"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a long time ago; a long time the hermit had been sorrowing over her grave! But listen, by the lake of Derryvaragh, on the seas of Moyle, or by Erris and Innishglory, and you will hear still the ghostly echoes of the singing of Danaan swans. Danaan swans: music better than of the world ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... men; and nothing more solemn, affecting, and true is to be found in all literature than his famous two sermons on Retribution, in the first volume of his published works. Spirituality, in the same manner, he called away from its ghostly churchyard haunts, and made it a cheerful angel of God's presence in the house and the shop, where the sense and feeling of God's holiness [362] and love make every duty an act of worship, and every commonest experience an opportunity of divine service. ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... trust your over-sensitive, artistic temperament is not to be so influenced by our ghostly visitor that you will be ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... stone, She sits and reckons up the dead and gone With the last leaves for a love-rosary, Whilst all the wither'd world looks drearily, Like a dim picture of the drowned past In the hush'd mind's mysterious far away, Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last Into that distance, gray upon ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... her face upon a bench, shivering in her clinging garments with a chill which was colder than any the river gave. A ghostly shadow of themselves and the boat and the collapsed figure of the girl began to grow upon the water. More stones in the moist walls showed glistening surfaces as the light mounted. The fact that they had lost their master, that ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... and still, lay her murderous work! There, ghostly white on the ground of the black robe, were the rigid hands, topped by the hideous machinery which was to betray them, if they trembled under the mysterious return ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... her maid to meet her at a certain place not far from the house, exactly at the ghostly and dreadful hour of twelve, began to prepare for ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... of hoarse ghostly laugh came from the bed. "Charles is always right," whispered the sick man. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... would tell a ghostly thing That hides beneath the simple name of Spring; Wild beyond hope the news—the dead return, The shapes that slept, their breath a frozen mist, Ascend from out sarcophagus and urn, Lips that were dust new redden to be kissed, Fires that ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... little importance. The place is pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... The ghostly world streamed by, silent-footed and mist-muffled. It was the hour when children are born and weary people die—the hour of new beginnings and ancient endings, when life and death, like soldiers changing guard, salute at the cross-roads of the new ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... should remove from such company at once, as there is talk about you and the said Sir Christopher Harflete. I purpose, therefore, God permitting me, to ride this day to Cranwell Towers, and if you be there, as your lawful guardian and ghostly father, to command you, being an infant under age, to accompany me thence to the Nunnery of Blossholme. There I have determined, in the exercise of my authority, you shall abide until a fitting husband is found for you, unless, indeed, ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... domesticated painter rejoicing in the return of the season of strong effects. The wonderful church, with its low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and sculpture, looking ghostly in the tempered gloom, and the sea breeze passed between the twin columns of the Piazzetta, the lintels of a door no longer guarded, as gently as if a rich curtain were swaying there. I used sometimes on these occasions to think of the Misses Bordereau and of the pity of their being ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... not behaved according to my wont, and visited the sick even by way of a letter. And by this time I hope you are quite well again, and do not need ghostly counsels.... I have felt very badly about Miss Lyman's dying at Vassar, but since Mrs. S.'s visit and learning how beloved she is there, have changed my mind. What does it matter, after all, from what point of time or space we go home; how we shall smile, after we get there, that ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... into the dark distance, where the turmoil of waters seemed to glimmer with ghostly light against a sky of the deepest black, he missed the light of the Smeaton, which, up to that time, had been moored as near to the lee of the rock as was consistent with safety. He fancied she must have gone down, and it was not till next day that the people on the beacon knew ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... not from the main highway, but from a lane which led right down to the Thames; and I went to the very bottom of that lane and swung myself by means of a post right over the river, so that I might get a view of the windows of the room with which so ghostly a character was associated. The blinds were all down and the whole ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... find himself alone. No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the hour out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away in outlandish ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spirits like Randal Leslie's. Wings have they, but only the better to pounce down,—draw their nutriment from unguarded material cuticles; and just when, maddened, you strike, and exulting exclaim, "Caught, by Jove!" wh-irr flies the diaphanous, ghostly larva, and your blow falls on your ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... water as though treading solid ground. When the voyagers caught sight of Him as He approached the ship in the faint light of the near-spent night, they were overcome by superstitious fears, and cried out in terror, thinking that they saw a ghostly apparition. "But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... even a chillier horror than the ghostly laughter, it so confessed a perishing hope. The children stood still and listened; but there was no result. Tom turned upon the back track at once, and hurried his steps. It was but a little while before a certain indecision ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... voice caused the rest to desist. The fallen tent had uprisen, and in the gathering twilight it flapped ghostly arms about and titubated toward them drunkenly. But the next instant John Gordon found the opening ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... space clairvoyance is that in which certain persons so awaken the astral senses of other persons that these persons perceive the first person—usually in the form of seemingly seeing the person present in the immediate vicinity, just as one would see a ghostly visitor. In some cases there is manifested double-clairvoyance, both persons visioning clairvoyantly; in other cases, only the person "visited" astrally senses the occurrence. The following cases illustrate this form of ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... was inclined to fear that I had really endangered my life by this ghostly rendezvous. I can testify, however, that it was by no means "death to me," nor did I experience any ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... old house were many little nooks, and each nook haunted by the spirit of some legendary story. As is the case in all houses where successive generations of the same family have lived and died, ghostly visitants came at certain times, so the negroes said, rang bells softly at dead of night, tipped across the floor with but the echo of a step, jostled medicine bottles together and did many curious things. Roberta, brave as she was and sensible as she was, would ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, And the highwayman came riding— Riding—riding— The highwayman came riding, up to the old ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... her waiting in a shadow; and she caught me by the wrist, clutching it cruelly, and led me to the deeper shadow and seclusion of a great rock, rising from the path to the flake. 'Twas very still and awesome, there in the dark of that black rock, with the light of the moon lying ghostly white on all the barren world, and the long, low howl of some forsaken dog from time to time disturbing the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... this part of the country before," said Tom Ross, looking around curiously at the ghostly tree trunks. ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a terrible fit of the toothake, and she walked with a long night-shift at dead of night like a ghost, and I thought she was one. She prayed for nature's sweet restorer—balmy sleep—but did not get it—a ghostly figure indeed she was, enough to make a saint tremble. It made me quiver and shake from top to toe. Superstition is a very mean thing, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... cautious progress, and invite us to follow it. The eye, wistfully pursuing its eccentric sweep, suddenly loses it in impenetrable shadows. There is not a vestige of any other ruin near it, and the long lines it here and there shows, ghostly white in the moonlight, seem like spectral ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... apparitions wrapped in what looked like dirty bagging, mingled with commonplace figures in Western dress. But huddled in elbow-high with this busy town of modern France (which might have been Marseilles or Bordeaux) was something alien, something remote in spirit; a ghostly band of white buildings, silent and pale in the midst of colour and noise. Low houses with flat roofs or miniature domes, small, secret doorways, tiny windows like eyes narrowed for spying, and overhanging upper stories supported ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Geoffrey rode home. In forecast of winter, a bitter breeze sighed across the heather and set the harsh grasses moaning eerily. The sky was somber overhead; scarred fell and towering pike had faded to blurs of dingy gray, and the ghostly whistling of curlew emphasized the emptiness of the darkening moor. The evening's mood suited Geoffrey's, and he rode slowly with loose bridle. The bouquet of the brandy had awakened within him a longing ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... door he had locked, which in haste he had taken out and still held in his hand. Without attempting to decide whether the thing he had seen was of common clay or of some lighter substance, he still did not lend his mind with sufficient readiness to ghostly theory to imagine that his unwelcome guest could ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... narrative like this. June passed away, and July, and August had come, and as yet the enigma which had completely puzzled Arrowhead Village and its visitors remained unsolved. The white canoe still wandered over the lake, alone, ghostly, always avoiding the near approach of the boats which seemed to be coming in its direction. Now and then a circumstance would happen which helped to keep inquiry alive. Good horsemanship was not so common among the young men of the ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... no more. The launch split her way swiftly toward the north. By the vague, ghostly shimmer of light upon the waters, a tense smile appeared on the steersman's lips. In his dark eyes gleamed the joy which to some men ranks supreme above all other joys—that of bending others to his will, of dominating them, of making them ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... their breakfast. "I will not share your breakfast," said I. "Wherefore not?" said Winifred anxiously. "Because," said I, "it is not proper that I be beholden to you for meat and drink." "But we are beholden to other people," said Winifred. "Yes," said I, "but you preach to them, and give them ghostly advice, which considerably alters the matter; not that I would receive anything from them, if I preached to them six times a day." "Thou art not fond of receiving favours, then, young man," said ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... King of this realm: strengthen him, O Lord, with the Holy Ghost the Comforter; Confirm and stablish him with thy free and princely spirit, the spirit of wisdom and government, the spirit of counsel and ghostly strength, the spirit of knowledge and true godliness, and fill him, O Lord, with the spirit of thy holy fear, now and ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... not know how Darwin would have accounted for the particular note they strike. It is probably on a level with the roaring of the lion, in that it is designed to terrify. But the jackal does not terrify by such obvious methods as the lion. He plays on your eerie, ghostly, superstitious side. He brings up into the imagination the malignity and hopelessness of the damned. He seems to people the night with wailing horrors. To a man dying of thirst in the desert, the jackal must just give the final touch of despair that makes death and nothingness seem best. ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... fresh, damp air we could watch the shadows deepen in the somber masses of the forest, and on the hilltops see the ragged silhouettes of sentinel pines against the rose glow of the sky. Ribbons of mist, weaving in and out above the stream, clothed the alders in ghostly silver and rested in billowy masses upon the marshes. Ere the moon had risen, the stars blazed out like tiny lanterns in the sky. Over all the ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... they all replied at once; whereupon Baron T. begged to be allowed to see it. "I will show it you to-morrow," the Count said. "No, Papa, now, immediately," the younger lady said mockingly; "just before the ghostly hour, such a thing creates a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... palms are the number of villages. They fringe the shore and the horizon. The sun sets golden behind them, and birds sit swinging upon their boughs and float gloriously among their trunks; on the ground beneath are flowers; the sugar-cane is not harmed by the ghostly shade, nor the tobacco, and the yellow flowers of the cotton-plant star its dusk at evening. The children play under them; the old men crone and smoke; the surly bison and the conceited camels repose. The old Bible-pictures are ceaselessly painted, but with softer, clearer ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... that it was one of the maid-servants, who had heard our after-dinner conversation, playing the ghost. But this particular ghostly lady was very short, much shorter than any servant in the establishment. After some, hesitation all (four) of us advanced towards the ghost. I remember how my heart throbbed as I advanced ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... Plaisance vowed she had heard the White Horses go past, on the nights before Tom Hamon and Peter were found. And every one knew that when the ghostly horses were heard, some one was going to die. But as she had said nothing about it before, her contribution to the general uneasiness was received with respect before her face but with ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... at me with venomous looks, as I pass through their streets. With a glance I disarm their malice, and fascinate the basilisks. Everywhere I see the track and scent the presence of the Ghostly One that dwells on the Threshold, and whose victims are the souls that would ASPIRE, and can only FEAR. I see its dim shapelessness going before the men of blood, and marshalling their way. Robespierre passed me with his furtive step. Those eyes of horror were gnawing into his heart. I looked ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... wheeling moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of a charm. And verily, this is enchantment; I am bewitched, by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flittering of the marvellous sleeves—apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this. And with the consciousness of ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... silence, and once more planted herself before him, her slim figure looking ghostly between the fading light of the departing day and the ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... through the ghostly, moonlit woods, Jabe followed obediently at the Boy's heels. Silently as shadows they moved, silently as the lynx or the moose or the weasel goes through the softly parting undergrowth. The Boy led far away from the brook, and over the crest of the ridge, to avoid alarming the vigilant sentries. ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and then entering the next on tip-toe. He stood in the dining-room, before the fireplace. He had sat where he now stood on so many evenings of winter days whose suns had set with his youth. The barren hearth was full of ghostly flames which struck a chill into his heart. There was the room opening to the left, which Mabel and Vi, the little twin daughters of his former chief, used to occupy. He seemed to hear the laughter of the children echoing from some ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... the scrub was a small ghastly, battle-rent piece of ground, not one hundred yards in width and rising slightly. Beyond and close on either side, it was bounded by the starry heavens, and seemed a strange, detached dreamland where men had gone mad. The Turks lined the far edge, their ghostly faces appearing and vanishing in the eerie light, as they poured a point-blank fusillade at the shattered series of shallow holes where the remnants of the New Zealanders were fighting gallantly. Sweeping round to the left was the flashing semicircle of the enemy line, bombs ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... with him, and used his utmost eloquence and endeavors to convert the devil; the knights stopped drinking to listen to the argument; the men-at-arms forbore brawling; and the wicked little pages crowded round the two strange disputants, to hear their edifying discourse. The ghostly man, however, had little chance in the controversy, and certainly little learning to carry it on. Sir Randal interrupted him. "Father Peter," said he, "our kinsman is condemned for ever, for want of a single ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... breasted the last rise and looked down into the valley where lay the Aurora Borealis. This was a desolate spot, great boulders, fallen from the huge rock overhead, lay all about, the earth was weathered by winter snows and summer rains. Ghostly fingers of mist writhed over the peak; darkness was not ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... Jones let out a ghostly, squeaky laugh. "I've never been placed in such a ridiculous position before," he went on, with a sepulchral equanimity of tone. "It's you, Martin, who dragged me into it. However, it's my own fault too. I ought to—but I was ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... days, my ghostly dreams Come clothed in garments like the mist, But through that vapoury veiling, gleams The lustrous eyes my lips have kissed. A radiant head leans on my heart, We walk in well-remembered ways; But oh! the sorrow when we ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... formed a semi-circle round Westerfelt and his horse. In their white caps and sheets they appeared ghostly and hideous, as they looked down at him through the eye-holes of their masks. One of them held a coil of new rope and tantalizingly swung it back and forth before ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... The face seemed to turn to the drear, blank sky—was it in appealing, or a desperate daring? an impotent resistance, or a wild, agonizing prayer? The hands were thrown up: he had come gradually nearer, and could see them, ghostly white in the long feeble ray of the distant lamp. What was she deciding or asking? A shiver ran over him as the thought of suicide entered his brain. At all events, he must not let ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... is evident also, by the triumph that such men make over all their enemies, both bodily and ghostly: "Now thanks be unto God," said Paul, "which always causeth us to triumph in Christ." And, "who shall separate us from the love of Christ" our Lord? and again, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... pounding hearts, for shadowy forms to appear. They were not unaccustomed to danger and the suspense of an ambush. But in the forest they had solid ground beneath their feet. Trees and other tangible objects were all about them. But here everything seemed unreal, almost ghostly. The darkness of the forest was no blacker than the night here in the open. And yet there was no shady covering of leaves to shut out the light—only a strange, weird, unearthly canopy of mist. In the forest ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... fittest to create And to repay each other! Why rejoices Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good? Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood, Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices, Image of Image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf, That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold? Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold These costless shadows of thy shadowy self? Be sad! be glad! be neither! seek, or shun! Thou hast no reason why! Thou canst have none; Thy ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... A half hour later ghostly noises; began to come from that room and mysterious whisperings fell out of the window and bumped ...
— Get Next! • Hugh McHugh
... had spoken it; and henceforth she dated disenchantment from that hour. The whole pageant of her romance, with the knightly figure of the painter that filled its foreground, shriveled to a scroll no bigger than a curled, dead leaf—sere, wasted, ghostly, and light enough to be washed away on a tear, borne away ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... that night, lying cold upon the ground, he beheld his ghostly visitors. They came and stood around him, a shining company, and looked upon him with countenances of fair women and good men. Their apparel was not unlike that of mortals. And he heard them questioning among themselves how ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... took the column over some millraces, a biggish jump for the men. The mules, having been relieved of their loads, were man-handled across. Once over these and then a wade through a stream knee deep, the ghostly column again halted. It was now 3.30 a.m. The foot of the low hills behind which was the laager, had been reached, and the officers were ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... and talk over the events of those many merry moons—there are some of our adventures that gleam out more vividly in memory than the others, and are oftener discussed. The time we bought God's picture from Jerry Cowan—the time Dan ate the poison berries—the time we heard the ghostly bell ring—the bewitchment of Paddy—the visit of the Governor's wife—and the night we were lost in the storm—all awaken reminiscent jest and laughter; but none more than the recollection of the Sunday Peg Bowen came to church and sat in our pew. Though goodness knows, as Felicity would ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... within me as I begin this Sketch. The page almost turns crimson under my gaze, and shadowy forms come forth out of the darkness into which they wildly plunged out of life's misery into death's mystery. Ghostly lips cry out, "Leave us alone! Why call us back to a world where we lost all, and in quitting which we risked all? Disturb us not to gratify the cold curiosity of unfeeling strangers. We have passed on beyond ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... our route was our reception at this place. The flashing of torches and the beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically Bengal lights) upon the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly illumination falling upon flowers and glittering laurels, whilst all around the massy darkness seemed to invest us with walls of impenetrable blackness, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting. ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... as men went to and fro with hasty steps. At a word from the steward, the women went softly from the room and up the winding stairs to their quarters, the rustling of their dresses coming back with ghostly stealthiness. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... dreaming, that's one sure thing," she murmured, approaching the little opening with extreme caution, while chills of alternate fear and excitement coursed all over her. "It seems so weird and ghostly to see that thing open all by itself, with nothing to help it along! Ghosts or not, I'm going to see what's there," and, strengthened by this resolve, she started to place her hand in the opening, but drew it back quickly ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... in the flow of his talk left a space of silence into which the encompassing peace and radiance stole like an inflowing tide. None loved better than Roy the ghostly music of silence; but to-night his brain was filled with the music of ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... a last effort to soothe the agitated woman. "We will let in a little light, and dissipate some of these shadows." And I attempted to throw back the curtains of the window, but they fell again immediately and I experienced a sensation as of something ghostly passing between ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... merely quote the opinions of others, far more important than my own, when I say this. It is a sort of haunted room to-day which I enter not with any fear, but I can never stay in it very long. It has no ghostly associations, it is too full of vital memories for that; but it is a room that mystifies and silences me, not with mere regrets, for that is sorrow, and there is nothing sad about the place to me. I can scarcely convey the impression; ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... have had a most faithful, intimate, and useful friend, whom I have constantly worn next my heart. I do not know him for a Spiritualist, but by some mysterious sympathy he hears the incessant, ghostly foot-falls of Time, and repeats them accurately to my ear. While I wake he tells me how Time is passing. While I sleep he is still marking his steps, so that sometimes I have a feeling of awe, as if my mysterious friend were counting my own life away. Then again I am sure that in the faint, persistent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his breast he lay and dared not sleep, Listening for the scarce motion of your boughs, Which sighed with bliss as she with blissful sleep, And drinking desperately each honied wave Of perfume wafted past the ghostly blind Knew first th' implacable and bitter sense Of Time that hastes and Death who need not haste. Shed your last sweetness, limes! But now no more. She, fruit of that night's love, she heeds you not, Who bent, compassionate, to the dim floor Takes ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... carelessly as he spoke, but he moved uneasily in his chair. Of late the sight of this man fretted him. It seemed as if he always saw him accompanied by a ghostly form. He tried to shake off the impression, and told himself angrily that he was falling into his dotage; but his memory would not yield. He saw again the pleading, trustful face of the man's mother as, years ago, she had besought him to do what ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... crystal radiance the ideal of the unity of the religious mind, the love and admiration for the high unseen things of which the Christian church was to him the sovereign embodiment. The mediaeval spirit, it is true, wears something of a ghostly air in the light of our new day. This attempt, which has been made many a time before, 'to unify two ages,' did not carry men far in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless it were an idle dream to think that the dead hand of Dante's ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... house, on across Sixth street, into the moonlight, then into the shadow, before I overtook it, when lo! it was a mortal woman, barefoot, in a dress which was probably a faded print. Most prints faded then, and this was white, long and scant, making a very ghostly robe, while on her head she carried a bundle tied up in a sheet. She had, of course, come out of Virgin alley, where many laundresses lived, and had just passed out of the shadow when I saw her. We exchanged salutations, and I went home to ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... wind long to drive us back on our cable, stern foremost, on to the wreck, which now loomed out huge and ghostly on the wild water. As we drifted down under her stern we were conscious, amidst the smoke of the burning tar-barrels and the spray of the waves which broke over her, of a crowd of faces looking ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... at a wandering robin. "I am as guiltless of theories as that bird. It is passing strange. Your cousin and our ghostly Huron seem to have gone up ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... hurled me, far beneath The vast and ghostly halls of Death, Down to the limitless profound Of Tartarus, in fetters bound, Fixed by his unrelenting hand! So had no man, nor God on high, Exulted o'er mine agony— But now, a sport to wind and sky, Mocked ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... moan. While o'er the wave the clouded moon appears To hide her weeping face, his voice he rears O'er the wild storm. Deep in the days of yore, A holy pilgrim trod the nightly shore; Stern groans he heard; by ghostly spells controll'd, His fate, mysterious, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... whistle, tolled no bell. Even the passenger coaches in the rear of the sightless engine were wrapped in darkness. It was a ghost of a train, a Flying Dutchman of a train, a nightmare of a train. It was as unreal as the black swamp, as the moss on the dead trees, as the ghostly tug-boat tied to the ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... added, "that the master of the New College and Magdalen beagles is called Joe. He is a member of the Bullingdon, and if he is the cheese it's distinctly mooters whether any of the Scorpers have a ghostly show; but I vote, gentlemen, that we don't crock at this ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... the mugs of ale upon the table, had spilled some of the liquid, he hurriedly wiped the stain away with EDWIN DROOD'S worsted muffler, and dried the sides of the glasses upon the napkin intended for Mr. DIBBLE'S use. There was something of the wild resources of despair, too, in this man's frequent ghostly dispatch of the German after articles forgotten in the first trip, such as another cracker, the cover of the pepper-cruet, the salt, and one more pinch of butter; and so greatly did his apparent dejection of soul increase as each supplementary luxury arrived and was recklessly ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... calculate to ask the Earl of Yalding to permit me to pass a night in his ancestral best bed- chamber. And if I hear so much as a phantom footstep, or hear so much as a ghostly sigh, ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... into the water and were floated ashore in the arms of naked girls; she had lain for weeks in enormous atolls, where the only life was that of birds, and the silence was unbroken save for the long roll of the surf, and at night the ghostly scurrying of turtles over the sand; she had been everywhere in those labyrinthine seas, those haunts of romance and mystery, with love, danger, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... by the heat that rose quiveringly from the fiery canyon below, the domain of Burnt Ridge stretched away before him, until, lifted in successive terraces hearsed and plumed with pines, it was at last lost in the ghostly snow-peaks. But the practical Josephine seized the opportunity to try once more to awaken the slumbering memory of her pupil. Following his gaze with signs and questions, she sought to draw from him some indication of familiar ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... and he fancied it hardly possible that he could ever get back again. But now, with every step that he took, he found himself getting miserably back into the old enchanted land. The mist rose up about him, the pale mist-bow of ghostly promise curved before him; and he trod back again, poor boy, out of the clime of real effort, into the land of his dreams ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the dripping eaves. The chinook wind droned its spring song, and the bare boughs of the tree beside the cabin waved and creaked the time. Somewhere distantly a wolf lifted up his voice, and the long, throaty howl swelled in a lull of the wind. It was black and ghostly outside, and strange, murmuring sounds rose and fell in the surrounding forests, as though all the dormant life of the North was awakening at the seasonal change. She closed the window and ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... cared for; and would be more safe than with such as might shun to own her rights of blood and heirship. Commend me to my brother, if so be that he cares to hear of me; and tell him that Guy hath wedded the lady of a castle in the land of Italy. And so praying you, ghostly father, for your blessing, I greet you well, and rest your grateful ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the Dominican Order were, in those days, to be found in many posts of influence, not the least of which was that of confessor to the King, and to Fray Tomas de Matiencio, the ghostly father of King Ferdinand, Las Casas did not fail to go at the outset. Matiencio had already shown pronounced sympathy with the cause of the Indians and was, therefore, to be counted upon as a firm ally, both because of his personal convictions ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... meter of the original. Lisardo, a Salamanca student, though a native of Cordova, falls in love with Teodora, sister of a friend, Claudio. Teodora is soon to become a nun. One night he makes love to her and is only mildly rebuked. But a ghostly swordsman warns him that he will be slain if he does not desist. Nevertheless he continues his wooing in spite of the fact that Teodora has become a nun. She agrees to elope. While on his way to the convent to carry out this design, his attention is attracted by a group of men attacking an ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... if it suggested midnight crime. For myself I have more agreeable associations, since I never hear one of these birds without recalling a gallant fight I once had with a big Tweed salmon in the weak light of a young moon, while three owls hooted amid the ghostly ruins of Norham Castle. Yet, even apart from this wholly agreeable memory, I find nothing unpleasant in their music, and can readily conceive that the moping owl may sing to his mate as passionately ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... were anything but natural. Possibly, he even pictured some ghostly figures sitting in a phantom boat, and speeding over the surface of the historical sheet of water, about which so much that is remarkable has been written, and, also, handed down from father to son, among the rangers and caribou hunters ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... matter nought to us. To-morrow shall we be with our uncle Hal. I only wish his lord was not of the ghostly sort, but perhaps he may prefer me to some great knight's service. But oh! Ambrose, come and look. See! The fellow they call Smallbones is come out to the fountain in the middle of the court with a bucket in each hand. Look! Didst ever see such a giant? He is as big and brawny as ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... commence their outcries, and from all parts they would assemble and flit about almost within reach of one's hand, making an awful noise, and in the dark shade of the forest their white gorgets had quite a ghostly look. The eggs are always three in number, of a beautiful shining blue-green, sometimes of a very long oval type. I have found the nests at Murree from the 3rd May to quite the ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... that his idea of the test by which he must try that possibility kept referring itself, in the warm early dusk, the approach of the Southern night—"conditions" these, such as we just spoke of—to the glimmer, more and more ghostly as the light failed, of the little white papers on his old green shutters. By the time he looked at his watch he had been for a quarter of an hour at this post of observation and reflexion; but by the time he walked away again he ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... more were blazing fiercely in the girdle of fire, and the sky throbbed with the crimson glare of their furnaces, and tall trees to which the autumn foliage clung would be touched with light, so that their straight trunks along a distant highway stood like ghostly sentinels. Now and again, above one of the burning towns a shell would burst as though the enemy were not content with their fires and would smash them ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... possible to remove the taint of infection from the letters, he started about four o'clock. The evening was most melancholy. For, though no rain any longer fell, there was a continual pattering of drops from the trees and a ghostly creaking of branches in a light and almost imperceptible wind. The day, too, was falling, the grey overhang of cloud was changing to black, except for one wide space in the west, where a pale spectral light shone without radiance; and the last ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... the room. There were no other doors, only the row of tiny windows around the ceiling of the room, pale, ghostly squares of light. ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... was locked in the ghostly cloisters, close to the graves of the dead; on the very spot where, as idle tales, went, the monks of bygone ages came out of those recording stones under his feet, and showed themselves at midnight. Not a step could he take, round the cloisters, but his foot must press those ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... gaed owre, went beyond the power of. gaffer, foreman, overseer. gait, way. gaithrin', crowd. gang, go. gangrels, wanderers, tramps. gant, yawn. gar, make, cause. gaun, going. gaun-aboot, wandering. gey, very. ghaistly, ghostly. gibbles, tools. gie, give; gie him the name, name the child after him. gillie-callum, a variety of Scots dance. gin, if. girnin', whining, complaining. gloamin', twilight. glow'red, stared. govy-dick, govy-ding, an exclamation ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... sundown. About nine o'clock, I took my pipe and my tobacco-pouch, and crept noiselessly out to the front porch. I had noticed a quaint settee there upon my arrival that morning, and I had no trouble in finding it now, for a ghostly moonlight had settled over everything. My mind was confronted by a question of decidedly more moment than any under which it had at any time before labored, and I had to think it out before I could sleep. If my cherished and faithful pipe, together ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... peculiarly Scottish. He does not himself know how far he is in earnest, and, to save his self-respect and character for canniness, he 'jocks wi' deeficulty.' He amuses himself with trying how far he can carry speculations on metaphysics (not yet reformed by himself) into the realm of the ghostly. He makes admissions about his own tendency to think that he has an immaterial soul, and that these points are, or may be, or some day will be, scientifically solved. These admissions are eagerly welcomed by Du Prel in his 'Philosophy of Mysticism;' but they are only ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... light a cigarette. No sound came from his companion. All round them spread the great common, with its old thorns, its clumps of fir, its hollows and girdling woods, faintly lit by a ghostly moonlight that was just beginning to penetrate the misty November dusk. The cheerful light of Dempsey's cigarette shone a moment in the gloom. Delane was conscious of an excitement which it took all his will to ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... produced its effect upon the now thoroughly terrified savages, who by this time realised that to remain in the canoe was but to court death. Yet what else could they do? There was but one alternative, and that was—to jump overboard, and trust to their ability to swim to the island that loomed ghostly in the moonlight ahead. And this they did, one after the other—the laggards being stimulated by another shot or two from Leslie's rifle—until the canoe, a fine big craft of about five feet beam and forty feet long, fitted with an outrigger, was ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... open slowly. The girl, holding a thin taper in her hand, seeing another man with me, began to back away before us slowly, shading the light with her hand. Her impassive white face looked ghostly. I followed behind General Robles. Her eyes were fixed on mine. I made a gesture of helplessness behind my chief's back, trying at the same time to give a reassuring expression to my face. None of us three ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... out on the dark terrace under the pale star beams, with a tall young man who spoke bitterly. This girl in the sheen of white and silver to whom the King was speaking kindly, was some one unreal and ghostly who acted like a real live girl, ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... proud sentinel between the North and Rome, offered herself to the embrace of the wild, tawny river, as if seeking to retard its ominous journey from Rhaetia's barbarous mountains to Italy's sea by Venice. Far to the northeast ghostly Alpine peaks awaited their coronal of sunset rose. Southward stretched the plain of Lombardy. Within easy reach of his eye shimmered the lagoon that lay about Mantua. The hour veiled hills and plain in a luminous blue from ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets of mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of mysteriously heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising against blackened walls or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed vegetable gardens, I saw the women pouring out from the potbanks, heard the hooters summoning the toilers to work, lost my way upon slag heaps as big as the hills of the south country, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... I shall leave thee none can tell, But all shall say I wish thee well, I wish thee, Vin, before all wealth, Both bodily and ghostly health; Nor too much wealth, nor wit, come to thee, So much of either may undo thee. I wish thee learning, not for show, Enough for to instruct and know; Not such as gentlemen require To prate at table, or at fire. I wish thee all thy mother's graces, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... when the man was almost winded, and his breath was coming in quick gasps, a faint, far-off cry floated down to him through the ghostly aisles of the naked wind-swept forest. At first it was so faint as to be almost unintelligible, but as they pressed on, it grew louder and clearer, until the man recognized the ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... interloper. It was cold, too, cold as a vault, and as I passed along, the stone paved hall made a clanking noise which echoed through the silent rooms. I heard the wind howling too, and the sea began to roar, and when this was so there was always a ghostly, weird feeling about ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... considerable time,—even till the old clock from the turret of the house told twelve, he turned away with a sigh, and went to bed. The wind moaned through the ancestral trees; the old house creaked as with ghostly footsteps; the curtains of his bed seemed to waver. He was now at home; yes, he had found his home, and was sheltered at last under the ancestral roof after all those long, long wanderings,—after the little log-built hut of the early settlement, after ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... my thought about, And in the ghostly middle-night Finds all the hidden windows bright, And sees the guests ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... warning, when the evil star of Boabdil shall withhold its influence, and he may strike, without resistance from the Powers above, for his glory and his throne.' 'The sign and the warning are bequeathed thee,' answered the ghostly image. It vanished,—thick darkness fell around; and, when once more the light of the lamps we bore became visible, behold there stood before me a skeleton, in the regal robe of the kings of Granada, and on its grisly ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... is not necessarily part of Penance. The Prayer Book lays great stress upon it, and calls it "ghostly counsel and advice," but it is neither Confession nor Absolution. It has its own place in the Prayer Book;[4] but it has not, necessarily, anything whatever to do with the administration of the Sacrament. Direction may, or may not, be good for the soul. It ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... waters of the bay. Out from the shelter of the wharves the wind buffeted us wildly, and the black waves were threshed into phosphorescent foam against the sides of the tug, while their crests, self-luminous, stretched away in changing lines of faint, ghostly fire. ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... breathin' corpses! How mothers weep over them! how wives kneel, and beat their hearts out on the rocky barriers that separate them from their hearts' love, their hearts' desire! How little starvin', naked children cower in their ghostly shadows through dark midnights! How fathers weep for their children, dead to them, dead to honor, to shame, to humanity! How the cries of the mourners ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... spot. Yet I was glad of the brief vision. I shall have fond and enduring memories of that sanctuary—the travertine of its artfully carven fabric glowing orange-tawny in the sunset; of the forsaken plain beyond, full of ghostly ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... not last long. Major Kent drove into the town in his pony trap and pulled up opposite the statue. He called to Father McCormack, who had satisfied himself about Mary Ellen's appearance, and was prowling round the statue, making mild jokes about its ghostly appearance. Doyle detected a note of urgency in the Major's voice, and hurried across the square, reaching the pony trap just ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... said with a laugh, defiantly, but none the less Jack read uneasiness in the manner of the man. It seemed to him that both were eager to turn back. Giant boulders, carved to grotesque and ghostly shapes by a million years' wind and water, reared themselves aloft and threw shadows in the moonlight. The wind, caught in the gulch, rose and fell in unearthly, sibilant sounds. If ever fiends from below walk the earth, this time and place was a fitting one for them. Jack curved a hand ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... beginning to blow outside, shaking open the dark clouds and letting gleams of moonlight flicker on the thinning fog. A ghostly ray came through a crack between the logs and lit Alice's face with a pathetic wanness. She moved her lips as if speaking, but Hamilton heard ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... dim interior of the place and for a moment did not see Cap'n Ira at all. The ghostly face of the Queen of Sheba appeared at the opening over her manger. Tunis was about to call when he saw the old man straining upon the lower rungs of the ladder to reach the loft to pitch down a bunch of fodder. Queenie ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... wild, careering, bumpy ride into the night. The road was fearful and all but invisible. The carriage swayed and swung dangerously. Keith drove, every faculty concentrated. No one spoke. The dim and ghostly half-guessed forms of things ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... In a ghostly way you see Stanley turning the pump handle. With a handful of waste which he has borrowed from the Rosa's engine room, the Professor wipes from the section of wall through which the searchlight plays the moisture that constantly collects there. I sit with my hand near the key, peering downward ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... number of French schoolmasters and teachers were visiting the exposition, to have public lectures given in which all the business of dark closets, hand-tying, materialization of spirits, presenting the faces of the departed, and ghostly portraiture was fully performed by professional mountebanks, and afterward as ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the Minerva was disturbed. A long streak of yellow light showed from the door leading into the cabin while yet the sounds of the clock hung above the river. It became ghostly against the moonlight that bleached the deck, a long grey-yellow finger pointing the way to the ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... and stopped before the old brown house hidden in creepers in which Laura lived. So changed by this time, however, was Gerty's mood that, after leaving her carriage, she stood hesitating from indecision upon the sidewalk. The few bared trees in the snow, the solemn, almost ghostly, quiet of the quaint old houses and the deserted streets, in which a flock of sparrows quarrelled under the faint sunshine, produced in her an odd and almost mysterious sense of unreality—as if the place, herself, the waiting ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... with well-aired sheets, to the waving tapestry, mildewed cushions, and all the other interesting appliances of romance. However, though I cannot promise you all the discomfort generally belonging to an old castle, you will find legends and ghostly lore enough to claim your respect; and if old Martha be still to the fore, as I trust she is, you will soon have a supernatural and appropriate anecdote for every closet and corner of the mansion; but here we are—so, without more ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... previous night was unconsciously impressed upon her mind. A shudder of fear came over her, and then she was astonished at the fear; he might easily have done all that she had given him to do and returned by this time. Yet why did he pass the window in that ghostly fashion and show no sign of coming to the door? A moment or two that she sat seemed beaten out into the length and width of minutes by the throbbing of her nerves, usually so steady. She determined to steel herself against discomfort. If ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... entertain no doubt; her manners, her accomplishments, her ways of thinking and speaking, all proved it. Looking below the surface, her character showed itself in aspects not common among young women in these days. In her quiet way she was an incurable fatalist, and a firm believer in the ghostly reality of apparitions from the dead. Then again in the matter of money, she had strange views of her own. Whenever my purse was in my hand, she held me resolutely at a distance from first to last. She ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... even as we gazed, that darkness seemed to become diluted, as it were, with the advancing light that we could almost see sliding along the surface of the water, until suddenly, as though emerging from an invisible mist, a ghostly object appeared, grey and elusive, against the background of darkness, and with one ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... the narrow indurated path over the spongy mould worn by running warriors. And when night filled the forest with the hoot of owl, and the far, weird cries of wild creatures on the rove, there sped through the aisled columns of star light and shadow, the ghostly figure of the French boy slim, and lithe as a willow, with muscles tense as ironwood, and step silent as the mountain-cat. All that night he ran without a single stop. Chill daybreak found him still staggering ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... bell. And the ghostly procession thrice tracks the four ambulatories of the cloisters, solemnly chanting a requiem for ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hour, I think, they sat there, two ghostly figures formless against the woods; then one rose, and presently I saw it was ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... flared and the twinkling tip of light grew at a candle end and she saw a ghostly figure, its white hand busy with the candle wick and its hollow, black eyes fixed on the tiny growing flame. Instantly other matches flickered and more candles glimmered in ghostly fingers, until the room was flashing with tiny points of light, while the masses of heavy shadow trembled and surged ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... of a world, it seemed to Amy. The moon, nearly full, had risen in the gap of the Highlands, and had now climbed well above the mountains, softening and etherealizing them until every harsh, rugged outline was lost. The river at their feet looked pallid and ghostly also. When not enchained by frost, lights twinkled here and there all over its broad surface, and the intervals were brief when the throbbing engines of some passing steamer were not heard. Now it was like the face of the dead when a ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... you, like a ghostly cricket, Creaking where a house was burned: Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... you, Ague," said Dillingford. "People live up there and since we've been here two or three men visitors have come down from the place to sample our stock of wet goods. Nothing suspicious looking or ghostly about them either. I talked with a couple of 'em day before yesterday. They were out for a horseback ride and stopped here for ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... never lasted long, and she suddenly broke in, "O mother, Master Eyre saith there is a marvellous cavern near his father's house, all full of pendants from the roof like a minster, and great sheeted tables and statues standing up, all grand and ghostly on the floor, far better than in this Pool's Hole. He says his father will have it lighted up if we will ride over ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... corridors. One of our party had been placed by himself at the end of a long suite of apartments, with balconies commanding the wide sweep of hills that Monte Amiata crowns. He confessed in the morning to having passed a restless night, tormented by the ghostly noises of the wind, a wanderer, "like the world's rejected guest," through those untenanted chambers. The olives tossed their filmy boughs in twilight underneath his windows, sighing and shuddering, with a sheen in them as eery as that of willows ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... of La Popa. Time-defying, grim, dramatic reliques of an age forever past, breathing poetry and romance from every crevice—still in fancy echoing from moldering tower and scarred bulwark the clank of sabre, the tread of armored steed, and the shouts of exulting Conquistadores—aye, their ghostly echoes sinking in the fragrant air of night into soft whispers, which bear to the tropical moon dark hints of ancient tragedies enacted within these dim keeps ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... flourish of silver trumpets. There were flashings of jewels, set where jewels should flash no more; white bridal robes, soon to be drenched in blood; ghostly crowns, glimmering for an instant over heads that should be laid upon the block ere one poor year were over. "Man proposed, and God disposed." The incorruptible crown was the fairer ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... black lurid thunderclouds lay piled along the horizon, and came up slowly and awfully against the wind. I looked upon them with terror; they seemed so near the earth, and so like living, watching things. They hung out of the sky, extending long ghostly arms downwards, and their gloom and density seemed supernatural. The soldiers took us out, our hands bound behind us, into a quadrangle at the back of their barracks. The scene is sharply impressed on my mind. A palisade of two sides of a square, made of wooden ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... and mow, we saw them go, Slim shadows hand in hand: About, about, in ghostly rout They trod a saraband: And the damned grotesques made arabesques, Like ...
— The Ballad of Reading Gaol • Oscar Wilde
... "I didn't see or hear anything unusual. Such stories are ridiculous; and even if there was a little truth in them, noises can't harm you as much as sleeping out in the storm. I'm going to encroach once more upon the ghostly hospitality of the ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... overcome by this awful sight, knelt down by his side and tried to quiet him, but in vain. He continued beating his hands in the air, trying to keep off the ghostly train, till, at last, with one awful howl, ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... forested hills into the depths of which he looked with rapt eyes, seeing visions which that forest never held for any other gaze. Mayhap, adown those dim green aisles he previsioned the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir" with the tomb of Ulalume at the end of the ghostly path through the forest—the road through life that led to the grave where his heart lay buried. Through the telescope on that balcony he may first have followed the wanderings of Al Araaf, the star that shone for him alone. ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... had been troubling her all the afternoon, and for which she now felt penitent, she kept telling me how good and how clever Deborah was in her youth; how she used to settle what gowns they were to wear at all the parties (faint, ghostly ideas of grim parties, far away in the distance, when Miss Matty and Miss Pole were young!); and how Deborah and her mother had started the benefit society for the poor, and taught girls cooking and plain sewing; and how Deborah had once danced with a lord; ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to the distant road, which wound like a muddy river beside the naked tobacco fields. Lying within the slight depression of a hilltop, the two were buried deep amid the lifeeverlasting, which shed its soft dust upon them and filled their nostrils with its ghostly fragrance. ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... and still there lay a mile of open prairie between him and shelter; still those bounding ponies, with their yelping, screeching riders, were fast closing upon him, when suddenly through the dim and ghostly light there loomed another shadow, wild and daring,—a rider who came towards him at ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... I have had in the Chaco. Some of them haunt me still like ghostly shadows. The evening camp-fire, the glare of which lit up and made more hideous still my savage followers, gorging themselves until covered with filth and gore. The times when, from sheer hunger, I have, like them, torn up bird or beast and eaten it raw. The draughts of water ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray |
