robbed, or dream-laden, nor even death's pallid peace; But a ceaseless crying over my heart's forsaken valleys Where love like a wraith haunts the empty tombs ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... barbaric. Such ghosts as presume to steal into poetry are amazingly tame, and even elegant, in their speech and deportment. In Mallet's William and Margaret (1759). which was founded on a scrap of an old ballad out of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Margaret's wraith rebukes her false lover in a long and dignified oration. But spirits were shy of appearing in an age when they were more likely to be received with banter than with dread. Dr. Johnson expresses the attitude of his age when, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... a wraith she went, now appearing in the open spaces, now vanishing, beneath the dense gloom of cedar boughs, till she reached a naked, lonely rock which stood almost upon the edge of the gulf. Opposite to this ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... clamored that there was more behind it all than mere witless repetition. John Anderson was smiling at her, too, smiling like a benevolent wraith. She saw that his pile of clay was still untouched, but there was no hint of petulant perplexity in his face, nothing of the terrified impotence which the inactivity of his fingers had always heralded before. He was just smiling—vaguely to ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... floated, swinging like dead leaves on the long swells. The stars came out, the gulls went shoreward for the night, and we were as alone as if on the sea. The woman's slender figure, wrapped in her white cloak, became a silent, shining wraith. She was within touch of my hand, yet unreachably remote. I lost my glib speech. The gray loneliness that one feels in a crowd came over me. If I had been alone with my men, I should have felt well accompanied, master of my craft, and in tune with my condition. It ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... written in deep dejection of spirit, and mentioned that he feared a judgment had come upon him for wishing to appear as a Scotchman on Scottish soil, as he had one moonlight night shortly after his arrival seen his 'wraith'. He evidently alluded to the fact that before his departure he had procured for himself a Highland costume similar to that which we had the honour to supply to you, with which, as perhaps you will remember, ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... that his eyes must be playing him some curious trick, for the figure at which he was staring remained strangely still and motionless. Was it possible that his mind, dwelling constantly on Flossy, had evoked her wraith? But, no, looking up in startled silence at the still figure standing before him, he realized that not so would memory have conjured up the pretty, bright little woman of whom he had once been proud. Flossy still looked pretty, but she was thin and pale, and there were ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... slightest interest." Nevertheless, it was generally admitted that Ranson had saved the post. He had been ubiquitous. He had been seen galloping into the advancing flames like a stampeded colt, he had reappeared like a wraith in columns of black, whirling smoke, at the same moment his voice issued orders from twenty places. One instant he was visible beating back the fire with a wet blanket, waving it above him jubilantly, like a substitute at the Army-Navy game when his side scores, and the next staggering ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... own shadow. She avoided further reference to the subject broached by Le Gardeur by saying,—"It was I whom Heloise saw pass into the church. I never explained the mystery to her, and she is not sure yet whether it was my wraith or myself who gave her that fright on St. John's eve. But I claimed her heart as one authorized to take it, and if I could not marry her myself I claimed the right to give her to whomsoever I pleased, and I gave her to you, Le Gardeur, but you would not ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... trailing over the hills. Still, we ought to be able to find in Masonry some trace of Rosicrucian influence, some hint of the lofty wisdom it is said to have added to the order; but no one has yet done so. Did all that high, Hermetic mysticism evaporate entirely, leaving not a wraith behind, going as mysteriously as it came to that far place ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... almost made out the bulk of figures near the fire when from the hedge beside the road there came sounds of tinkling bells and a small wraith in red and blue rose like a Phoenix from the dust and confronted him with ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... nothing loath. Either he was not the bravest in the party, or else he had the keenest appreciation of the odds against an exposed position. In a very few minutes the dory was a mere gray wraith on the water, but there it hung. Evidently the rower was overruled by others less cautious, or of the certain conviction that at the distance the yacht was a better ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... multitudes crowding the banks, distant, dreamlike beneath the yellow storm-light. Of Tintoret's Christ before Pilate, of that figure of the Saviour, long, straight, wrapped in white and luminous like his own wraith, I have spoken already. But I must speak of the S. Rocco Christ in the Garden, as imaginative as anything by Rembrandt, and infinitely more beautiful. The moonlight tips the draperies of the three sleeping apostles, gigantic, solemn. Above, among the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... house to water the plants there, and then he stole into the house and up stairs, and threw himself upon the bed. And outside he still heard Sheila singing lightly to herself as she went about her ordinary duties, little thinking in how strange and wild a drama her wraith had that night ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... eldritch voices crying the nature and remarkable qualities of the wares within. Every hand-cart carried a flaring naphtha-lamp, and the glare of these innumerable torches created strong lights and flickering shadows which would have gladdened the heart of Rembrandt were his artistic wraith permitted to roam the by-ways of a city which, perhaps, he never heard of, even in its early Dutch guise as ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... the story saith, Out of the night came the patient wraith, He might not speak, and he could not stir A hair of the Baron's minniver—- Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin, He roved the castle to seek his kin. And oh,'twas a piteous thing to see The dumb ghost follow ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... wolf there—close behind me; it does not move; it glares at me with its two red eyes. It is my wraith,[1], Sigurd! Three times has it appeared to me; that bodes that I ...
— The Vikings of Helgeland - The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. • Henrik Ibsen
... indescribable style that only an artist could give. But the white ones are marvels. One has deep heliotrope ribbons, and another crapy material seems almost alive. There are plain mulls, with wide hems, there are gloves and sashes and wraith-like plaitings of tulle; a pretty, dainty bonnet and a black chip hat, simple and graceful. Madame Vauban has certainly taken into account youth, bridehood, and the husband's wishes. Plain they are, perhaps their chief beauty lies in their not being overloaded with ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... that she did not exist, and the little wraith floated back to Paris from which she had come, suddenly, on days when she had written him certain letters which had ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... Goblin and witch!" Nay, Heber dear, Before you touch my charter, hear; Though Leyden aids, alas! no more, My cause with many-languaged lore, This may I say:- in realms of death Ulysses meets Alcides' WRAITH; AEneas, upon Thracia's shore, The ghost of murdered Polydore; For omens, we in Livy cross, At every turn, locutus Bos. As grave and duly speaks that ox, As if he told the price of stocks Or held ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... I frightful then? I live, though they call it death; I am only cold! Say dear again." But scarce could he heave a breath; Over a dank and steaming fen He floated astray from the world of men, A lost, half-conscious wraith. ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... them. And therfor, in the first place, we exhort and warne all the inhabitants of the land, to searche out ther iniquities, and to be deeplie humbled before the Lord, that he may turn away his wraith from us. The Lord hath wounded us and chasteissed us sore, wiche sayes that our iniquities are muche, and that our sins are increessed. It concerneth the King to mourne for all the grivous provocations of his father's housse, and for all his ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... woman had been killed by falling down the steep cellar stairs, and the spot on the left side where she was found unconscious and bleeding had been pointed out to me. There, I heard it again! Was it the wraith of the aged dame or the cries of that unfortunate creature? Hush! Ellen ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... As for her eyes, the customary similes of the court poets were gigantic onyxes or ebony highly polished and wet with May dew. These eyes were too big for her little face: they made of her a tiny and desirous wraith which nervously endured each incident of life, like a foreigner uneasily acquiescent to ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... rolled a cigarette, and lit it. Paul blew a great smoke ring into the air; his companion blew a lesser one that shot rapidly after the larger halo, and the two were speedily blended in a pretty vapor wraith. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... over the gap, floundered in the mud . . . still veiled. The unexpectedness of his coming was the only thing, you understand, that saved him from being at once dispatched with krisses and flung into the river. They had him, but it was like getting hold of an apparition, a wraith, a portent. What did it mean? What to do with it? Was it too late to conciliate him? Hadn't he better be killed without more delay? But what would happen then? Wretched old Allang went nearly mad with apprehension and through the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... questioned she laughed darkly, as was her fashion, and said that she knew nothing of it, never having seen the face of the child's father, who rose out of the sea at night. And for this cause some thought him to have been a wizard or the wraith of her dead husband; but others said that Groa lied, as many women have done on such matters. But of all this talk the child alone remained and she was ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... eyes fixed on this, my first view of Sunny Spain, if there had not been excited talk of another land looming on the starboard side. Looking quickly that way, I made out the grey wraith of a continent, and realised that, for the first time, Dark Africa had crept, with becomingly mysterious silence, into my range ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... the hills, his unhurt right hand began crying out for action and a brush to nurse. As he watched, day after day, the unveiling of the monumental hills, and the transitions from hazy wraith-like whispers of hues, to strong, flaring riot of color, this fret of restlessness became actual pain. He was wasting wonderful opportunity and the creative ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... afterwards, according to the legend, dug, or rather scooped, for himself a cave out of the cliff-side with no better tools than his own finger-nails, which he never cut after the unfortunate lady's foul murder. The legend went on further to state that the white wraith of the innocent victim might be seen, on a certain night in the year, rising out of the misty spray of the waterfall: but as nobody except one very weak-witted female Jocelyn had ever seen the vision, ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... silent, and Radmore began to have a strange, uncanny feeling that none of them could see him, that he was a wraith, projected out of the past into the present. It was a novel and most disconcerting sensation. But no one glancing at his keen face, now illumined with a half humorous expression of interest, would have guessed the mixed and painful ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... boarded a bus which dropped him at Jarviston, Minnesota, at two a.m. He thrust his hands into his pockets, partly like a lonesome tramp, partly like some carefree immortal, and partly like a mixed-up wraith who didn't quite know who or what he was, or where ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... on an over-turned boat, her chin in her hands, staring out to sea. The soft tide of the bay lapped almost at her feet, and the draperies of her white gown melted hazily into the sands. She looked like a wraith, a despondent phantom of the sea, although the adjective is redundant. Nobody ever thinks of a cheerful phantom. Strangely enough, considering her evident sadness, she was whistling softly to herself, over and over, some dreary little minor air that sounded like a Bohemian dirge. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... waves that leaped at him in wrath To find Mabel Lee, like a wraith, in his path. The rose from her cheek had departed in fear; The tip of her eyelash was gemmed with a tear. The rude winds had disarranged mantle and dress, And she clung with both hands to her hat in distress. "I am frightened," ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... system up here; but it flows into South Harvey and the Valley towns, a great open ravine, because you people sitting here who own the property down there won't tax yourselves to enclose those sewers that poison us!" A faint—rather dazed smile ran over the congregation like a wraith of smoke. He felt that the smoke proved that he had struck fire. He went on: "Love, great aspiring love of fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, love stifled by fell circumstance, by cruel events, and love that winces in agony at seeing children ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... wreathes stern Coolin like a cloud, The water-wraith is shrieking loud, And blue eyes gush with tears that burn, For thee—who shall no more return! Macrimmon shall no more return, Oh never, never more return! Earth, wrapt in doomsday flames, shall burn, Before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... a mendis for thy synne. The Father of Heaven is wraith wyth thee. Quhair is thy rychteousnes, goodnes, and satisfactioun? Thou art bound and obligat unto me, [to] the devill, and ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... side of the chamber, silently as the wraith of a disembodied soul, the swift jungle creature moved from the path of the charging Titan that, guided solely in the semi-darkness by its keen ears, bore down upon the spot toward which Tarzan's noisy entrance into its lair had attracted it. Along ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Painfully distinct, the wraith of Josephine Childe rose up before me, pale and accusing. Fragments of the letter which had offered me the Sealyham re-wrote themselves upon my brain.... It nearly breaks my heart to say so, but I've got to part with ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... themselves into the slumbers of sportsmen who have not treated them as they deserved. I have suffered from it myself. It was only last week that, having said something derogatory to the dignity of my second gun, I woke with a start at two o'clock in the morning, and found its wraith going through the most horrible antics in a patch of moonlight on my bed-room floor. I shot with that gun on the following day, and missed nearly everything I shot at. Could there be a more convincing proof? Take my advice, therefore, and abstain ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... Jock, I often think I was born like the Marquis, under an unlucky star, and that all my life things will go ill with me, and with my cause. I dinna think that I'll ever see old age, and I doubt whether I'll leave an heir to succeed me. I dreamed one nicht that the wraith of our house stood beside my bed and said, 'Ye'll be cursed in love and cursed in war, and die a bloody death at the hand of traitors whom ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... steps into gardens stretching along beside the river—gardens blazing with flowers and sweet with blossomed fruit trees. It was so unexpected, so splendidly beautiful, it surpassed a dream of fairy-land. We passed on, saw a shadowy lady among the flowers on the lawn, knew it was the wraith of the unhappy and guilty Dearvorgill. Stole out of the farther gate—at least I did— feeling naughty and intrusive. Found ourselves in the clean little town of Drumahaire, a pretty little village, straggled over ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... 1788 peaceful electioneering went on throughout the country. Among the last acts of that thin wraith, the Continental Congress, was a decree that Presidential Electors should be chosen on the first Wednesday of January, 1789; that they should vote for President on the first Wednesday in February, and that the new Congress should meet on the ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... saying, was a much more comfortable ambush than the recess of the door. Nilo merely felt the shaking the gale now and then gave the house. So, too, he bade welcome to the glare in the sky for the flushing it transmitted to the court. Only a wraith could have come from or gone into ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... was sitting reading in the drawing-room, when the door opened, the servant pronounced a name which thrilled her with surprise, and, looking up, she beheld Ned Talbot standing before her,— Ned Talbot, or the wraith of Ned, for so pale did he appear, so worn and haggard, that it needed no words to tell the ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... momentarily, at least, unconscious of the embarrassing predicament which was hers. So complete, indeed, seemed her abstraction that Maitland caught himself questioning the reality of her.... And well might she have seemed to him a pale little wraith of the night, the shimmer of grey that she made against the shimmer of light on the water,—a shape almost transparent, slight, and unsubstantial—seeming to contemplate, and as still as ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... stream, flowing between thinly-inhabited banks, were personified in the beliefs of the people by a frightful goblin, that took a malignant delight in luring into its pools, or overpowering in its fords, the benighted traveller. Its goblin, the "water-wraith," used to appear as a tall woman dressed in green, but distinguished chiefly by her withered, meagre countenance, ever distorted by a malignant scowl. I knew all the various fords—always dangerous ones—where of old she used to start, it was said, out of the river, before the terrified traveller, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... it might have been said of him that he was seeking the realization of an ideal, yet to one's amazement our very ideals change at times and leave us floundering in the dark. What is an ideal, anyhow? A wraith, a mist, a perfume in the wind, a dream of fair water. The soul-yearning of a girl like Antoinette Nowak was a little too strained for him. It was too ardent, too clinging, and he had gradually extricated himself, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... of that mist wraith which on a cloudless day stretched across some mountain's breast, lies lightly upon the air, with diaphanous ends coming out of and going into nothingness; for in just such manner does the music fall across an ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... A hush and a silence then; The dancers rest in their pleasure quest, And lo! I am old again. Old and alone in my chamber, While the night wears wearily on, And the pallid wraith of a broken faith— Keeps watch ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... stones, for bread; Lest, as you look one eighth of an inch beneath The yellow skin of death, You dream yourselves discoverers of the skull That old memento mori of our faith; Lest it be you who hunt a flying wraith Through this dissolving stuff of hill and cloud; Lest it be you, who, at the last, annul Your covenant with your kind; Lest it be you who darken heart and mind, Sell the strong soul in bondage to a dream, And fetter us once ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... had thought about her intensely for a long time, the picture would not come at all or come with tantalizing incompleteness, apparently because he wanted it to be whole so much—all he could see would be a wraith of Nancy, wooden as a formal photograph, with none of her silences or mockeries about her till he felt like a painter who has somehow let the devil into his paintbox so that each stroke he makes goes a little fatally out of true from the vision in his ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... here again very soon, unless I get married, or commit a murder or some such enormity," rejoined Helwyse, his long mustache curling to, his smile. They shook hands,—the vigorous young god of the sun and the faded old wraith of Brahmanism,—with a friendly ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... away from Rome for a few days, and hence the delay in answering your charming message. Don't trouble a moment about the dead-and-buried nightmare. If the story is true, so much the better. R. R. is dead, thank God, and her unhappy wraith will haunt your path no more. But if Dr. Roselli knew nothing about David Rossi, how comes it that David Rossi knows so much about Dr. Roselli? It looks like another clue. Thanks again. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... none of him! The fair Griselda! Not alone by day, With this most solid earth beneath his feet, But in the weird and unsubstantial sphere Of slumber did her beauty hold him thrall. Herself of late he saw not; 't was a wraith He worshipped, a vain shadow. Thus he pined From dawn to dusk, and then from dusk to dawn, Of that miraculous infection caught From any-colored eyes, so they be sweet. Strange that a man should let a maid's slim foot Stamp on his happiness ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... It was still as death. And in this hushed blackness—lightened only by a pale streak in the north and east that was the reflection of snowy mountain crests standing stark against the sky line—this smoky wraith crept along the valley floor. No red glow greeted Hollister's sight. There was nothing but the smell of burning wood, that acrid, warm, heavy odor of smoke, the invisible herald of fire. It might be over the next ridge. It might be in ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... auld wife cam till her braith, And she thocht the Bible micht ward aif scaith; Be it benshee, bogle, ghaist, or wraith— But ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... going to die, and they did their best to vindicate that belief. Even those that were well were sure that it was only a mater of days when the sickness would catch them and carry them off. And yet, believing this with absolute conviction, they somehow lacked the nerve to rush the frail wraith of a man with the white skin and escape from the charnel house by the whale-boats. They chose the lingering death they were sure awaited them, rather than the immediate death they were very sure would pounce upon them if they went up against the master. That he never slept, they knew. That ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... arms, but this wraith of the mother, he remembered, frightened the child, who clung ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the Girl in the light of the blazing logs. Why? His heart trembled. He lifted his eyes to the grayish film of smoke rising between him and the balsam-covered tent, and slowly he saw another face take form, framed in that wraith-like mist of smoke—the face of a golden goddess, laughing at him, taunting him. Laughing—laughing!... He forced his gaze from it with a shudder. Again he looked at the picture of the Girl in his hand. "She ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... smiting the face of the cliff, booming through the low-mouthed caves, curling its great green curls and combing them out to frothing ringlets along the strips of beach, winding itself about the rock of Conca in a heavily gleaming sheet and whirling its wraith of foam to heaven, the ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... at her appearance. White as a bone, her beautiful violet eyes full of haunting fear; her hair, torn down by the wind and flickering in long black strands about her face, far below her waist, she looked like a wraith of the storm. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... psychological effect of what was going on secretly, in his relations to girls and women. In a word, these relations were sentimental only. He often imagined himself in love; but it was imagination only. He was in love with a wraith, not a girl of flesh and blood. He hesitated to regard in any sexual way any girl of whom he had a high opinion; sexual desire and 'love' seemed for him to inhabit different worlds and that it would be a pollution to bring them together. In hours of relaxation from ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... ghost is more terrible far than the ghosts Of many more famous than he— Of many more gory than he— And neither visits to foreign coasts, Nor tonics, can ever set free Two well-known Profs from the haunting wraith Of the injured ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... father, thoughtfully; "but the thing, you see, was in the shape of a man—a man lying at full length as if he were dead, and indeed in his grave: he might take it for his wraith—an ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... minaret of faithful cloud A wraith-muezzin of the sunset cried Over the sea that swung with sultan pride, "Allah is Beauty, there is none beside! Allah is Beauty, not to be denied By Death or ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... there at the sluice gate, with his arm about her, and herself willingly nestling against him, trembling now and again; looking out at the sheeny surface of the slow flowing stream from which, in the imperceptible night breeze, stole away wraith after wraith of water mist to float and lose themselves ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... against my ribs from the exertion of my efforts to release myself from the anaesthesis which had held me. My breath was coming in quick, short gasps, cold sweat stood out from every pore of my body, and the ancient experiment of pinching revealed the fact that I was anything other than a wraith. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his words when last we met; My passion I as freely told him; Clasp'd in his arms, I little thought That I should never more behold him! Scarce was he gone, I saw his ghost; It vanish'd with a shriek of sorrow; Thrice did the water-wraith ascend, And gave ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... This wraith, brought into being by the gathering blackness in the gulches and crevices of the mountains, filled the hearts of the natives ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... of Peters, which had much to do with their willingness to 'speed the parting guest.' It seems that Pym for months after the death of Lilama was in an extremely morbid state of mind. He spent most of his time with Masusaelili, who allowed him to see Lilama's apparition or wraith many times. The aged mystic explained to Pym the scientific modus operandi of the production, so that he was in no way deceived into thinking that he met Lilama in person; but we may presume that, as it is to each of us some gratification to look at ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... and the tall trees below rustled weirdly in the night breeze and the rush of the river over the weir rose and fell as is the wont of falling water in the silence of the night, I looked in vain for the wraith of the hapless maiden of the heath and finally gave up ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... with its precious store of scenes. As they trooped silently down to the house and to their beds, they felt something of the magnitude of life, something of the mystery. Behind them, treading noiselessly in her beaded deerskin moccasins, Annie-Many-Ponies followed like a houseless wraith of the plains, the little ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... lived, but I saw nothing more than at the first. I wanted to cross the threshold over which he walked so often, to see the noise-proof room in which he used to write, to look at the chimney-place down which the soot came, to sit where he used to sit and smoke his pipe, and to conjure up his wraith to look in once more upon his old deserted dwelling. That vision ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... musicians, fiddles and guitars fairly leaped to position, and in a moment Rezanov enjoyed the novel delusion of encircling a girl's floating wraith. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... well have graced. And led its functions like a queen; Instead, her life has run to waste, The wraith of what it might ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... serried squadrons in the city, while he scatters them tenuously in the suburbs; so that your morning train may bear you from twilight to darkness. But to-day the enemy's manoeuvring was more monotonous. From Bow even unto Hammersmith there draggled a dull, wretched vapour, like the wraith of an impecunious suicide come into a fortune immediately after the fatal deed. The barometers and thermometers had sympathetically shared its depression, and their spirits (when they had any) were low. The cold cut ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... floating accompaniment, she sang with a swift, impetuous grace, and in a sweet, yet thrilling voice, the Moth Song. The shrill music and murmur from the parlors burst all at once in muffled volume upon the melody, and, turning, they both saw Marguerite standing in the doorway, like an angry wraith, and flitting back again. Mrs. Purcell laughed, but took up the thread of her song again where it was broken, and carried it through to the end. Then Mr. Raleigh tossed the gondel-lied aside, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... who was the fatal cause of it all; and the Baroness Bonnar, who made her cat's-paw of him; and Ruffiano, whom the two betrayed between them; and then there are left the count, and Miss Rossano, and the faithful Hinge. Then there is the ghost of poor Constance Pleyel, who came like a wraith out of the past and vanished again into the darkness; then there is myself for the centre of the story, whether I like it or not. Here are now my dramatis persono before me. The stage of my mind is crowded with auxiliaries, but I dare scarcely ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... resemblance to her father, that was all. Perhaps it was only a waxen image she saw, or a wraith in that long dream of hers, of which she could not quite remember the beginning. She knew that she was nothing to the image, and that it was nothing to her. While her lips repeated the grand dirge of the King-poet in Saint Jerome's noble old Latin words, her thoughts followed broken threads, ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... breezes. Maddened by this obstruction which hung, veil-like, over her bovine lineaments, she gave a twist of her Texas horns, a tug, and the surplice was released, but from the line only; it twined itself like a white wraith about the horns. ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... can persuade myself Whether to laugh or pull a solemn face At seeing you. It is preposterous! I thought that you were dead—a myth—a wraith. ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... zest, since we know in advance that he reached home safely at last. One of the most popular modern books of travel—Eothen—is a poem which gives us the very atmosphere and odor of the Orient, but nothing more; and the author floats before our vision in so dim and wraith-like a manner, that many readers have doubted whether the work was founded on actual experience. On the other hand, those old narratives, of which Robinson Crusoe is the ideal type, bear unmistakable ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... dreamed myself away to you. I walked beside you, a little wraith of love, through the silent night streets of your great city,—but you did not know me. There was no sky above us, only a hollow blackness, and the snow lay new and white upon the pavements; but ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... forgetting herself in the panic of the moment, screamed. She screamed lustily, twisting her face away from his lips. And as she screamed Lily, as silently as a little wraith, started across the room. She might almost have heard, so straight she came. She might almost have known what was happening, so directly she ran to the spot where Rose-Marie was struggling in the arms of Jim. All at ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... as they always did when their Captain started one of her "sermonettes" as Julie called them; and when she had concluded, Joan said: "In other words, you want us to starve the poor wraith still more by withdrawing any thoughts ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... before. They would be on the platform, pasted over with express labels. He would stand by them, even touch them, examine the padlocks, turn them over, heft them; actually hold within his grasp the film wraith of Beulah Baxter in a terrific installment of The Hazards of Hortense. Those metal containers imprisoned so much of beauty, of daring, of young love striving against adverse currents—held the triumphant fruiting of Miss Baxter's toil and struggle and sacrifice to give the public ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... off on his perceiving that real flesh and blood is before him—Charles Clancy himself, and not his wraith. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... the fountain, when, through the mist, I saw the lonely figure of a girl standing in the shadows of a viny bower. She was toying idly with the swaying tendrils. Her hair was the unfaded gold of youth. Her pale dress of silvery grey, unmarred by any clash of colour, hung closely about a form of wraith-like slenderness. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... off, a bell rang. It was like a summons. The wraith of his own making vanished. He wiped his eyes, now with one fringed sleeve, now with the other, stooped and felt round just inside the little room for his scrap of mattress and the quilt, took them up, softly shut the ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... squirrels chattering and playing. He envied them their health and spirits, their happy, care-free existence. That he should contrast their condition with his was inevitable; and that he should question why they were splendidly vigorous while he was a feeble, dying wraith of a man, was likewise inevitable. His conclusion was the very obvious one, namely, that they lived naturally, while he lived most unnaturally therefore, if he intended to live, ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... cumbersome hulk. Men's voices made the night noisy, and numerous feet scuttled to and fro over the cobbles of the dockyard to where a handful of fishing boats were drawn up, only their masts showing above the landing, with here and there a ghostly wraith of sail. ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... vague hope that time would do something for her before Hugh came in. Perhaps it did; for though she lay in a kind of stupor, and was conscious of no change whatever, she was able when she heard him coming to get up and sit in the chair in an ordinary attitude. But she looked like the wraith of ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... there grew up within her a sort of courage. A girl whose material embodiment has melted away until she has worn the aspect of a wraith is not restored to normal bloom in a week. But what Dowie seemed to see was the lamp of life relighted and the first flickering flame strengthening to a glow. The hands which fitted together on the table in the Tower room delicate puzzles in bits of lawn and paper, did not ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... threw a prodigious summerset, and when they alighted upon the ground, there! in them again, Sprigg saw his semblance. Manitous, temple, amphitheater—all had vanished—a forest of lofty trees appearing instead, through whose glimmer of lights and shadows the boy now saw himself, or rather his wraith running with incredible swiftness, and glancing furtively over his shoulder at every bound, as if death were a present fear behind him; life a ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... on the wharf and climbed into the boat. The water slapped vigorously against its side, for the tide was running, and above, a wraith-like gull occasionally dropped ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... sometimes an odd mixture of all three. Ordinarily there was a suspicion of hardness in her face but there was also upon occasions a kind of winsomeness, an unexpected peeping out of a personality which was like the wraith of the child which she once had been—a suggestion of girlish charm and spontaneity utterly unlike her ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... strength of sinew which made her formidable. All things had been patiently cared for by the man who, selling his patrimony, had labored against wind and tide to the end that he might carry forth with him such an armament as scarce had been the Cygnet's own. Tier on tier rose the Sea Wraith's ordnance; she carried warlike stores of all sorts that might serve for battle by sea or land. If his money could not buy such men as stood ready to ship with Drake and Hawkins, yet in his wild, sin-stained crew he had purchased experience, the maddest bravery, and a lust ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... blissful, of the annihilation of Eugene Brassfield. The mails might take to Mrs. Baggs at Hazelhurst vague letters from Judge Blodgett hinting at clues and traces of Florian, preparatory to the restoration of the lost brother; but Brassfield, never anything but a wraith from the mysterious caves of the subconsciousness, was non-existent for evermore, except through the magic of Le Claire. But Elizabeth Waldron, just home from college, full of the wise unwisdom of Smith and twenty-three, and ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... know that a part of my youth which in some strange way seems to have acquired an individuality, of its own dwells, and will for ever dwell, among these scenes. And I shall never be so ill-advised as to seek it, for the wraith, like a mocking dryad, would flit from tree to tree, as beautiful and as elusive as ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... Siward's straight figure swinging past, silhouetted against the glare of light from the billiard-room. And here she made an effort to efface the vision, shutting her eyes as she rode there in the rain. But clearly against the closed lids she saw the phantoms passing—spectres of dead hours, the wraith of an old happiness masked with ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... this business; it's all he knows. He considers himself the father of this section; and when he sees others rounding up the task that he began, it breaks his poor heart. Why, every summer when the run starts he comes across the marshes and slinks about the Kalvik thickets like a wraith, watching from afar just in order to be near it all. He stands alone and forsaken, harking to the clank of the machinery, every bolt of which he placed; watching his enemies enrich themselves from that gleaming silver army, which he considers his very own. He is shunned like a leper. ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... — Hour of fairy and of wraith, When in many a dim-lit green, 'Neath the stars' prophetic sheen, As the olden legend saith, All the future may be seen, And when — an older story hath — Whate'er in life hath ever been Loveful, hopeful, or of wrath, Cometh back upon our ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... like them maist, Ye're far frae kelpie, wraith, and ghaist, And fairy dames, no unco chaste, And haunted cell. Among a heathen clan ye're ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... go, boy!" roared the priest with a hammering blow across my forearm that brought me to my senses and convinced me she was no wraith. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... to sing and the cover danced cheerily. Tiny clouds of steam trailed off into space, disappearing in the late afternoon sunshine like a wraith at dawn. Madame filled the blue china tea-pot and the ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... burden of the whole disastrous secret was too much. And it was my fault, Willits—all my fault!" He turned to the window to hide his working face. "Do you wonder," he added softly, "that her poor little wraith comes back ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
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