"Phantom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that every author, while living, has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant places, and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never knew him in the flesh. When the author dies, this phantom fades away, not caring to continue business at the old stand. Then the dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature; this impression may grow sharper or fainter according to the fashions and new conditions of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... into the face of the mysterious woman—and suddenly I gave an involuntary shudder: there was a chilly breath upon me. And then I was not lying down, but sitting up in my bed; and where, as I fancied, the phantom had stood, the moonlight lay in a long streak of white upon ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... tents the Grecian leaders lie; Th' immortals slumber'd on their thrones above, All but the ever-watchful eye of Jove. To honour Thetis' son he bends his care, And plunge the Greeks in all the woes of war. Then bids an empty phantom rise to sight, And thus commands the vision of the night: directs Fly hence, delusive dream, and, light as air, To Agamemnon's royal tent repair; Bid him in arms draw forth th' embattled train, March all his legions to the dusty plain. Now tell the king ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... A phantom central repeated the numbers; there was a pause, and then "Two two four one" came in a tiny voice into my ear—a voice with the English sing-song—the voice plainly of a gentleman. "Is that you again, Mr. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... upon him. He was too familiar with truth to take the yeasty bunghole of a working barrel for a fountain of its waters. The unseen Lord and his reported words were to Gibbie realities, compared with which the very visible Mr. Sclater and his assured utterance were as the merest seemings of a phantom mood. He had never resolved to keep the words of the Lord: he just kept them; but he knew amongst the rest the Lord's words about the keeping of his words, and about being ashamed of him before men, and it was with a pitiful indignation he heard the minister's ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... dreamy night is on, up the Hudson river, And the sheen of modern taste is dim and far away, Ghostly men on phantom rafts make the waters shiver, Laughing in the sibilance of the silver spray. Yea, and up the woodlands, staunch in moonlit weather, Go the ghostly horsemen, adventuresome to ride, White as mist the doublet-braize, bandolier and feather, Fleet as ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... he offered me an asylum himself: but he would have the same good intentions at present, when he could not act in that manner without completely endangering his existence. In proportion as tyranny is allowed to advance, it grows, as we look at it, like a phantom, but it seizes with the strength of a real being. I arrived then, at the country seat of a person whom I scarcely knew, in the midst of a society to which I was an entire stranger, and bearing in my heart the most cutting chagrin, which I made every effort ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... Burkhardt stepped out into an evening left thus to its stilly depth, shades drawn against it, a light dust of snow, just fallen, was scurrying up-street before the wind, like something phantom with its skirts blowing forward. Little drifts of it, dry as powder, had blown up against the porch. She sidestepped them, hurrying down a wind-swept brick walk and out a picket gate that did not swing entirely after. Behind her, ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... chose. Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was forever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine;—and the physician knew it well! Would he startle him with sudden fear? As at the waving of a magician's wand, uprose a grisly phantom,—uprose a thousand phantoms,—in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking round about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... down and were reflected, as in a mirror, on the otherwise ink-black water of the lagoon. As we pulled ahead, we appeared to be passing through a narrow canal, with lofty impenetrable walls on either side, while in the centre rose before our eyes the phantom-like outline of the schooner, her topmast heads and rigging alone being seen against the sky above the dark shadows of the trees. The splash of our oars was the only sound which broke the dead silence which reigned in this sequestered spot; while the only light, except from the glittering stars ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... my seat, drew one long breath, but whether he thought I was going to kill him,—I dare say I looked it,—or whether he saw a sheriff behind, or a phantom gallows before, I know not; but without waiting for the thunderbolt to strike, he rushed from the car as precipitately as he had rushed in. I WAS angry,—not because I was to have been cheated, for I been repeatedly and atrociously cheated and only smiled, but because the rascal dared attempt ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Either the Karlsruhe had returned to life as a plague upon allied shipping, an able successor appeared, or a flotilla of giant submarines was at large that could cruise almost any distance. Several vessels brought tales to England of being chased by a phantom ship near the African coast. But such stories had been repeated so many times without any foundation that the British admiralty was in a quandary. To overlook no clue, a flotilla of cruisers swept the seas under suspicion. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... his professions of sanity and reason, had an inexplicable, invincible horror of death; he quailed at the mere mention of the black phantom. The subject being not at all to his taste, he ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... family who soared on wings of hope above the sordid facts of the situation was Claude Martel. After years of search, he had at last found the generous benefactor, the noble young patron, who recognized the merit of his work. They spent hours together elaborating the plot of "Phantom Love" and discussing every detail of its construction. Occasionally on Saturday night Mr. Martel would mention quite confidentially to Quin that, owing to some delayed payments, he was a little pressed for ready money and that a small loan ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... her again. He could not, for the brown eyes which still seemed looking at him as if asking what he did. There was a strange spell about those phantom eyes, and they made him say to Lucy, who was now ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... kept going back to her mother's story—her father's silence and suffering. It was as though her mind could not disentangle itself from the load which had been flung upon it—could not recover its healthiness of action amid the phantom sights and sounds which beset imagination. Again and again she must ask him for details—and shrink from the answers; must hide her eyes with the little moan that wrung his heart; and break out in ejaculations, as though of bewilderment, under a revelation ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... we ourselves help to make, and then tremble before the creation of our own cowardice; whereas, if we will but face him, in the fear of God and the faith of Christ, determined to say the thing which is true, and do the thing which is right, we shall find the modern Caesar but a phantom of our own imagination; a tyrant, indeed, as long as he is feared, but a coward as soon ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... force of this desire; then she drew quickly back while the world about her—the room, the window, the bare skeleton of the elevated road, the street, and even the rose geranium blooming on the sill—became as remote and impalpable as a phantom. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... are waiting for the facts," he presently resumed, speaking with a slowness which told of a mind labouring for the right mode of expression. "These are so scanty, I fear, of so, shall I say, phantom a kind, that even when they are in your possession you will consider me to be merely the victim of a delusion. In the first place, then, I have reason to believe that someone followed me from my ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... The phantom was not unlike the wisps of yellow smoke from a green-wood fire, despatched by a lazy dawn wind. The face of Jen, ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... about four years ago, when, as the guest of Mr. Stedman, she told several interesting stories, relate an experience of her own, wherein, one night early in her life, she had leaned against the walls of the Campanile, gray and phantom-like in the moonlight, and, singing softly to herself, was surprised at discovering several little lizards lying about on the stones, their heads held alertly in the air as if entranced by the sound ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... heavens. All things that are, are on condition of perpetual flux and change. The cloud-rack has the likeness of bastions and towers, but they are mist, not granite, and the wind is every moment sweeping away their outlines, till the phantom fortress topples into red ruin while we gaze. The tiniest stream eats out its little valley and rounds the pebble in its widening bed, rain washes down the soil, and frost cracks the cliffs above. So silently and yet mightily does the law of change work that to a meditative ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the height of madness, For I have wander'd long in sweet delusion. At length the pleasing Phantom chang'd its form, And left me in a ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... have lived these weeks in Germany I do not doubt that what you would have seen would have led your ripe experience to a fervent faith in a Divinely guided future of mankind. The great spiritual movement of 1870, when I was a boy growing up, was but a phantom compared to July and August of 1914. Germany was a nation stirred by the most sacred emotions, humble and strong, filled with just wrath and a firm determination to conquer—a nation disciplined, faithful, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... us to come down on the yacht, but we thought the steamer would be faster; so he sailed without us and was to have touched at Havana, but he has apparently changed his course. Doesn't she look like a phantom ship in ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... fact and they cared nothing for the name of liberty; they had a ruler with whom they were well pleased, and they did not long for one of whom they knew nothing. But Stephen, brave, pure and devoted, was a man of dreams, and he died for them, as many others have died for the name of Rome and the phantom of an impossible Republic; for Rome has many times been fatal to those who loved ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... you derive from so excellent a picture? none at all, most certainly: neither has the poet said a single word which might in the least serve to mark a single limb or feature of the phantom, which he intended to represent in all the horrors imagination can conceive. In reality, poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is, to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... And a real sound smothered the phantom. Johnson the purser was sitting here alone in the dimness. He was smoking. I noticed that his cigar held a long, frail ash. It could not have been him I was chasing. He was sitting there quite calmly. A thick-necked, heavy fellow, easily out of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... the lesson of the dead: Sudden the rich bells chorussed overhead: "O be not of the throng ephemeral To whom to-day is fame, to-morrow fate, Proud of some robe no statelier than a pall, Mad for some wreath of cypress funeral— A phantom generation fatuate. Stand thou aside and stretch a hand to save, Virtue alone revives ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... ridicule. At this point, a sense of tragedy is transformed into demoniac glee. No more is this a permanent state. The humorist is too impulsive to accept it as final. Moreover, he feels that with the world he has annihilated himself. In the phantom realm into which he has turned the world, his laughter reverberates with ghostlike hollowness. Recognizing that the world meant more to him than he was willing to admit, and that apart from it he has no being, he again ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... he bore only the name of regent; he had the power and the dominion; the infant nurseling Ivan, the minor emperor, was but a shadow, a phantom, having the appearance but not the reality of lordship; he was a thing unworthy of notice; he could make no one tremble with fear, and therefore it was unnecessary to crawl ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... he said, "after what we have just heard, that men of letters are, as a rule, very little acquainted with what concerns the government of a country,—not that government of pure speculation, which is nothing more than a phantom, vanishing the nearer we approach to it, but the practical government which consists in keeping men within the sphere of their practical duties. With all their pretence of knowledge, they are, in this matter, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... sense of their own security, which they should not certainly have entertained, had they been left to their own reflections, and when, after a good deal of turning and restlessness they at length fell into a disagreeable and unrefreshing dose, and were attacked by that hideous phantom, nightmare, which was often the case; starting up in fright from the assassin's knife, which they could scarcely persuade themselves to be unreal; it was pleasant to fix their eyes upon their comical ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... of perception is obvious, since it is to the errors of sense that the term illusion has most frequently been confined. It is hardly less evident that there are illusions of memory. The peculiar difficulty of distinguishing between a past real event and a mere phantom of the imagination, illustrated in the exclamation, "I either saw it or dreamt it," sufficiently shows that memory is liable to be imposed on. Finally, it is agreed on by all that the beliefs we are wont to regard as self-evident are sometimes erroneous. When, for example, an imaginative ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... the cloud castles began to flush rosily, though the sun still rode above the tree tops. A purple light filled the aisles of the forest, through which a herd of deer, making for some accustomed lick, passed like a phantom troop. They vanished, and from out the stillness of the glades came the sudden, startled barking of a fox. A shadow darted across a sunlit alley from gloom to gloom, paused on the outskirts of the wood below the crags while one might count ten, then turned and flitted ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... "The phantom knew me, for, being as yet unburied, he was not one of the shades, and had not lost his memory or voice, nor did he need to drink of the blood. He moaned and replied: 'Noble Odysseus, it was an evil fate which the gods had decreed ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... have seen him lean, spell-bound, from our windows on a blue summer night, thrilled by the presence out there of Cleopatra's Needle, the pagan symbol flaunting its slenderness against river and sky, while in the distance the dome of St. Paul's, the Christian symbol, hung a phantom upon the heavens. His pleasure in the friendship of men of rank and family might have savoured of snobbishness had not one understood how much they stood for to him as symbols. I am sure he could fancy himself with these friends that same King of ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... idea, hardly yet a resolve, he afterwards carries out so well, that he deceives not only king and queen and court, but the most of his critics ever since: to this day they believe him mad. Such must have studied in the play a phantom of their own misconception, and can never have seen the Hamlet of Shakspere. Thus prejudiced, they mistake also the effects of moral and spiritual perturbation and misery for further sign of intellectual disorder—even for proof of moral weakness, placing them in the same category with ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... the children had been on a London music-hall stage. The Englishwomen passed us as though we had been invisible. They had so completely the air of seeing nothing in our chairs that I felt myself a phantom, a ghost like Banquo's, with no guilty eye to discern my presence at the table. Lastly came the Austrian, who had paused to speak to a servant, and, as she passed, she gave us a fleeting smile and a slight bow, the mere shadow ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... the first that fell of womankind, When on that dread yet lovely serpent smiling, Whose Image then was stamped upon her mind— 160 But once beguiled—and ever more beguiling; Dazzling, as that, oh! too transcendent vision To Sorrow's phantom-peopled slumber given, When heart meets heart again in dreams Elysian, And paints the lost on Earth revived in Heaven; Soft, as the memory of buried love; Pure, as the prayer which Childhood wafts above; Was she—the daughter of that rude old Chief, Who met the maid with tears—but ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... his work. Let there be light and there was light: 'tis so: For was, and is, and will be, are but is; And all creation is one act at once, The birth of light: but we that are not all, As parts, can see but parts, now this, now that, And live, perforce, from thought to thought, and make One act a phantom of succession: thus Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow, Time; But in the shadow will we work, and mould The woman to the fuller day.' She spake With kindled eyes; we rode a league beyond, And, o'er a bridge of pinewood crossing, ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... most pure and noble face, Seen in the thronged and hurrying street, Sheds o'er the world a sudden grace, A flying odor sweet, Then passing leaves the cheated sense Balked with a phantom excellence. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Phantom Bride'? It 's perfectly thrilling! There 's a regular rush for it at the library; but some prefer 'Breaking a Butterfly.' Which do you like best?" asked a pale girl of Polly, in one of the momentary ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... really but a combination of sacrileges and murders graduated with a view to the permanent perversion of the human will and the realization in a living man of the monstrous phantom of the fiend. It is, therefore, properly speaking, the religion of the devil, the worship of darkness, the hatred of goodness exaggerated to the point of paroxysm; it is the incarnation of death and the permanent ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... prevent its secession. It was this wretched dogma, that paralyzed our energies when they were most needed, gave immunity to treason, and invited rebellion, rendered our stocks unsalable, and induced thousands, at home and abroad, to believe that the Federal Government was a phantom, which existed only ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... The phantom stooped over me as she spoke, and lowered her gory fingers, as if to touch my face, when, terror giving me the power of which it at first deprived me, I screamed aloud—the casement of the apartment was thrown open with a loud noise,—and—But what signifies ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... yards from the last out-building rose a great brick edifice, with a black slate roof and a thick round tower. Its gloomy walls on this treeless pasture-land, without one trace of life around, rose beneath the cloudy sky like a phantom fortress which some evil spirit had evoked from the abyss—a station from which to blight ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... them almost curse the sunshine; for it is ever between them and it—not a mere shadow, nor yet a substance, but a vacuum of light, casting also a shadow. Neither substance nor shadow, it must be a phantom—it may be of a dead sin—and against such, exorcism avails. I opine this exorcism lies in no cabalistic words, no crossing of the forehead, no holy name, in nothing that one can do unto or for himself, but in entire self-forgetfulness—in doing for, in sympathizing with, others. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... polished crests. Beyond the whole, and bounding the valley filled with a billowy sea of bluish-green pine tops, rose a wooded eminence, wearing still its Persian robe of autumn foliage, and on its brow the colonnade and chimneys of "Elm Bluff" blotted the southern sky, like a threatening phantom. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... lamentable thing it is to roam through cities, provinces, nations, and kingdoms simply to visit a church here, a castle there; to rise at four in the morning at the summons of a pitiless guide, to see the sun rise from Rigi or Etna; to pass like a phantom, already dead, through the world of living shades called men; to know not where to rest; to know no land in which to take root, no arm on which to lean, no heart in which to pour your own! Well, last night, my dear Roland, suddenly, in an instant, in a second, this void in my ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... impression as to what the gifted preacher meant when he extolled in such glowing terms that true liberty which is the glory, at once, and the best security of nations. If, a little later, they pursued the phantom instead of the reality, it must be considered that, as yet, they had no political education or experience, and that no high-principled Tribune, like O'Connell, stood forward to lead them. All who aspired to guide them, and who won their confidence, were tainted with the doctrines of the ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... I do? I don't do anything," said Herrick. "There is nothing wrong; all is above-board; Captain Brown is a good soul; he is a ... he is...." The phantom voice of Davis called in his ear: "There's going to be a funeral"; and the sweat burst forth and streamed on his brow. "He is a family man," he resumed again, swallowing; "he has children ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man bowed once more. The phantom of a half-smoked cigar floated reproachfully before his eyes. He had lit it a quarter of an hour ago in fond anticipation of a quiet evening. Unless a miracle had occurred, it must be out by this time. And he knew as well as anybody else that ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... what did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... could not do it. My will was utterly powerless. We approached the house where Ackermann resided, and I was seized with horror, thinking it possible that she might murder him while I witnessed the bloody deed, powerless to prevent it. But she never once looked at the house while passing it. This phantom—whatever it might be—seemed to be entirely free from human feelings. I do not think this idea tended to reassure me, and when we left the closely built street, and merged into the open country, where the fields stretched away on every side of us, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... we have this knowledge in our veins, Shall we deny the journey's gathered lore— The great refusals and the long disdains, The stubborn questing for a phantom shore, The sleepless hopes and memorable pains, And all mortality's ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... wrapped in shrouds of drifting clouds I watch the phantom's flight, Till alien eyes from Paradise Smile on me as I write: And I forgive the wrongs that live, As lightly as I wipe Away the tear that rises here; And so I smoke ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... understanding of their meaning. Though dead to the rest of the world, David would maintain an intense and secret life in his murderer's conscience. He had never fought such a subtle and implacable foe, and he lay thinking of how he could create conditions that would give him escape, push the phantom from him, make him forget, and be as he had been when no one had disputed his sovereignty over himself. He tried to think that time would mitigate this haunting discomfort. His sense of guilt, his fear of his wife, would die when the novelty of once again being one with the crowd ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Why should the phantom of a dead past divide us? We belong to one another, you and I. Think of what life might mean to us, side by side, hand in hand, working, striving together, you the stronger, giving me some of your strength, I ready to give you the love you need—the love you have craved ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... sitting there in a cold sweat, a remorse gnawing at his vitals, realizing the curse that was on him. He divined that never would he be able to keep off that phantom. He remembered how his father had been eternally pursued by the furies of accusing guilt, how he had never been able to forget in work or in sleep those men he ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... Hali. "The scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever," he muttered, but I do not believe Vance heard him. Then by degrees he led Vance along the ramifications of the Imperial family, to Uoht and Thale, from Naotalba and Phantom of Truth, to Aldones, and then tossing aside his manuscript and notes, he began the wonderful story of the Last King. Fascinated and thrilled I watched him. He threw up his head, his long arms were stretched out in a magnificent gesture ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... trouble to form a preference. And on the other hand, poor Susan Fitzgerald, for all her blustering defiance of the tyrant sex, could in reality be overawed and browbeaten by any male not yet out of kilts. Before the phantom-like laughter had quite died away, Mrs. Hornblower added majestically: "But I don't want my opinions to count too much either way as I may ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... wrapt into another sphere, far from the light of day, of hope, of love. I had no natural affection left; she had slain me, but no other thing had power over me. Her arms embraced another; but her mock-embrace, the phantom of her love, still bound me, and I had not a wish to escape. So I felt then, and so perhaps shall feel till I grow old and die, nor have any desire that my years should last longer than they are linked in the chain of those ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... must be carried far into the mists of that "prehistoric" period, that mythical age which inspires the modern historian with such a feeling of squeamishness that anything creeping out of its abysmal depths is sure to be instantly dismissed as a deceptive phantom, the mythos of an idle tale, or a later fable unworthy of serious notice. The Atlantean "old Greeks" could not be designated even as the Autochthones—a convenient term used to dispose of the origin of any people whose ancestry cannot be traced, and which, at any rate with the Hellenes, meant ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... is breaking, My burning brain is reeling, My very soul is riven, I feel myself forsaken. And phantom forms of horror, And shapeless dreams of terror. And mocking tones of laughter, About me seem to gather; And death, and hell, and darkness ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... of the cold was such that De Guiche opened his eyes, and by a look in which revived intelligence was dawning, seemed as if struggling back again into existence. The first thing upon which he fixed his gaze was this phantom standing erect by his bedside. At that sight his eyes became dilated, but without any appearance of consciousness in them. The lady thereupon made a sign to her companion, who had remained at the door; ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... with a start, and as I did so I sought to retain the phantom being who faded away and became more and more intangible and unreal, in proportion as my mind grew clearer through the effort it made to remember. Could it be possible that she was not and had never been more than a vision? Had nothingness re-engulfed and forever effaced ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... this ambition of greatness that hurries them all on! Why can they not be satisfied with being respectable subjects of so great a country as England, that they must destroy each other for this phantom of liberty? Will it make them wiser, or happier, or ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... would be idle to suggest that the tradition of that mysterious cart, moving silently through the darkness of night on muffled wheels towards our village churchyards, was merely a creature of the imagination. The tradition of that phantom cart which lingered for years had a substantial origin as certain as the memory of many persons still living can make it! In many of the villages around Royston, as indeed in other districts, the terror of it became such that not a burial took place in the parish ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... be man, From that one light no man can look upon, Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons And all the shadows. O dear Spirit, half-lost In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign That thou art thou,—who wailest being born And banish'd into mystery,... ...our mortal veil And shattered phantom of that Infinite One, Who made thee unconceivably thyself Out of his whole world-self and all in all,— Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape And ivyberry, choose; and still depart From death ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Whenever it is opposed to the transcendental, the natural is conceived as dangerous and diabolical. At the moment of the abrupt inner change in Tannhaeuser, Venus and her world must vanish like a phantom of the night. "A consuming, voluptuous excitement kept my blood and nerves tingling while I sketched and composed the music of Tannhaeuser...." says Wagner in one place, and in another he confesses that sensual pleasure, while attracting and seducing him, filled ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... that nothing should escape him at such a Crisis, which might increase the Suspicions, and consequently the Precautions of his Enemies. It was not till after the Death of Zokitarezoul, that he asserted his Claim. Attended by a Multitude of his Adherents, he went to the Pemenralt, which is a Phantom of the antient States. There feigning to submit his Destiny to the Arbitration of that illustrious Senate, he set forth, and urged his Claim with such a persuasive Eloquence, that the whole Assembly unanimously annulled a Will, ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... I gave up flies, spoons, phantom minnows, artificial frogs, and crayfish. As Dick continued to sit on the rock and think, we both joined him. The sun was very warm and grateful, and I am sure we both acquired an added ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Mint band, had repaired their ramparts, cut away their bridges and mounted guard with their guns loaded.[2427] But it is only a postponement. Now that the commissioners have gone, and the king's authority a phantom, now that the last loyal regiment is disarmed, the terrified Directory recast and obeying like a servant, with the Legislative Assembly allowing everywhere the oppression of the Constitutionalists by the Jacobins, a fresh ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... grey-eyed Athene, turned to other thoughts. She made a phantom, and fashioned it after the likeness of a woman, Iphthime, daughter of great-hearted Icarius, whom Eumelus wedded, whose dwelling was in Pherae. And she sent it to the house of divine Odysseus to bid Penelope, amid ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... and a well-marked stroke of the fatality pursuing him. He sauntered by the graveyard wall until her figure slipped out of sight. It went like a puffed candle, and still it haunted the corner where last seen. Her vanishing seemed to say, that less of her belonged to him than the phantom his eyes ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Blessington," pursued the sensitive and affectionate young officer, "I should vainly attempt to paint all that passed in my mind at that dreadful moment. Nothing but the depth of my despair gave me strength to support the scene throughout. I saw the frantic and half-naked woman glide like a phantom past the troops, dividing the air with the rapidity of thought. I knew it to be Ellen; for the discovery of her exchange of clothes with one of the drum boys of the grenadiers was made soon after you left the fort. I saw ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... of those hollow principalities which the despot and the stranger built in Italy after the fatal date of 1494, when national enthusiasm and political energy were expiring in a blaze of art, and when the Italians as a people had ceased to be; but when the phantom of their former life, surviving in high works of beauty, was still superb by reason of imperishable style! How much in Italy of the Renaissance was, like this plank-built plastered theatre, a glorious sham! The sham was seen through then; and now ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... and birds and animals and all other living things are inextricably made up of the stuff of the same unfathomable struggle. For where there is life there must be a soul possessed of life. Life, apart from some soul possessed with life, is an abstraction of the logical reason and a phantom of no more genuine reality than the "a priori unity of apperception" or "the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the south; Wild birds of huge beak, and all horrors that drouth Engenders of slime in the land of the pest, Vile shapes without shape, and foul bats of the West, Bringing Night on their wings; and the bodies wherein Great Brahma imprisons the spirits of sin, Many-handed, that blent in one phantom of fight Like a Titan, and threatfully warr'd with the light; I have heard the wild shriek that gave signal to close, When they rushed on that shadowy Python of foes, That met with sharp beaks and wide gaping of jaws, With flappings of wings, and fierce grasping of claws, And whirls of long tails:—I ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Lake of Saint John the rock-bound Saguenay rolls through a mystic country, sublime in natural beauty, and alive with traditions, legends and folk-lore tales. Ghosts of the past people its shores, phantom canoes float down the river of mystery; and disembodied spirits troop back to earth at the dreamer's call; traders, trappers, soldiers, women strong in love and valor, heroes in the long ago, and saintly missionaries offering up mortal life that savages may ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... am an old traveler, and was soon in bed and enjoying a well-earned slumber, but my dreams were wild, for I seemed now to be driving furiously over the moorland, pursuing ever the phantom of pretty Bessie, who, with her bewitching smile, was luring me into the fog and darkness, and now to be barring the front door to defend her from some unknown assailant, whose perpetual rapping rang ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... turned a corner, and come plump on the house; and there on the piazza, two rods away, sat a rare and radiant maiden, playing cat's cradle with my eldest son and heir. I can't tell you how she was dressed; but she was a phantom of delight when thus she broke upon our sight; a lovely apparition, sent to be Jim Hartman's blandishment. At least so it seemed, for he stood there and stared like a noble savage. As when the lightning descends ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... the head. It was silvering the gray hairs that rested there. Ralph stepped up to the bedside and uncovered the face. Was it changed since he looked on it last? Last night it was his father's face: was it laden with iniquity now? How the visible phantom of one horrible moment must have stood up again and again before these eyes! How sternly fortune must have frowned on these features! Yet it was his ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... without the propensities which shaded his early life, preserved the name of a republic, whilst he well knows that a decisive and irresistible authority can alone reunite a people so vast and distracted; who, in the pursuit of a fatal phantom, have been inured to change, and long alienated from subordination. I would not wish such a government to be perpetual, but if it be conducted with wisdom and justice, I will not hesitate to declare, that I think it will ultimately prove as favourable to the happiness, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... flashed into Mary's mind as she left the white-walled village of Shanmoor behind her, and climbed upward with her shame and her secret into the mists. To see the bogle was merely distressing and untoward; to be spoken to by the phantom voice was death. No one so addressed could hope to survive the following Midsummer Day. Revolving these things in her mind, along with the terrible details of her own story, the exhausted girl had seen her vision, and, as she firmly ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wild and lurid desert, in the thunder-travelled ways, 'Neath the night that ever hurries to the dawn that still delays, There she clutches at illusions, and she seeks a phantom goal With the unattaining passion that consumes the unsleeping soul: And calamity enfolds her, like the shadow of a ban, And the niggardness of Nature makes the misery of man: And in vain the hand is stretched to lift her, stumbling in the gloom, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... but me they know, As mountains might the leaping stream that meets The ocean as a river. Time and exile Change our life's course, but is its flow less deep Because it is more calm? I've seen to-day Might stir its pools. What if my phantom flung A shade on their bright path? 'Tis closed to me Although the goal's a crown. She loved me once; Now swoons, and now the match is off. She's true. But I have clipped the heart that once could soar High as her own! Dreams, dreams! And yet entranced, ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... such pleasures, no one, my dear, would wish to deprive you; but beware, Eliza! Though strewed with flowers, when contemplated by your lively imagination, it is, after all, a slippery, thorny path. The round of fashionable dissipation is dangerous. A phantom is often pursued, which leaves its deluded votary the real form of wretchedness." She spoke with an emphasis, and, taking up her candle, wished me a good night. I had not power to return the compliment. Something seemingly prophetic in her looks and expressions cast ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... then continued: "And yet you think that you can remain in the theater without becoming a hysterical type? That's impossible! This phantom life, this daily portrayal of new characters, feelings and thoughts upon that shifting plane of impressions, amid artificial stimulants this must metamorphose every human being, demolish his former personality and recast or rather disintegrate his soul so that you can put almost any stamp upon ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... must speak to you; hear me. You hug a phantom to your heart; Russell does not and will not love you, other than as ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the causes, it takes the evil in a lump, personifies it, and christens it "the Devil." Thus it keeps men off the real path of deliverance, and teaches them to fear the Bogie-Man, who is simply a phantom of superstition, and always vanishes at the first ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... Provence, revisited the tomb of my Eveline, saw my boy, sought absolution, made many prayers, but could not shake off the phantom. It was on a Friday I slew my foe, and on each Friday night he appeared. The young Simon de Montfort was about to form another band of crusaders, and he allowed me to accompany him, with the result I have described. During my stay in the monastery at Acre the phantom ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... man I was raising to my own level, not as one to whom I wished to descend. I forced him to be cleanly in his jokes, but allowed him to be free and facetious within the limits of decent mirth. He was a frank, jovial man. I questioned him minutely to discover if he was not in league with the phantom who was in the habit of leaving his cloak upon the bed. This, however, seemed far from probable; the man evidently had such an aversion for the Hamstringers, that, had not a regard for my relationship held him back, he would have been only too glad to ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... which makes it puzzling. And to the best of my belief I have never seen anyone like her; what I felt was a kind of dim far-off memory, vague but persistent. The only sensation I can compare it to, is that odd feeling one sometimes has in a dream, when fantastic cities and wondrous lands and phantom personages appear ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... Swedish hero, in the hope of obtaining from the Emperor the electoral dignity. Deaf to the suggestions of a rational policy, he listened only to the dictates of heated ambition; by supporting the Emperor, he exasperated France, his formidable neighbour; and in the pursuit of a visionary phantom in another country, left undefended his own dominions, which were instantly overrun by a French army. Austria willingly conceded to him, as well as to the other princes of the League, the honour of being ruined ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... something of wild unrest. The cool, salt flavor of the air spoke of wild stretches of the North Atlantic where sea-fogs have touched the eerie loneliness of Greenland bergs and passed it on to the wind. In this ghostly dusk of driving mist the smear of the rain across the face is like a touch of phantom hands coming out of unfathomed spaces, gentle but uncanny. All the soft perfumes of wood and field seem beaten to the ground by this rain which brings with its salt tang faint breathings ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... by Spaniards; but the government is too much occupied with its own wars, and the knowledge could not be procured except at the price of blood. Two young men of good constitution, and who could afford to spend five years, might succeed. If the object of search prove a phantom, in the wild scenes of a new and unexplored country, there are other objects of interest; but, if real, besides the glorious excitement of such a novelty, they will have something to look back upon through ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... phantom of delight, When first she gleamed upon my sight: A lovely apparition sent To ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... feet in the sea, and its head vanishing into infinity—here, at last, was this rock of rocks, caught, phantom-like, up ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the open meadow the cow was still grazing; perhaps the same cow that was once pestered by a volatile Irish terrier who used to swing merrily at the end of that cow's tail; a merry and irresponsible little creature, she was, and her phantom still scampers the road where the sharp scream of the Freeport trolley brings back her last fatal venture to our mind. It was strange to look at those windows, with their neat white sills, and to remember how we felt when for the first time we slept in ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... having declared his intention of repairing to Delphi to purify himself from his blood-guiltiness, flies in terror from the furies of his mother, whom the chorus does not perceive, but conceives to be a mere phantom of his imagination, but who, nevertheless, will no longer allow him any repose. The chorus concludes with a reflection on the scene of murder thrice-repeated in the royal palace since the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... a slave of the most degrading superstition. Instead of worshipping the true, free, living God, who governs all things by His Providence, he bows before the horrid phantom of blind chance or inexorable destiny. He is a man who obstinately refuses to believe the most solidly-established facts in favor of religion, and yet, with blind credulity, greedily swallows the ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... thought. "The ghost of Captain Seth Costin, late of the Union Army, probably the Army of the Potomac, will perform for all comers promptly at nine. 'We regret there can only be one performance each evening.' Or was that true? Had anyone stayed to see? Maybe the obliging phantom performed every hour ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... past be spread before the eyes of a candid and thoughtful people; let the bulky roll of misgovernment, incompetence, and blind folly be enrolled on the one hand, and then turn to the terrors of the midnight assassin and the lawless deeds which desecrate the sunlight of noontide, walking abroad as a phantom armed with ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... I cannot quite forget That in the underdawn of dreams I have felt the faint surmise Shining through the starry deep of my sleep That I with God went singing once Up and down with suns and storms Through the phantom-pillared forms And stately-silent naves ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... walking in the dark would naturally do for the greater certainty of following his conductress, while the general part of the symbol of IMMORTAL LIFE, being turned toward the figure of Pluto, shews that she is leading the phantom to his realms. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... a phantom lover.' Then the answer to that flashed on me and I said in a hurry, 'I thought you never came to ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... suitor started at this sudden apparition. Jack, whose clothes were covered with dust, and whose face was deathly pale from his recent exertion, looked more like a phantom than ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... tossed aside the blocks of childhood days. Instead of laboriously piling small squares of wood one upon another in an endeavor to build the tiny semblance of a house, I now, in this second childhood of mine, projected against thin air phantom edifices planned and completed in the twinkling of an eye. To be sure, such houses of cards almost immediately superseded one another, but the vanishing of one could not disturb a mind that had ever another ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... him to get back to his desk and continue the story of their lives. But he said after he had published several books, and saw what serious demands his characters were accustomed to make for the constant attention of his already overtasked brain, he resolved that the phantom individuals should no longer intrude on his hours of recreation and rest, but that when he closed the door of his study he would shut them all in, and only meet them again when he came back to resume his task. That force of will with which he was so pre-eminently endowed enabled him to ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... away! To future times how faint the voice of fame, For greatness here but "stalks an empty name." Around, above, how sorrow builds her throne, To snatch from death's embrace each treasure gone. See, how the horrid phantom bends his bow, And points his dart to lay that victim low![1] She sinks, she falls, and her fond husband's breast Is the cold pillow to that marble rest! But softly tread upon the sacred ground, Where Britain's bards lie sepulchred round. Sons of the muse, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... brilliantly; the moon, about three days old, was gleaming with a soft subdued radiance through the topmost branches of the trees on the adjacent shore; and the night-mist was already gathering so thickly on the bosom of the river that the brig loomed through it vague, shadowy, and indistinct as a phantom craft. The tide was ebbing, and her stern was turned toward us, but no lights appeared gleaming through her cabin windows, which struck me as being a little strange until I remembered that Monsieur ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... his idea of justice helped me afterwards to see that God could not have done it either, for that it was not justice. Some perception of this must have lain at the root of the heresy that Jesus did not suffer, but a cloud-phantom took his place on the cross. Wherever people speculate instead of obeying, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... should be, Who call'd our Wordsworth friend. My thoughts did frame A growing Maiden, who, from day to day Advancing still in stature, and in grace, Would all her lonely Father's griefs efface, And his paternal cares with usury pay. I still retain the phantom, as I can; And ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... happened at Port Charlotte). At eight o'clock I could see the faces of the audience well enough, but by and by the room became quite dark, and I seemed to be addressing an audience of silent and attentive ghosts. After I had finished, a Phantom arose in the far corner of the room and proposed a vote of thanks; and thereafter a Voice somewhere pronounced the benediction. Then there was a movement of feet, and the shadowy spectres trooped out into the night. The foolish virgins had no oil in their lamps; in Port Charlotte, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... silence, Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long, A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect, Terrible in beauty, age, and power, The genius of poets of old lands, As to me directing like flame its eyes, With finger pointing to many immortal songs, And menacing voice, What ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... house of many memories. Great people of yore, kings and queens, buffoons, and grave ambassadors, played their stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There Prince Charlie held his phantom levees, and in a very gallant manner represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these things of clay are mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself is shown for sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these changes. For fifty weeks together, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... moustache to one's pipe-stem. By noon the air is thick with a coagulated mist; the temperature meanwhile has risen, and a little snow falls at intervals. The valleys are filled with a curious opaque blue, from which the peaks rise, phantom-like and pallid, into the grey air, scarcely distinguishable from their background. The pine-forests on the mountain-sides are of darkest indigo. There is an indescribable stillness and a sense ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Idealism.... See then how far we have travelled from the scholastic theory of occult substrata underlying each group of phenomena. These substrata were but the ghosts of the phenomena themselves; behind the tree or the mountain a sort of phantom tree or mountain, which persists after the body of perception has gone away with the departure of the percipient mind. Clearly this is no scientific interpretation of the facts, but is rather a specimen of naive barbaric thought surviving in metaphysics. The tree or mountain ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... King Leodogran rejoiced, But musing "Shall I answer yea or nay?" Doubted and drowsed, nodded and slept, and saw, Dreaming, a slope of land that ever grew, Field after field, up to a height, the peak Haze-hidden, and thereon a phantom king, Now looming, and now lost: and on the slope The sword rose, the hind fell, the herd was driven, Fire glimpsed; and all the land from roof and rick, In drifts of smoke before a rolling wind, Stream'd to the ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... judgment against it as being in many places defiled, defective, false, surreptitious; who have corrected some passages, tampered with others; torn out others; who have converted every bulwark wherewith it was guarded into Lutheran "spirits," what I may call phantom ramparts and parted walls. All this they have done that they might not be utterly dumbfounded by falling upon Scripture texts contrary to their errors, texts which they would have found it as hard to get over as to swallow hot ashes or chew stones. This then ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... little remorse of conscience for her thoughtless course. The fact that such amusements were sinful, as well as dangerous, had never been impressed upon her mind. She deemed them consistent with the highest state of moral and religious enjoyment, and pursued the miserable phantom of human, earthly pleasure, until aroused by the Spirit ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... darkness, and the open door poured out a yellow flood. At the time we came on it first we were unaware of our propinquity to it, and this mansion looming on us suddenly through the vapours teemed a cantrip of witchcraft, a dwelling's ghost, grey, eerie, full of frights, a phantom of the mind rather than a habitable home. We paused in a dumb astonishment to look at it lying there in the darkness, a thing so different from the barren hills ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... begun to give him her full attention. She had a feeling that she had seen the man somewhere before, but where and under what circumstances she could not recall. It was no moment for retrospection and the phantom ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... himself as David Scott, the confidential agent of Charles Merriwell, Frank's unfortunate father, who had spent the best years of his life and separated himself from his family and friends in the mad search after "phantom fortune." ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... visitant she had heard described. Thankful scarcely breathed. The brave little heart that had not quailed before the sentry's levelled musket a moment before now faltered and stood still, as the phantom with a slow and majestic tread moved toward her. She had only time to gain the shelter of a tree before the figure, majestically unconscious of her presence, passed slowly by. Through all her terror Thankful was still true to a certain rustic habit of practical perception ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... Feuillant-Constitutional, as your respectable Cahier de Gerville, as your respectable unfortunate Delessarts; or Royalist-Constitutional, as Montmorin last Friend of Necker; or Aristocrat as Bertrand-Moleville: they flit there phantom-like, in the huge simmering confusion; poor shadows, dashed in the racking winds; powerless, without meaning;—whom the human memory ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... there been a more delusive diplomacy, and it was natural that the lieutenant-general abroad and the statesman at home should be sad and indignant, seeing England drifting to utter shipwreck while pursuing that phantom of a pacific haven. Had Walsingham and himself tampered with the enemy, as some counsellors he could name had done, Leicester asserted that the gallows would be thought too good for them; and yet he hoped he might be hanged if the whole Spanish faction in England could procure for the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... no thoughts but humorous ones; And in thy chill revulsion, through thy skies, At my advance thy crystal home would fade, A ghost, a shadow, a film, a papery dream. Thou and thy moon were one. What is it now, Thy phantom paradise of gorgeous pearl, With sibilant streams and palmy tier on tier Of wind-bewhitened foliage? Still it floats, As when thy congregated harps and viols Beat slow harmonious progress, light on light, Across our stainless ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... Launce's revisited Poems of 1912-13- The Going Your Last Drive The Walk Rain on a Grace "I found her out there" Without Ceremony Lament The Haunter The Voice His Visitor A Circular A Dream or No After a Journey A Death-ray recalled Beeny Cliff At Castle Boterel Places The Phantom Horsewoman Miscellaneous Pieces The Wistful Lady The Woman in the Rye The Cheval-Glass The Re-enactment Her Secret "She charged me" The Newcomer's Wife A Conversation at Dawn A King's Soliloquy The Coronation Aquae Sulis Seventy-four ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... friend. He laughed when she started at a mournful hoot of the siren, and was enormously interested to hear that she had never set eyes upon the sea until to-day. Mademoiselle, for such an ingenue, was very courageous, he thought, and looked at Mary closely; but her eyes wandered from him to the phantom-shapes that loomed out of a pale, wintry mist: tramps thrashing their way to the North Sea: a vast, distant liner with tiers of decks one above the other: a darting torpedo-destroyer which flashed by like a ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... happens that at the time of the action a certain unaccountable premonition arises in the mind. This is chiefly the case when the act is to be the cause of sorrow. Like the wizard with Lochiel, some dark phantom arises before the mind, and warns of the evil to come. So it was in the present case. The pulling out of that drawer was an eventful moment in the life of Zillah. It was a crisis fraught with future sorrow and evil and suffering. There was ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... the weakness of Clay in attempting to grasp a phantom, his character stands out in an interesting light on the whole. He had his faults and failings which did not interfere with his ambition, and great and noble traits which more than balanced them, the most marked of which was the patriotism whose fire never went out. If any man ever loved his country, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... object. It started suddenly up, as above the waters to the south, and strikingly resembled an isolated castle. Behind it, a dense column of smoke rose into the sky, and the effect was most remarkable. On a nearer approach, the phantom disappeared and a clear and open sea again presented itself to our view. The fact was, that the refractive power upon the coast had elevated the sand-hillocks above their true position, since we satisfactorily ascertained that they alone separated the lake from the ocean, and that they alone ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... better. A living being, who does not suspect that to the man whom he is visiting, he is the most horrible phantom from the other world! The murdered father, risen up in the son!—It will make me acknowledge one of the ideas I have hitherto denied—the ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... towers; Within the gloom the fountain jets its pallid mist in lily flowers. The waters lull me and the scent of many gardens, and I hear Familiar voices, and the voice I love is whispering in my ear. Oh real as in dream all this; and then a hand on mine is laid: The wave of phantom time withdraws; and that young Babylonian maid, One drop of beauty left behind from all the flowing of that tide, Is looking with the self-same eyes, and here in Ireland by my side. Oh light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings, While we are in the calm and ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... phantom, had been haunting and pursuing her all day, begging for water when there was none. It was like the prayers one might ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... intolerable. He passed his days in apprehension of each succeeding night; and each night the vision came back again. As soon as he had locked himself up in his room, he strove to struggle; but in vain. An irresistible force lifted him up and pushed him against the glass, as if to call the phantom, and ere long he saw it lying at first in the spot where the crime was committed, lying with arms and legs outspread, just in the way ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... Nov. 26, he heard first a rush of wind, then tappings on the wall. He corroborated Lemonier's testimony to the musical airs knocked out, the volatile furniture, and the recognition in Thorel of the phantom. 'In the evening,' said Bunel, 'Lemonier en eut une crise de nerfs dans laquelle ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... have been an object of worship in Phoenicia. There is a good deal of mystery about its origin. The ancient Greeks called it "The Phantom" and "The Man ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... his halting maunderings, hardly heeded them. She heard in her troubled ears the rush of mad waters; phantom voices cracked again in pistoled oaths at the horses, the fear of sudden death clutched at her heart, and in the dreadful dark a powerful arm caught her again and drew her, helpless, out of an ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... of states have similarly passed their lives in doing violence to mankind; but it was for something that was likely to last, and for a national interest. What they deemed the public good was not a phantom of the brain, a chimerical poem due to a caprice of the imagination, to personal passions, to their own peculiar ambition and pride. Outside of themselves and the coinage of their brain a real and substantial ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... frosted with the snow of years. Your husband has forsaken you. After a long career of success, he has buried his fame under the orange-groves of the Alhambra. There he directs, according to his own statement, (but I can scarce credit it,) the phantom of a Conservatory for singing. I am convinced he has too much taste to break in upon the poetical silence of the old Moorish palace with portamenti, trills, and scales, and I flatter myself that the plaintive song ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... Fandor. "Human skin marvellously preserved by some special process: all its lines and marks are intact. Can you not guess whence it came? Do you need to be told whose dead body has supplied this phantom glove?" ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... fragrance of satin slippers dropped by the bedside, and near the head of the bed itself Serge thought he could trace the imprint of a little hand, which had left behind it a clinging scent of violets. Over all the furniture the phantom presence of the dead girl still ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... pleading with the phantom—defending himself. Every now and then he found that he was speaking aloud; then he would look round with a quick, piteous terror to see whether he had been heard or no, the parched lips beginning to move again almost before his fear ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of sensual pleasure, a similar want of sympathy with what is feminine in womanhood leaves an even more discordant impression on the mind. I would base the proof of this remark upon the marble Leda of the Bargello Museum, and an old engraving of Ixion clasping the phantom of Juno under the form of a cloud. In neither case do we possess Michelangelo's own handiwork; he must not, therefore, be credited with the revolting expression, as of a drunken profligate, upon the face of Leda. Yet in both cases he is indubitably responsible for the general design, and for ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... spoke out of the fog and into the glare of the fire shot a phantom skiff, beaching itself straight and swift at his feet, and so suddenly that he had to withdraw them like a flash to avoid the crunch of the sharp bows across the sand. 'Always let the other man speak first,' he thought; 'this boomerang of a ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... preternatural midnight excursion with her phantom lover, was more terrified than poor Maggie in this entirely natural ride on a short-paced donkey, with a gypsy behind her, who considered that he was earning half-a-crown. The red light of the setting sun seemed to have a portentous meaning, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Its faint sickly odor overpowered her like a spell. Even the white bunches of elder flowers seemed to grow alive in the twilight, and to change into faces, looking at her whithersoever she turned. She shut her eyes, and tried to summon back the phantom of the golden chariot, and especially of the king-like man who sat inside. Scarce had she seen him clearly, but she felt he looked a king. If wishing could bring to her so glorious a fortune, she would almost like to have, in addition to the splendors of rich dress and grand palaces, such a noble-looking ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... a little at the sight of magazines, and picked out a periodical with a soldier upon the cover. Marjorie, whose taste in literature inclined to the sensational, reviewed the books, and chose one with a startling picture depicting a phantom in the act of disturbing a dinner-party. She was too agitated to read more than a few pages of it, but she thought it seemed interesting. The two hours were over at last, and the girls and their luggage were safely installed in the ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... this Phantom we detest, Rarely we let it cross our portals: It is a most exacting guest, And we are much afflicted mortals. Your neighbor Gay, that jovial wight, As Dives rich, and brave as Hector, Poor Gay steals twenty times a night, On shaking knees, to ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... at all," said the vagrant. "While M. Jacques and the countess were quarrelling in this way, I saw the door of the parlor suddenly open as if by itself, and a phantom appear in it, dressed in a funeral pall. It was Count Claudieuse himself. His face looked terrible; and he had a revolver in his hand. He was leaning against the side of the door; and he listened while his wife and M. Jacques were talking of their former love-affairs. At certain words, he ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... "It was no phantom you saw, that girl on the horse!" shouted Warner in Dick's ear, and Dick nodded in return. They had no time for other words, as Forrest's horsemen, far outnumbering them, now pressed them harder than ever. A continuous fire came from their ranks and ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... trees spread their roots, themselves empty; in emptiness rose phantom temples, palaces and houses—all empty; and in the emptiness moved restless Man, himself empty and light, like ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... at length a couple of burly gendarmes tore him away and, grasping his arms, hurried him—pale, dishevelled, and in that strange, half-conscious condition into which a man sinks when he sees before him only the dark, terrible figure of death, the phantom which is so abhorrent to all our natures—from the building. But on the threshold the party came face to face with Murazov, and in Chichikov's heart the circumstance revived a ray of hope. Wresting himself with almost supernatural strength from the grasp ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... notes. In the presence of the egotistic indifference of the emancipated Jews, he is shaken in his firmest convictions, and he admits with anguish that the ideal for which he has fought and sacrificed his life is but a phantom. Under the stress of such ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz |
