"Phantasmagoria" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as one who toils not for delight, living ever amid rich joys. He wondered if she was as unreal as the gardens, and remembering her words, they seemed familiar as if they were but echoes of the unuttered thoughts that welled up as he moved about. While he watched the flitting phantasmagoria with a sense expectant of music which never came, phantasmagoria with a sense expectant of music which never came, there arose before him images of peace, vanishing faster than passion, and forms of steadfast ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... count of time, of days and nights and storms and camps. Through a vast mad phantasmagoria of suffering and toil he and Labiskwee struggled on, with McCan somehow stumbling along in the rear, babbling of San Francisco, his everlasting dream. Great peaks, pitiless and serene in the chill blue, towered about ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... hither Adrian asked no questions as to their destination; he was too broken in heart and too shaken in body to be curious; life in those days was for him too much of a hideous phantasmagoria of waste and blackness out of which appeared vengeful, red-handed figures, out of which echoed dismal, despairing voices calling ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... judicial, fiscal, municipal, scholastic, commercial, and consular—throughout France, on the soldier, the citizen, and the peasant. Add, as we have above pointed out, the fictitious communist Jacquerie and the real Bonapartist terrorism, the government imposing by phantasmagoria on the weak, and by dictatorship on the refractory, and brandishing two terrors together. It would require a special volume to relate, expose, and develop the innumerable details of that immense extortion of signatures, which is called "the vote of ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... I had begun my journey with anxious haste; now I desired to draw it out through the course of days and months. I longed to avoid the necessity of action; I strove to escape from thought—vainly—futurity, like a dark image in a phantasmagoria, came nearer and more near, till it clasped the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... The dazzling phantasmagoria which life had been to the young actress was suddenly exchanged for the most practical acquaintance with its realities. She was married, left the stage, and as a wife and mother resided for a winter on the plantations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... different poles of the universe and of life, the mental and physical fantasy called space, is a nightmare of the human imagination. That nightmares exist, and exist only to torment, every child knows; and what we need is the power of discrimination between the phantasmagoria of the brain, which concern ourselves only, and the phantasmagoria of daily life, in which others also are concerned. This rule applies also to the larger case. It concerns no one but ourselves that we live in a nightmare of unreal ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... in any case a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of guiding its course. Man has the power of doing this largely so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... physiologists of the present day try to note and to fix precisely, and that disturbance must have caused a profound gulf in my mind and in the order and logic of my ideas. Similar phenomena occur in the dreams which lead us through the most unlikely phantasmagoria, without causing us any surprise, because our verifying apparatus and our sense of control has gone to sleep, while our imaginative faculty wakes and works. Is it not possible that one of the imperceptible keys of the cerebral ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of an hour, that quarter of an hour before the liner sails; that worrying, waving, whooping, whistling quarter of an hour through which you stand on deck like a human centre-piece loaded with candy, fruit, and flowers, surrounded by a phantasmagoria of friendly faces, talking like a dancing-man and feeling like a dancing dervish. Small wonder that the deafening whistle-blast and cry of "All ashore!" smite sweetly on your ears. Small wonder that you hand a dollar ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... and dying groans that resounded everywhere about him, and yet all the time feeling as though he were some spectator set apart, and condemned to watch the progress of a ghastly phantasmagoria in Hell, Theos was just revolving in his mind whether it would or would not be possible to make a determined climb for escape through one of the tall painted windows, some of which were not yet reached by the fire, when, with a sudden passionate exclamation, Sah-luma ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... thing;—and I sat silent and dazed through it all. Finally they fell to travestying scenes from history, each assuming a name and supporting it by his own wits, but it all passed before my dulled senses like the phantasmagoria of a troubled dream; and that tiring, there was a kind of dissolving views managed by artful ebb and flow of light, pictures at whose ending the Rose of May was lost in Francesca, who, waxing and waning in her turn, faded into Astarte, and went out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... strange illusion! Fancy-born delusion! Reason-bred confusion! Phantasmagoria! Love, where shall I find thee? Faith, how shall I bind thee? Truth, who has defined thee? ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... the objective is developed from the subjective; and there is no reality anywhere except in the region of consciousness. Nature is seen only as it is imaged in the mirror within; and to us it is a mere phantasmagoria, a series of phenomena, a succession of thoughts. "The sum total," says Fichte, "is this; there is absolutely nothing permanent, either without me or within me, but only an unceasing change. I know absolutely ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... lay there in the darkness. Then he struggled up and went at his task once more. Queerly colored flames were shooting before his straining eyes. He toiled in partial delirium, and it seemed to him that he was looking again at the phantasmagoria of the Coston lights on the fog when the yachtsmen were serenading the girl of the Polly. He found himself muttering, keeping time to ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... world has been constantly slipping ever more and more out of the Celt's grasp," wrote Matthew Arnold. But all the while the Celt has great compensations. To him belongs another world than the visible; the world of phantasmagoria, of emotion, the world of passionate beginnings, rather than of things achieved. After the romantic and defiant days of his youth, my father, still pursuing the same natural tendency, found all that he needed in Catholicism, and specially, I think, in that endless poetry and mystery of the Mass ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... different are the conditions to the calm morning of yesterday! If the air were visible it would be seen to be acting in the most extraordinary manner; crazily swirling, lifting and dropping, gusts viciously colliding—a mad phantasmagoria of forces! ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... vapors arise And fall, pass and change, group themselves and revolve Round the great central life, which is love: these dissolve And resume themselves, here assume beauty, there terror; And the phantasmagoria of infinite error, And endless complexity, lasts but a while; Life's self, the immortal, immutable smile Of God, on the soul in the deep heart of Heaven Lives changeless, unchanged: and our morning and even ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... humanity regards religion as cosmic and universal, rather than something mainly concerned with our earth. The discourses of Sakyamuni are accompanied in it by stupendous miracles culminating in a grand cosmic phantasmagoria in which is evoked the stupa containing the body of a departed Buddha, that is a ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... display, exposure, mise en scne[Fr]; rising of the curtain. phantasm, phantom &c. (fallacy of vision) 443. pageant, spectacle; peep-show, raree-show, gallanty-show; ombres chinoises[Sp]; magic lantern, phantasmagoria, dissolving views; biograph[obs3], cinematograph, moving pictures; panorama, diorama, cosmorama[obs3], georama[obs3]; coup de theatre, jeu de theatre[Fr]; pageantry &c. (ostentation) 882; insignia ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... are unconscious that the artist is sketching them. The moment they are posed for a composition, unless by a man of genius, the life has gone out of them. In the hands of an inferior artist, who fancies that imagination is something to be squeezed out of color-tubes, the past becomes a phantasmagoria of jackboots, doublets, and flap-hats, the mere property-room of a deserted theatre, as if the light had been scenical and illusory, the world an unreal thing that vanished with the foot-lights. It is the power of catching the actors in great events ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... phantasmagoria of colour, what a wonderful vision! Wrapped up in the delight of it, I passed on through some and round others, pursuing my way up the beach, and ascended slowly the rocks, the huge morain at the side of the glacier, while impressively from the inlet came unvaryingly the thunder of the five-minute ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the inventor of the phantasmagoria (magic lantern), is at present performing some interesting experiments that must doubtless advance our knowledge concerning galvanism. He has just mounted metallic piles to the number of 2,500 zinc plates and as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... revealed, and new agonies suffered. Oh! the many many hours, that I have groaned under the terrible incubi which the fits of real delirium evoke. Oh! the racking anguish of body that a traveller in Africa must undergo! Oh! the spite, the fretfulness, the vexation which the horrible phantasmagoria of diabolisms induce! The utmost patience fails to appease, the most industrious attendance fails to gratify, the deepest humility displeases. During these terrible transitions, which induce fierce distraction, Job himself would become irritable, insanely ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... outbursts of reflection in philosophic accent which reveal in startling style the working of Borrow's mind. The linguistic lore is phenomenal, as in all his books. But though the wild, passionate scenes make the whole narrative an indescribable phantasmagoria, the diction is always free from turgidity, and from involved periods. Borrow died at Oulton, Suffolk, on July 26, 1881. A mighty athlete, an inveterate wanderer, a philological enthusiast, and a man of large-hearted simplicity mingled with violent prejudices, he was one of the most ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... inherited all kinds of funereal horrors from our forefathers, and so we are used to them, and we do not see the absurdity and the monstrosity of them. The ancients were in this respect wiser than we, for they did not associate all this phantasmagoria of gloom with the death of the body—partly perhaps because they had a much more rational method of disposing of the body—a method which was not only infinitely better for the dead man and more healthy ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... Brahmanistic philosophy, continually poisoned the atmosphere which Buddha's disciples breathed. Still worse, as his religion transmigrated into other lands, it became itself a history of transformation, until to-day no religion on earth seems to be such a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria. Polytheism is rampant over the greater part of the Buddhist world to-day. In the larger portion of Chinese Asia, pantheism dominates the mind. In modern Babism,—a mixture of Mohammedanism, Christianity and Buddhism,—there are streaks of dualism. If Monotheism has ever dawned on the Buddhist world, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... darkness only a few paces from them. The chimes of unseen belfries and the roll of carriages visible only for a few seconds fell upon their ears. Felicita, in the secret excitement of her mood, felt herself in some impossible world, some phantasmagoria of a dream, which must presently disperse, and she would find herself at home again, in her quiet, dainty study at Riversborough, where most of the manuscript, which she held so closely in her hand, had been written. But the ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... office. Then there was the Countess de Mussidan, Flavia, the rich heiress, and Gaston de Gandelu, who was to be led into a crime the result of which would be penal servitude,—all jumbled and mixed up together in one strange phantasmagoria. Was he, Paul, to be a mere tool in such hands? Toward what a precipice was he being impelled! Mascarin and Van Klopen were not friends, as he had at first supposed, but confederates in villainy. Too late did he begin to see collusion ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... alloy of truth, and even the virtues of the human mind: they called up past ages, summoned spectres, and the dead were heard to speak. They played upon the plastic imagination of princes, by rapid transition from terror to enthusiasm. The knowledge of the phantasmagoria, then but little known, served as an auxiliary in these deceptions. On the death of Frederic II., his successor submitted to such tests, and was worked upon by wonders. Kings conspired against thrones. The princes of Gotha gave Weishaupt ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... that luncheon-party was a phantasmagoria of faces and voices to poor Nelly. He was going, and she would never see him again, although he had shown her by a thousand infallible signs that he loved her. Despite his occasional coldness, she was sure ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... and uninfluenced by this phantasmagoria of the brain, without movement and almost without breath, the sportsman waits hopefully; for the greatest virtue in this kind of sport is patience, the second courage, first-rate—his heart should be of marble, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... pounds were evidently to be devoted? What new face had she purchased by the loan of her own? Not the Pig-faced Lady nor the Spotted Boy. Could it be the Norfolk Giant or the Calf with two Heads? Horrible idea! Monstrous phantasmagoria began to stalk before her eyes; and to charm them away, with great fervour she fell to saying her prayers,—an act of devotion which she had forgotten, in her excitement, to perform before resting her head on the pillow,—an omission, let us humbly hope, not noted down in very dark ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... themselves before us as in vision, and fade; but the fact of their appearance is its own proof of their deep reality. They are the substance compared with which all the lower and lesser experiences are mere phantasmagoria. ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... phenomenon that the same man who has given us sternly and soberly realistic novels like "The Family at Gilje" and "The Commodore's Daughters," is also the author of the collection of tales called "Trold," in which his fancy runs riot in a phantasmagoria of the grotesquest imaginings. The same Jonas Lie who comports himself so properly in the parlor is quite capable, it appears, of joining nocturnally the witches' dance at the Brocken and cutting up the wildest antics under the pale glimpses of ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous a phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer. After hours ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... chiefly prone among the ancient matrons of her own political persuasion. It certainly seemed probable that intelligence from the continent, which could easily have been transmitted by an active and powerful agent, might have enabled him to prepare such a scene of phantasmagoria as she had herself witnessed. Yet there were so many difficulties in assigning a natural explanation, that, to the day of her death, she remained in great doubt on the subject, and much disposed to cut the Gordian knot, by admitting ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Protestantism its spiritual confirmation. Protestantism, as the self assurance of the individual that he was directly related to God without any dependence on the mediation of any man, rose to the truth in the autonomy of the soul, and began out of the abstract phantasmagoria of monachism and chivalry to develope Christianity, as the principle of humanitarian education, into concrete actuality. The cities were not merely, in comparison with the clergy and the nobility, the "third estate"; but the citizen who himself managed his commonwealth, and defended ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... of wild horses, right down through the Corso or Condotti, well worth seeing, and very exciting, and game suppers o'nights after the opera, and the meeting with many swells and noted folk, and now it all seems like some memory of a wild phantasmagoria or hurried magic- lantern show—galleries and ruins by day, and gaiety by night. Even so do all the scenes of life roll up together at its ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... until we feel that throughout Paradise Lost, as in Paradise Regained and Samson, Milton felt himself to he standing on the sure ground of fact and reality. It was not in Milton's nature to be a showman, parading before an audience a phantasmagoria of spirits, which he himself knew to be puppets tricked up for the entertainment of an idle hour. We are told by Lockhart, that the old man who told the story of Gilpin Horner to Lady Dalkeith bona fide believed the existence ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... from the falling man, permitting his adversaries to push their ponies so close to his sides that he could work only with a shortened blade. Appreciating what terrific additional handicap this would be to Carrick, Carter was yet scarcely prepared for the immediate tragedy that followed. Like the phantasmagoria of dreams, he saw the Cockney, cut, slashed, and pierced, fall ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... placing implicit trust in others, as I had done; instead of failing to discover a significance and a warning in each circumstance as it arose, I was suspicious from the first—suspicious of Margaret, of her father, of her mother, of Mannion, of the very servants in the house. In the hideous phantasmagoria of my own calamity on which I now looked, my position was reversed. Every event of the doomed year of my probation was revived. But the doom itself, the night-scene of horror through which I had passed, had utterly ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... turning of a page in some gigantic book, the swift-moving phantasmagoria swung back into the blackness of the infinite and was gone. Before them stretched a landscape of rolling hills and fertile valleys. Overhead, the skies were a deep blue, almost violet, and twin suns shone down on the scene. The sphere drifted ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... slumbers of England was the Pope; of whom Swift remarked, that constantly his holiness was seen incog. under one disguise or other, drinking at gin-shops in Wapping, and clearly proved to be spying out the nakedness of the land. In our days the Pope has vanished to the rear of the English phantasmagoria, and now lies amongst the [Greek: neknon amenena kasena]. But not, therefore, is England without her pet nightmare; and that nightmare is now the Czar, who doubtless had his own reasons lately for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe. In the last analysis magic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought; and as science has supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... I have to put him to bed laughing, and come back to my own room to finish my letter with an easier mind. For the last half-hour the aurora has been pulsing in the northern sky, and I have been thinking that the glorious phantasmagoria must be the sign of a gale in heaven, just as sleet and mist and black wind are the signs of a gale on earth. But it has tripped off into nothingness and only the dark night is left, through which the dogs at Knockaloe are keeping up their private ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... which contradicts it, that the image appears as illusory.[20] Let us suppose that we are sitting down dreaming and watching the passing by of our images. If, at this moment, a sudden noise calls us back to reality, the whole of our mental phantasmagoria disappears as if by the wave of a magic wand, and it is by thus vanishing that the image shows its falsity. It is false because it does not ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... point-blank into his bowels. Then all was blank. I do not even remember the next moment. A rush of roaring waters, a fighting with fearful, desperate energy for air and life, all in a hurried, flurried phantasmagoria about which there was nothing clear except the primitive desire for life, life, life! Nor do I know how long this struggle lasted, except that, in the nature of things, it could not have been ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... breakdown of some barrier life flows in like a tidal wave, paralyzing the reason, and therefore presenting itself in an irrational manner to consciousness. Were reason equal to the strain put upon it under these circumstances, in what light might the phantasmagoria of human life appear? Might it not be perceived as a representation, merely, of a supernal world, higher-dimensional in relation to our own? Just as a moving picture shows us the round and living bodies of men and women as flat images on a plane, enacting there some ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... in the dream," said Skippy sulkily. Then he remembered that all through the hideous phantasmagoria, in the smoky mists of low gambling dens, in the drizzle of midnight conclaves, across the sepulchral silences of leaden prisons, there had flitted the beatific vision of an angel with velvety eyes ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... practice and our profession cannot be reconciled without illegitimate casuistry. It seems to me that few things are more needed by us in England than a revision of our religion, to adapt it to the intelligence and needs of this present time.... Evolution is a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of guiding its course. Man has the power of doing this ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the comprehensive story of which can never be written, owing to the fact that no human mind could follow the swift events of the next few tumultuous months, no brain could record it. Chaos came. Life in the oil fields became a phantasmagoria of ceaseless action and excitement—a fantastic stereopticon ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... mystery rigid as Fate seemed to shackle me. Without seeing him go, I knew that Vannelle had left the room. Again was I conscious of the carriage-rumble growing fainter, fainter, fainter in the distance. A dream of passionate excitement, a phantasmagoria of old wishes, old hopes, of the life I might have led, flew before me. For a moment the energy of Vannelle seemed to have transfused itself through every fibre. An unquenchable thirst that I had never ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... surface of polished lacquer, darker than the night, and powdered thick with the gold of reflected stars. Leaning over, she marvelled at the silhouette of her own slim figure. It did not seem to have an actual place among these frail phantasmagoria. As she stared on she noticed that the end of the pond farthest from her, to the west, quivered and turned gray. She looked quickly upward and around. Yes, there to the east was the answering blur of light. Dawn ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... work-girls, students picturesquely long-haired and floppily trousered and cravated, and poorly clad models, a whole army of nondescripts, heaven knows with what means of livelihood, all dancing, drinking, eating, laughing, jesting, smoking, primitively love-making, moving, shouting, a phantasmagoria of souls making merry beyond the pale of reputable life; such were the frequenters of the Bal Jasmin. Gas flared in two concentric circles of flame around the hall and around the central bandstand. There was no ventilation. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... of thirty, who had been six years in my service, and who had, on so many occasions, proved himself entirely trustworthy, I passed away the seasons as they came and went, always living in the best hotels, and making a good many passing acquaintances. Life was, indeed, a perfect phantasmagoria. ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... surrounding them; then, suddenly blinded and seeing no more, felt themselves seized, lifted from their feet, carried off, hoisted a little higher, set upon the backs of horses, and there tied, each to a man already mounted. All these incidents they remember, as one recalls the fleeting phantasmagoria of a dream. But that they were real, and not fanciful, they now too surely know; for the hoods are over their heads, the horses underneath; and the savages to whom they were strapped still there, their bodies in repulsive contact with ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... a feeling of littleness and impotence, twilight gloom, burnished night, bitter cold, unreality, phantasmagoria, ghosts like those which surged about Aeneas, and finally clogging, white silence,—these were the simple but dreadful elements of that journey which lasted, without event, from the middle of November until the latter ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... came when all this phantasmagoria ceased to bother him; with returning vigor he had to make less and less effort to forget it, until at last it altogether went. The joy of new health swept over him, filling the gaps and low, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... there he still pursued his anxious quest of life in the midst of death. He saw him wander up and down, in and out, among the evening crowd, delighting in contact with such of his fellow-creatures as had health and youth, and seeking, seeking—he knew not what. From this phantasmagoria he dozed off into the dark plains of sleep; but even there the terribly blanched and emaciated face was with him, bending wistful worn eyes upon him and melting him to pity. And still again the ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... Park at Night: Clerks Gipsy Two-Fold Under the Oak Sigh no More Love Storm Parliament Hill in the Evening Piccadilly Circus at Night: Street Walkers Tarantella In Church Piano Embankment at Night: Charity Phantasmagoria Next Morning Palimpsest of Twilight Embankment at Night: Outcasts Winter in the Boulevard School on the Outskirts Sickness Everlasting Flowers The North Country Bitterness of Death Seven Seals Reading a Letter Twenty Years Ago Intime Two Wives Heimweh ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... the ashes powdered on the hearth and the face of Renault became obscure in the twilight, the dim outlines of a great meaning rose before her, reconciling all.... The Vision that abides within apart from the teasing phantasmagoria of sense, the Vision that comes, now dim, now vivid, as the flash of white light in the storm, the Vision towards which mankind blindly reaches, the Vision by which he may learn to live ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the course of existence too generally teaches to us all, that mournful truth, that, after all, we have no friends that we can depend upon in this life but our parents. All other intimacies, however ardent, are liable to cool; all other confidence, however unlimited, to be violated. In the phantasmagoria of life, the friend with whom we have cultivated mutual trust for years is often suddenly or gradually estranged from us, or becomes, from, painful, yet irresistible circumstances, even our deadliest foe. As for ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... he, pointing his uplifted finger to the hanging. Presently appeared upon it figures like shadows on a phantasmagoria. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... voice, husky, uncertain, brought both his visitors to a halt; and for a wild moment he fancied that after all they were no real beings, only more than usually vivid shadows, projected visions from the whirling phantasmagoria of his brain. The light behind them, streaming in through the open door, confused him, made him feel as though this were all a trick of the nerves, a kind of chaotic nightmare; and with a muttered curse at his own folly in imagining for one moment ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... of the fairies, it is the object of the author to bring before the reader a rapid phantasmagoria of the various beings that belong to the German superstitions, so that the work may thus describe the outer and the inner world of the land of the Rhine. The tale of the Fox's Wooing has been composed to give the English reader an idea of a species of novel not naturalized amongst us, though ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... refuge, first, in my laboratory, but, even as I approached, a lurid glare foretold me of its destruction. As I drew nearer, the whole ghost-factory was seen to be in flames; every moment crackling reports were heard, as the over-heated tins of phantasmagoria exploded and threw their supernatural contents upon the night. These liberated ghosts joined the army of Napoleon's outraged warriors, and turned upon me. There was not enough formaldybrom in all the world ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... English something with such interest that they were conscious of nothing around them. Sitting outside a cafe on the Piazza every evening for a month, one naturally sees many travellers come and go; but none other in that phantasmagoria left any mark on my mind. Why ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... this sublime phantasmagoria of the grain of hemp which in a few hours has been transmuted into the finest cloth. What a mighty artist is Life, shooting her shuttle to weave the wings of the locust—one of those insignificant insects of whom long ago Pliny said: In his tam parcis, fere nullis, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... that of sentiment Furthermore, the motives which have presided over particular musical combinations establish links between the composer and the listener. We sigh with Bellini in the finale of La Somnambula; we shudder with Weber in the sublime phantasmagoria of Der Freischutz; the mystic inspirations of Palestrina, the masses of Mozart, transport us to the celestial regions, toward which they rise like a melodious incense. Music awakens in us reminiscences, souvenirs, associations. When we have wept over a song, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... lethargic impulses of an equally tired brain, but the break would come. At this moment he was oppressed with a sense of the unreality of it all. The pueblo seemed like an ancient city of his dreams; the adobe houses details of a weird phantasmagoria; his adventures of the past forty-eight hours a succession of wild imaginings which he now reviewed with a sort of detached interest, as though he had watched them ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... individuality, if the feeling we call by that name be naught but the transient illusion the Buddhists would have us believe it, any faith founded upon it as basis vanishes as does the picture in a revolving kaleidoscope,—less enduring even than the flitting phantasmagoria of a dream. If the ego be but the passing shadow of the material brain, at the disintegration of the gray matter what will become of us? Shall we simply lapse into an indistinguishable part of the vast universe that compasses us round? At the thought ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... the only personage who does not come evidently from dream-land; and she, I think, represents that lurking scepticism, that sense of unreality, of which we are often conscious, amid the most vivid phantasmagoria of a dream. I should be glad to believe in the genuineness of these spirits, if I could; but the above is the conclusion to which my soberest thoughts tend. There remains, of course, a great deal for which I cannot account, and I cannot ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The square-browed judge likewise dreamed, and all his race rose up before him in a mighty phantasmagoria—his steel-shod, mail-clad race, the law-giver and world-maker among the families of men. He saw it dawn red-flickering across the dark forests and sullen seas; he saw it blaze, bloody and red, to full and triumphant noon; and down the shaded slope he saw the blood-red sands dropping into night. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... tried to note them exactly in our memory, but there were so many of them, and our brain got mixed so quickly, that at present we had no very clear recollection of anything or anybody. Even objects that were immediately before us appeared to us in a vague, dusky phantasmagoria and got confounded with precious objects in an inextricable manner. The world became a sort of kaleidoscope to us, seen in a dream through the penumbra of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... explanation is necessary before I can tell you of the substance of my dreams. Otherwise, little could you know of the meaning of the things I know so well. As I write this, all the beings and happenings of that other world rise up before me in vast phantasmagoria, and I know that to you they ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... it. These spots spread and shrink, changing form and color, constantly displacing one another. Sometimes the change is slow and gradual, sometimes again it is a whirlwind of vertiginous rapidity. Whence comes all this phantasmagoria? The physiologists and the psychologists have studied this play of colors. "Ocular spectra," "colored spots," "phosphenes," such are the names that they have given to the phenomenon. They explain it either by the slight modifications ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... Audrey's imagination borrowed nothing from the past, it had no sense of the demands made by the future. Now, although in publicly announcing her engagement to Ted she would give a fixity to this floating phantasmagoria which would rob it of half its charm, on the other hand she felt the need of some such definite and stable tie to secure her against Vincent's claim, the solidity of which she now realised for ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... with dust or bask in the sun; his dissipation is at the restaurateur's, whose poisonous dinner has won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the monads which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water; but what would Rabelais' Gargantua,—that misunderstood figure of an audacity so sublime,—what would that giant say, fallen ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... were lighted, there was no one to be seen in the room besides themselves. Several, Hugh amongst them, had observed the figure; but all had taken it for part of the illusive phantasmagoria. Hugh would have concluded it a variety of his vision of the former night; but others had seen it ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... and many respecting the Lady of Beaumanoir, fond almost savage regret at her meditated rejection of De Repentigny, glittering images of the royal Intendant and of the splendors of Versailles, passed in rapid succession through her brain, forming a phantasmagoria in which she colored everything according to her own fancy. The words of her maid roused ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... never tired of the phantasmagoria of Upper Richmond Road. The interminable, intermittent vision of food dead and alive, and of performers performing the same performance from everlasting to everlasting, and of millions and millions of cigarettes ascending from the mouths of handsome young men in ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... habitues eavesdropping on the rehearsal mumble in the half-dark that there was never anything like this seen on earth or in heaven. Mr. Anisfeld's scenery explodes like a succession of medieval skyrockets. A phantasmagoria of sound, color and action crowds the startled proscenium. For there is no question but that the proscenium, with the names of Verdi, Bach, Haydn and Beethoven chiseled ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... that he does not set a bad example. Fools need only be civil, and in consideration thereof they may aim at being the basis of monarchies. The narrowness of Clancharlie's mind was incomprehensible. His eyes were still dazzled by the phantasmagoria of the revolution. He had allowed himself to be taken in by the republic—yes; and cast out. He was an affront to his country. The attitude he assumed was downright felony. Absence was an insult. He held aloof from ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... a word in reply, but walking so close to Kit as to bring his eyes within two or three inches of his face, looked fixedly at him, retreated a little distance without averting his gaze, approached again, again withdrew, and so on for half-a-dozen times, like a head in a phantasmagoria. Kit stood his ground as if in expectation of an immediate assault, but finding that nothing came of these gestures, snapped his fingers and walked away; his mother dragging him off as fast as she could, and, even in the midst of his news of little Jacob and the baby, looking anxiously ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... coroner's inquiries tended that I wished to be the first to note their effect on him. It was less marked than I had anticipated. The man seemed benumbed by accumulated torment and stared at the witnesses filing before him as if they were part of some wild phantasmagoria which confused, without enlightening him. When finally several persons of both sexes were brought forward to prove that his attentions to Miss Tuttle had once been sufficiently marked for an announcement of their engagement to be ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... rather an anti-metaphysician, and, as would be said nowadays, a positivist. There are only two sources of knowledge, observation and reasoning. Observation makes us know things—is this true? May not the sensations of things which we have be a simple phantasmagoria? No; for we have an internal sense, a sense of our own, which cannot deceive us, which affirms our existence (here is the Cogito of Descartes anticipated) and which, at the same time, affirms that there are things which are not ourselves, ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... with Ukrainian myth, legend, and song, impressed upon Russian literature, faced with the realities of modern life, a spirit titanic and in clash with its material, and produced in the mastery of this every-day material, commonly called sordid, a phantasmagoria intense with beauty. A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian critic's observation about Gogol: "Seldom has nature created a man so romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic in life." But this ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... instance, the lines (iii. 86) beginning "Allah holds the kingship!" are a lesson to the manichaeanism of Christian Europe. It relates the doings of three royal generations and has all the characteristics of Eastern art: it is a phantasmagoria of Holy Places, palaces and Harems; convents, castles and caverns, here restful with gentle landscapes (ii. 240) and there bristling with furious battle-pictures (ii. 117, 221-8, 249) and tales of princely prowess ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... turned and saw the girl. The phantasmagoria of his brain vanished at sight of her. She was a pale, ethereal creature, with wide, spiritual blue eyes and a wealth of golden hair. He did not know how she was dressed, except that the dress was as wonderful as she. He likened her to a pale gold flower upon a slender stem. No, she ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... seem to have been in a trance, or a dream, ever since you gave me that composing draught! What was it—opium, hasheesh, amyle—what? And, mother, how much was real and how much was dream that I have passed through? It seems like the phantasmagoria of a midnight orgie—through which only one thing seems to stand out clearly—that I have had 'some outlet through thunder and lightning' into freedom! Mother, is it ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Susan Nunsuch, a little lower down than her grandfather's. The door was ajar, and a riband of bright firelight fell over the ground without. As Eustacia crossed the firebeams she appeared for an instant as distinct as a figure in a phantasmagoria—a creature of light surrounded by an area of darkness: the moment passed, and she was absorbed ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... hence was careless to observe whether or no this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add to the popular respect for nature and the natural man. After all, considering that literature is for the most part a hollow and pretentious phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches and peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignified assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one who would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... impossible that she should have the experiences of Miss Bronte or Madame Sand, and without some experience the most vivid imagination cannot act, or can act only in the production of mere chimeras. To forestall Miss Braddon in the art of criminal phantasmagoria might have been within Jane's power by the aid of strong green tea, but would obviously have been repugnant to her nature. We must not ask her, then, for the emotions and excitements which she could not possibly ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... weighing and shading things, should come and open the next century with a hatchet stroke, sending up a fine flare of truth and reality.... But, as for my comrades of the Scientific Section, I assure you that neo-Catholicism and Mysticism and Occultism, and every other branch of the fashionable phantasmagoria trouble them very little indeed. They are not making a religion of science, they remain open to doubt on many points; but they are mostly men of very clear and firm minds, whose passion is the acquirement of certainty, and who are ever absorbed in the investigations which continue ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... discovered that the history of mankind means something, and are naturally intent on learning what it means. No one now regards it as a mere Devil's phantasmagoria, significant of nothing but Adam's sin in the Garden. However differing on other points, we all now perceive that the history of the mind of man is a more interior history of the universe,—that it must be studied, in the most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... upon the 'shadow-presentment' of the Roman tyrant Nero; and I wondered vaguely how it chanced that he, in all the splendour of his wild and terrible career of wickedness, should be brought into this phantasmagoria of dream in which I and One Other alone seemed to be chiefly concerned. There were strange noises in my ears,—the loud din of trumpets—the softer sound of harps played enchantingly in some far-off distance—the ever- increasing loud buzzing of the voices of the multitude—and ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... faeryland, these two mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering the central dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and this mind that finds them so interesting—all are a portion of that great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... delight, for the hand which, as by enchantment, snatches us from the little cares of life, whirls us into the boundless regions of imagination, "exhausting" one "world," and imagining others, to supply pictures which may refresh and charm the mind.[L] Lord Byron shews us man and nature, like the phantasmagoria, in shade; whereas, in poetry at least, we desire to see them illuminated by all the friendly rays which a benevolent ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... the Phantasmagoria, but it forms a part of metropolitan magic, which you shall be better acquainted with before we part. That is no other than a Linen-draper's shop, 'papered,' as an Irishman one day remarked, 'vvid nothing at all at all ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... often replaced by sentimental rhetoric. Ruy Blas, like Marion Delorme and Hernani, has extraordinary beauties; yet the whole, with its tears and laughter, its lackey turned minister of state, its amorous queen, is an incredible phantasmagoria. Angelo is pure melodrama; Marie Tudor is the melodrama of history. Les Burgraves rises from declamation to poetry, or sinks from poetry to declamation; it is grandiose, epic, or, if the reader please, symbolic; it is much that it ought not to be, much that is admirable and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... do not," he adds, "keep a whole stud of them." To go deeper into this matter, to speculate upon the possible germs, the first vague intimations to the mind of Coleridge of the weird spectra of "The Ancient Mariner," the phantasmagoria of "Kubla Khan," would be, perhaps, over-refining. "Barry Cornwall," too, Lamb tells us, "had his tritons and his nereids gambolling before him ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... its difficulties with George Cruikshank. The best of his illustrative works (mostly designs on wood) were executed for this periodical, and selections were afterwards collected and published under the title of "The Phantasmagoria of Fun." ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... remember that she had ever thought of life as any thing different from this, or had ever planned an existence of boundless enjoyment, freedom, and beauty, travel in foreign countries, seeing of mountains, cities, pictures, palaces, hearing of grand music, and mingling in brilliant society—a phantasmagoria of delight which had visited her fancy once—was it only her fancy?—and vanished in a moment, as completely as the shadows projected on the wall. And here she was, the wife of the ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... so entirely at home in this more tropical clime, had relapsed into respectability when I spoke to him. He was sitting at a supper-table smoking a cigarette, and gazing somewhat sadly—it seemed to me—at the pandemoniac phantasmagoria of screaming dancers, the glittering cosmopolitan chaos that multiplied itself riotously in the mirrored walls of the great flaring ball-room, where under-dressed women, waving many-coloured paper lanterns, rode on the shoulders of grotesquely clad men prancing ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... a nameless interval, a phantasmagoria of wild, drugged dreams. My senses came slowly. At first, there were dim muffled voices and the tread of footsteps. Then I knew that I was lying on the ground, and that I was indoors. It was warm. My overcoat was off. Then I realized that I was bound ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... himself, and keeping silent that he might see the better, it was more difficult than ever for the envoy to know what course to pursue. Some persons went so far as to suggest that the whole negotiation was a mere phantasmagoria devised by Queen Elizabeth—her purpose being to breed a quarrel between Henry and Philip for her own benefit; and "then, seeing them together by the ears, as her accustomed manner was, to let them go alone, and sit ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... newspaper. The sight of the red cross pinned on M. de Guersaint's jacket was also calculated to render him prudent; nevertheless his tongue won the victory. "Well, monsieur, opinions are free, are they not?" said he. "I respect yours, but for my part I don't believe in all that phantasmagoria! Oh I've never concealed it! I was already a republican and a freethinker in the days of the Empire. There were barely four men of those views in the whole town at that time. Oh! I'm ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... terribly cramped and hurried time in which to view Florence, the beloved city, whose ineffable glories need at least one whole winter adequately to grasp them. But failing a winter, a week with the gods made Herminia happy. She carried away but a confused phantasmagoria, it is true, of the soaring tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, pointing straight with its slender shaft to heaven; of the swelling dome and huge ribs of the cathedral, seen vast from the terrace in front of San Miniato; of the endless Madonnas and the ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... on 'em; hats that twitter and hats that squawk; hats of lordly velvet and hats of plebeian corduroy; felt hats, straw hats, chip hats; wide brim and narrow brim; skewered, beribboned, bebowed—finally, again, just hats, hats, hats, a phantasmagoria of primary colors and gewgaws and fallalerie pure and simple, before which the masculine brain fairly reels. But the woman contemplates the show with serenity imperturbable: the hat she wants is here somewhere, and it is only a matter of time and ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... blanched in death then; and wan as the very kingdom of death and Hades I have seen it, most terrifying, that neuter state and limbo of nothingness, when unreal sea and spectral sky, all boundaries lost, mingled in a vast shadowy void of ghastly phantasmagoria, pale to utter huelessness, at whose centre I, as if annihilated, seemed to swoon in immensity of space. Into this disembodied world would come anon waftures of that peachy scent which I knew: and their ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... another world. The preacher, leaping, sweating, roaring till the windows rattle, the mothers with sleeping babes in their arms, the sweet, strained faces of the girls, the immobile wondering men, are spectral shadows, figures encountered in the phantasmagoria of disordered sleep. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... son, choking, calling wildly upon Heaven to aid him, had fallen in the midst of crowding, obscene things, and, in the instant of his fall, had found the room clear of the waving antennae, the beady eyes, and the beetle shapes. The whole horrible phantasmagoria—together with the odour of ancient rottenness—faded like a fevered dream, at the moment that Dr. Cairn had burst in upon the ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... at this point. Cataract followed rapid and rapid followed cataract as we were hurled on down through the midst of the sublimity, which, parting at our advance, closed again behind like some wonderful phantasmagoria. At times in the headlong rush the boats could barely be held in control. Once, a wild mass of breakers appeared immediately in the path of our boat, from which it was impossible to escape, even though we made ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... an unreality; against which idea his instincts revolt. But this, like all other great truths, must be considered both from the Absolute and the Relative points of view. From the Absolute viewpoint, of course, the Universe is in the nature of an illusion, a dream, a phantasmagoria, as compared to THE ALL in itself. We recognize this even in our ordinary view, for we speak of the world as "a fleeting show" that comes and goes, is born and dies—for the element of impermanence and change, finiteness and ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... happy eyes intent upon the rose-colored phantasmagoria of existence, her worriment past. Donald was safe with Brian. It hurt her a little that he did ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Hartley Coleridge, in the biographical supplement to the "Biographia Literaria," replies with what we now know to be truth: "If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping the strings of some shattered lyre." In 1795. that is, at the age of twenty-three, we find ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... crowded thoroughfares, through cluttered places, through factories, hotels, wharves, sits in railway trains, and the glare and tumult and pulsation, the engines and locomotives and cranes, the whole mad phantasmagoria of the modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him to reproduce them in all their weight and gianthood and mass, their blackness and luridness and power. The most vulgar things and events excite him. The traffic, the restlessness of crowds, the noise of vehicles, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... man,—characters and fortunes how diversified! All species of thinkers and actors, of ideas and passions, all the labyrinthine complications and scenery of existence, may be illustrated in persons or introduced by-the-by; into whatever colors make up the phantasmagoria of collective humanity the novelist may dip his brush, in painting his moving picture. Yet problems need not be fully appreciated, nor characters or actions profoundly understood. It must be an engrossing story, but the theme and treatment are as lawless as the conversation of an evening ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... "I was not yet in a state to enjoy Thee." There is Augustin's main objection to Platonism. He felt that instead of touching God, of enjoying Him, he would be held by purely mental conceptions, that he would be always losing his way among the phantasmagoria of idealism. What was the use of giving up the illusory realities of the senses, if it were not to get hold of more solid realities? Though his intelligence, his poet's imagination, might be attracted by the glamour of Platonism, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... pass to the French romance of Parceval, we find that all this phantasmagoria clothes a very different significance. The lance is that with which Longus pierced Christ's side, the Grail or basin is that in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the divine blood. This miraculous vase procures all the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... conspicuous by their absence; even that 'restraint' which is the salient characteristic of Greek expression in literature no less than in Art, is largely relaxed in the rough-and-tumble, informal, miscellaneous modern phantasmagoria of these diverting extravaganzas. ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... solve the workings of the varied phantasmagoria that flitted across the horizon of my brain that night, curious as they were; nor, will I try to track out how, and in what way, they retraced the events of the past, and prognosticated the possibilities of the future. The task in either direction ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... passing a man seated on the ground and robed in a horseman's cloak. I need not tell you that it was I whom you passed and accosted. I saw you ride by me; but the moment you were gone I forgot the occurrence. I looked upon the rolling and distant crowd as a child views the figures of the phantasmagoria, scarcely knowing if my eyes deceived me, feeling impressed with some stupefying and ghastly sensation of dread, and cherishing the conviction that my life was not as the life of the creatures that ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... American Cousin,") in which, among other characters, so call'd, a Yankee, certainly such a one as was never seen, or the least like it ever seen, in North America, is introduced in England, with a varied fol-de-rol of talk, plot, scenery, and such phantasmagoria as goes to make up a modern popular drama—had progress'd through perhaps a couple of its acts, when in the midst of this comedy, or non-such, or whatever it is to be call'd, and to offset it, or finish it out, as if in Nature's ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... way into it. Scenes and events that had once stained themselves, in deep colors, on the curtain that Time hangs around us, to shut us in from eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the succeeding phantasmagoria, and sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more strongly ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... instead of young, warm flesh returning His warmth, the wall was cold and burning Like stinging ice, and his passion, chilled, Lay in his heart like some dead thing killed At the moment of birth. Then, deadly sick, He would lie in a swoon for hours, while thick Phantasmagoria crowded his brain, And his body shrieked in the clutch of pain. The crisis passed, he would wake and smile With a vacant joy, half-imbecile And quite confused, not being certain Why he was suffering; a curtain Fallen over the tortured mind beguiled His sorrow. Like a little child ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... To live for ever in this magic land—to have the princess herself carry him in this little boat into the quiet bays of the islands, or out at night, in moonlight, on the open sea—to forget for ever the godless South and its social phantasmagoria, and live in this beautiful and distant solitude, with the solemn secrets of the hills and the moving deep for ever present to the imagination, might not that be a nobler life? And some day or other he would take this island-princess up to London, and he would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... means of obviating the present danger, while the persons whom he beheld glimmered before him, less like distinct and individual forms, than like the phantoms of a fever, or the phantasmagoria with which a disease of the optic nerves has been known to people a sick man's chamber. At length they assembled in the centre of the apartment where they had first appeared, and seemed to arrange themselves into form and order. A great number of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 373, Supplementary Number • Various
... unforeseen gray form suddenly arose very loftily and towered threateningly right beside them; masts, spars, rigging, all like a ship that had taken sudden shape in the air instantly, just as a single beam of electric light evokes phantasmagoria on the screen ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... kind of wink just now, or was I deceived in some way? The idea is absurd! Why should he wink at me? Perhaps they intend to upset my nervous organization, and, by so doing, drive me to extremes! Either the whole thing is a phantasmagoria, ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... work!—because I have shown how great works may be advantageously pursued by the aid of "Literary Union." It is a monstrous inference! The chimera which plays before his eyes is his own contrivance; he starts at his own phantasmagoria, and leaves me, after all, to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... grate the wild, lustrous, appalling eyes of Ligeia looked out at her, while the unearthly tones of Morella whispered from every corner of the room. She rose and replaced the book on the shelf, striving to shake off the dismal hold which all this phantasmagoria had taken on her fancy. Her eyes chanced to fall upon a bust of Athene which surmounted her guardian's desk, and immediately the mournful refrain of the Raven, solemn and dirge- like, floated through the air, enhancing the spectral element which enveloped ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... continued; in fact, it increased until it became almost unbearable. She closed her eyes only to behold a whirling confusion of shapes and visions. Gradually her mind became peopled by distorted fancies. The moments crept on and the phantasmagoria continued... Lilas realized at last that she was ill. She was confused, hysterical, wretched. She tried to rise, but failed... She found herself swimming through space; blinding lights and choking vapors enveloped her. She noted with ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... of him in his absence. This was far more interesting than any of the vague processional effects that glided half seen before his eyes, the streams of people with no apparent meaning in them, who were going and coming, flowing this way and the other, on their commonplace business. The phantasmagoria of moving forms and faces went past and past, as he thought, altogether insignificant, meaning nothing. She had said, "I wondered if you remarked"—something that had happened when they were apart from each other; a sunset ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... reality, consoling as a ray of light after a hideous nightmare. Those things which were false, impossible, a lie, a phantasmagoria born of a fever, were Michel Menko, the past years, the kisses of long ago, the threats of yesterday, the bayings of the infuriated dogs at that shadow which ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... glancing shadows of the trees towards the Piccadilly entrance. Here they paused for a moment and stood together looking down the drive. The sunlight seemed to touch with quivering fire the brilliant phantasmagoria. Berenice was serious. Her dark eyes swept down the broad path ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of them) which have come under my eye, even those written before he went to Malta, where his opium habits were confirmed. If my father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams, but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, released for a time at least from the tyranny of ailments which by a spell of wretchedness fix the thoughts upon themselves, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... long as the fatal delusion prevails, that liberty solely depends upon and consists in government, so long will such changes, no matter at what cost they may be effected, have as little practical and lasting result as the shifting of the figures in a phantasmagoria. The solid foundations of liberty must rest upon individual character; which is also the only sure guarantee for social security and national progress. John Stuart Mill truly observes that "even despotism does not produce its worst ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... escape." All was bustle and confusion, the officers looked east and west, and up in the air and down on the floor; but the search was in vain. The judge at last began to suspect witchcraft, and exclaimed, "This is a deceptio auris—it is absolute delusion, necromancy, phantasmagoria." And to the day of his death the judge never understood the precise origin of ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... mould themselves continually under the action of sun and wind in the great deserts—suddenly showing themselves upon the remote horizon, rear themselves silently and swiftly, then stalking forward towards the affected caravan like a phantom phantasmagoria, approach, manoeuvre, overshadow, and then as suddenly recede, collapse, fluctuate, again to remould into other combinations and to alarm other travellers—have passed. This vast structure of Central Europe had been abandoned by all the greater tribes; they had ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... however, and as approaching dawn began to burn its slow way up the stupendous vaults of space above the eastern cloud-battlements—battlements flicked with dull crimson, blood-tinged blotches, golden streaks and a whole phantasmagoria of shifting hues—something of the oppression of night ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... come nearer and nearer the city, painted in violet tints against an azure sky, to find it, as we approach, a splendid phantasmagoria. What we deemed citadels, domes and parapets, prove to be the silvery dolomite only: limestone rock thrown into every conceivable form, the imposing masses blocking the horizon; the shadow of a mighty Babylon darkening the heaven; but a Babylon untenanted from ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... letter—the letter! Phoebe and Ruth in the letter cannot be drowned, if they are Granny Marrable and Widow Thrale." A rapid phantasmagoria of possibilities and impossibilities shot through her mind. How could order ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the hourra raised by the Cossacks, as they advance to battle. Many husbands become irritated and fall into irreparable mistakes. Others abandon their wives. And, indeed, even those of superior intelligence do not know how to get hold of the enchanted ring, by which to dispel this feminine phantasmagoria. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... his brief uneasy slumbers anxious and unrefreshed. The phantasmagoria of his dream had been so living, so vivid, that it was difficult to throw off the impression produced by it. Moreover, he was slightly ashamed to find that, the restraining power of the will removed, his mind was capable of creating scenes of ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... curiosity was not to be exorcised by sentimental evasion: "Those letters, sir, of which you spoke, they must have been of a real, tangible form—not a part of the mythical phantasmagoria of your idealistic vision." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... more than mere coincidence. It was plagiarism. He wanted to cry out. But the room swam before his eyes. Surely he must be dreaming. It was a dream. The faces of the audience, the lights, Reginald, Jack—all phantasmagoria ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... the land of Russia appears to us when the mists of prehistoric time first begin to lift. Half-formed figures appear, rising, vanishing, showing large through the vapor; stirring, interwoven, endlessly coming and going; a phantasmagoria which it is impossible more than half to understand. At that early date the great Russian plain seems to have been the home of unnumbered tribes of varied race and origin, made up of men doubtless full of hopes and aspirations like ourselves, yet whose story ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the sea and among the lands in the midst of the sea. He does not know when he is beaten, wherefore the term "bulldog" is attached to him, so that all may know his unreasonableness. He has "some care as to the purity of his ways, does not wish for strange gods, nor juggle with intellectual phantasmagoria." He loves freedom, but is dictatorial to others, is self-willed, has boundless energy, and does things for himself. He is also a master of matter, an organizer of law, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... hands in his pockets and his whistle in his mouth. I think that in that moment of acutest suspense the whole of his earthly career must have flashed before him in a phantasmagoria. And then the crisis was past. The inherent gentlemanliness of the outraged host had triumphed and the ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... nostrils; a hand over my mouth. I struggled to hold my breath—failed. Then inhaled with a gasp, a pungent, sickening-sweet gas. Roaring, clanging gongs sounded in my ears—roaring and clattering louder, then fading into silence. A wild, tumbling phantasmagoria ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... shoulder received a severe contusion. The noble man-of-war captain inside had his face much cut with the bottles of wine that were in the pockets of the vehicle, and he would have made an excellent phantasmagoria. His nephew had one of his legs very much injured. Here we were in a most pitiable condition, not knowing what to do, as we could not move our travelling machine without assistance. As we were scratching our wise heads, and looking ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... like all other charlatans of this sort, assumed a theatrical magnificence, and an air of science calculated to deceive the vulgar. His best instrument of deception was the phantasmagoria; and as, by means of this abuse of the science of optics, he called up shades which were asked for, and almost always recognised, his correspondence with the other world was a thing proved by the concurrent testimony ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... in dizzy fashion, my judges watching me. Through my mind, in a mad phantasmagoria, danced the series of events that had begun in the St. Ives restaurant and was ending so dramatically in the salon of this ship. Or perhaps the end had not yet arrived, I thought ironically. By a slight effort of imagination ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... dreamlike. A phantasmagoria of blows and staggering steps. A nightmare with only the horrible vision of this goggled helmet always before ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... thinkers, then, believe that the only real things that exist are the mind and God, and that the universe is only the infinitely varied manifestation of God in the human conscience. It is evident, then, that matter, the only thing the materialist concedes real existence, is simply an orderly phantasmagoria; and God and soul, which materialists regard as mere fictions of the imagination, are the only conceptions ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... railroad, the express and the post-office, the telephone, the telegraph, the newspaper, and, in short, the whole machinery of social intercourse—these elements of existence combine to produce what may be termed a kaleidoscopic glitter, a dazzling and confusing phantasmagoria of life that wearies and stultifies the mental and moral nature. It induces a sort of intellectual fatigue through which we see the ranks of the victims of insomnia, melancholia, and insanity constantly recruited. Our modern ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... ILLUSIONS Raising the Ghost, Magic Lantern Pictures, Phantasmagoria, Chinese Shadows, Wonderful Mirror, ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... Copperfield, to go back to him, Dickens had exactly the opposite intention. He found his book in the expanse of life which his David had travelled over; Dickens's only care was to represent the wonderful show that filled his hero's memory. The whole phantasmagoria is the subject of the book, a hundred men and women, populating David's past and keeping his pen at full speed in the single-minded effort to portray them. Alone among the assembly David himself is scarcely of the subject at all. He has substance enough, and amply, to be a credible, ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... from which alone I shrink, and to which this emissary of hell seems to have predestined me. Sir, this is a monstrous and hideous extravagance, a delusion, but, after all, no more than a trick of the imagination; the reason, the judgment, is untouched. I cannot choose but see all the damned phantasmagoria, but I do not believe it real, and this is the difference ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu |
