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Spectral   Listen
adjective
Spectral  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to a specter; ghosty. "He that feels timid at the spectral form of evil is not the man to spread light."
2.
(Opt.) Of or pertaining to the spectrum; made by the spectrum; as, spectral colors; spectral analysis.
Spectral lemur. (Zool.) See Tarsius.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spectral" Quotes from Famous Books



... may strive to drain it, still and for ever spreads. How heavy was the silence, how dense the darkness in those working-class streets where sleep seems to be the comrade of death! Yet hunger prowls, and misfortune sobs; vague spectral forms slink by, and then are lost to view in the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... of spectral light, Whose distance thrills the soul with solemn awe, Can ne'er escape in its majestic might The firm control of omnipresent law; This mote descending to its bounden place, Those suns whose radiance we can scarcely trace, Alike obey the ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... by the smoke and the glare. Was it a fool's errand? And had he and Shad only entrapped themselves to no good end? To the right of him the fire roared and with his back to the glare his eyes eagerly sought the shadows down the wind. Vague shapes of gnarled branches and pallid tree trunks, spectral bushes quivering before the advancing demon, some of them already alight. Safety lay only in this one direction—for Beth, if she had been there, for Shad——Peter suddenly remembered the lumberman and turned to his left to look, when suddenly ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... he was encountering. Suddenly, however, he was startled by a blue phosphoric light streaming through the bushes on the left, and, looking up, he beheld at the foot of an enormous oak, whose giant roots protruded like twisted snakes from the bank, a wild spectral-looking object, possessing some slight resemblance to humanity, and habited, so far as it could be determined, in the skins of deer, strangely disposed about its gaunt and tawny-coloured limbs. On its head was seen a sort of helmet, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth

... Scotland, which would sometimes serve you to read by at eleven o'clock at night. The crimson flush has faded from the bosom of the river; if you are alone, its murmur begins to turn to a moan; the white stones of the churchyard look spectral through the trees. I think of poor Doctor Adam, the great Scotch schoolmaster of the last century, the teacher of Sir Walter Scott, and his last words, when the shadow of death was falling deeper—'It grows ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... Jane who wished to seek oblivion in the waters of the Seine? Anselmo listened. The footsteps drew near now—the spectral apparition of a woman went past him and swung itself on the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... adamantine shield made light; Her face, helm-shadowed, grew a thing to fear, And her fierce eyes, by danger challenged, took 30 Her trident-sceptred mother's dauntless look. 'I know thee now, O goddess-born!' I cried, And turned with loftier brow and firmer stride; For in that spectral cloud-work I had seen Her image, bodied forth by love and pride, The fearless, the benign, the mother-eyed, The fairer ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... to-morrow we may be able to go to the museum. The rows of stone lanterns are impressive beyond anything I had imagined; hundreds of them which must have given to the nights they illuminated a wonderfully weird spectral look. ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey

... Past and I, The Past and I; I tended while it hovered nigh, Leaving me never alone. It was a spectral housekeeping Where fell no jarring tone, As strange, as still a housekeeping As ever has ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy

... me, but it was no gradual process, seeing that I jumped from deep sleep to absolute alertness in a single instant. I had evidently slept for an hour and more, for the night had cleared, stars crowded the sky, and a pallid half-moon just sinking into the sea threw a spectral light between the trees. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... where a dance was set, with youths and maidens in two long rows. The fiddlers sat on barrel-heads near the door; a lantern hanging just behind projected their shadows across the square of light on the trodden space in front where they executed a grotesque pantomime, keeping time to the music with spectral wavings and noddings. The dancers were Dorothy's young neighbors, whom she had known and yet not known all her life, but they had the strangeness of familiar faces seen suddenly in some ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... strange and spectral land, wilt thou Not show thy favor to a lonesome child Come wandering all this way, impelled by love? Not hate, ambition, curiosity, Have led me to thy fair and fearful presence. I have no power, am but a weak young girl; And chance, alone, has thus revealed to me The mystic glory of ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown

... o'clock he worked his way back toward the hotel. He watched for the bank and found it still full of spectral activity. It occurred to him that city life must be made up of pleasure and work, without any rest. He was to ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... eye fell down to gazing at the corresponding window to her own, on the opposite side of the court. It was lighted, but the blind was drawn down: upon the blind she saw, first unconsciously, the constant weary motion of a little spectral shadow, a child's hand and arm—no more; long, thin fingers hanging down from the wrist, while the arm moved up and down, as if keeping time to the heavy pulses of dull pain. She could not help hoping that sleep would soon come to still that incessant, feeble motion: and now and then it did cease, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell

... the stolen burro were never seen again. As to the mozo, a Sulaco man—his wife paid for some masses, and the poor four-footed beast, being without sin, had been probably permitted to die; but the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the discovered ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... be clear and crisp, and the sky was so studded with stars that it seemed as if there was not room for even one more, a strange and lordly company came stalking into the land of the king of the mountain. They were gray, dim, spectral shapes and new to ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... herself must admit that it was all true and reasonable,—but, oh, how very dreadful! Then she conjured up to view the image of Elam Hunt,—his lank, slim figure, arrayed in sombre black,—his pale, cadaverous visage, spotted with pimples and blue blotches of close-shaven beard,—his spectral glance of admiration through those detestable blue spectacles. She imagined that she felt the clammy touch of his long, skinny fingers, and cold, flabby palm. She reflected upon the probability, nay, the certainty, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... permitting nearly homogeneous rays to pass, and these, which may contain the rays of as many as four overlapping spectra, are next passed through a rock-salt or glass prism placed with its refracting edge parallel to the grating lines. This sorts out the different narrow spectral images, without danger of overlapping, and after their passage through the prism we find them again, and fix their position by means of the bolometer, which for this purpose is attached to a special kind of spectrometer, where its platinum thread replaces the reticule of the ordinary telescope. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various

... from the hearth Flap their bright wings against the window panes,— A billowy swarm that beat their slender bars, Or seek the night to leave their track of flame Upon the sleet, or sit, with shifting feet And restless plumes, among the poplar boughs— The spectral poplars, ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland

... in all. She was used to liberty, but now she had none; she was an out-of-door creature by nature and habit, but now she was shut up day and night in a steel cage like an animal; she was used to the light, but now she was always in a gloom where all objects about her were dim and spectral; she was used to the thousand various sounds which are the cheer and music of a busy life, but now she heard only the monotonous footfall of the sentry pacing his watch; she had been fond of talking with her mates, but now there was no one to talk to; ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain

... us all with a shout. We leaped up and stared blinkingly into the north. That whole region of the sky was aflame from zenith to horizon with spectral fires. It was the aurora. Not the pale, ragged glow, sputtering like the ghost of a huge lamp-flame, which is familiar to every one, but a billowing of color, rainbows gone mad! In the northeast the long rolling columns formed—many-colored ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... be otherwise than full of wickedness, the chastest virgin seemed impure, in a world where such a babe was possible. The governor whispered me, apart, that, like nearly all the rest of them, it was the child of unhealthy parents. Ah, yes! There was the mischief. This spectral infant, a hideous mockery of the visible link which Love creates between man and woman, was born of disease and sin. Diseased Sin was its father, and Sinful Disease its mother, and their offspring lay in the woman's arms like a nursing Pestilence, which, could it live ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... gazed on the landscape far and near, Then impetuous stamped the earth, And turned and tightened his saddle-girth; But mostly he watched with eager search The belfry-tower of the old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely, and spectral, and sombre, and still. ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various

... spirits, to the nodding head on the gallows-hill, the old crone hummed her songs; and the crickets chirped, and the raven croaked from the opposite neighbour's house, and the winding-sheet rolled from the candle. Through the whole spectral world sounded, ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... it. Pausing a moment, and looking forward at its shattered face in utter anguish of despair, I saw again, repeated in a hundred jagged splinters, up and down in zigzag confusion, in demoniac omnipresence, the uncanny eye, the spectral shape, which had so appalled me. The little phantom had arisen, its slim finger was outstretched,—it beckoned, slowly beckoned, growing indistinct, it receded farther and farther out from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... at last, spectral and ghastly, gradually yielding glimpse of the surroundings. They were travelling steadily south, the horses beginning to exhibit traces of weariness, yet still keeping up a dogged trot. All about extended a wild, desolate scene of rock and sand, ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish

... eminence, that stood Girt with inferior ridges, at the point, Where light and darkness meet in spectral gloom. Midway between the height and depth of ocean, I mark'd a whirlpool in perpetual play, As though the mountain were itself alive, And catching prey on every side, with feelers Countless as sunbeams, slight as gossamer: Ere long transfigured, each fine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various

... mind as one carefully picks one's way down a green hillside yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhaps the most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet again, as we pass into another stretch of woodland, another profusion and another fragrance await us, the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of the wild hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches of these hyacinths in the woods, they seem at first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces of the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind, and, of them all, Shakespeare and Milton alone have come near to suggesting ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... and waited. Soon she saw, with a certain grim satisfaction, Zora and Bles emerging from the swamp engaged in earnest conversation. Here was an opportunity to overwhelm both with an unforgettable reprimand. She rose before them like a spectral vengeance. ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... the sun, translucent fish revealed their presence by spectral shadows on the sand, and, traced by the shadows, became discernible, though but ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... and down hill, through slough and over rock, we trudged, for mile after mile. Sometimes beside Get-Along Lake, with its grey, spectral islands and woodlands; sometimes by rushing brooks and dreary farm-fields; now in paths close set with evergreens; now in more open grounds, skirted with hills and dotted with silent, two-penny cottages. Sometimes Picton mounted his pyramid of trunk-leather ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens

... mate, "he does wear one, any how, and night before last I sat on the hatch, as he says, reading Shakspeare in the moonlight, and when the second mate's night-capped head rose through the slide, he looked so very spectral that I couldn't forbear hailing him with—'Art thou a ghost or goblin damned?' which he persists in rendering his own fashion. I'm sure I didn't intend to liken him to a barn-yard fowl of any kind; I should rather have gone into the stable in ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... up an amusing theory of apparitions, to show that Hobbes might fear that a certain combination of atoms agitating his brain might so disorder his mind that it would expose him to spectral visions; and being very timorous, and distrusting his imagination, he was averse to be left alone. Apparitions happen frequently in dreams, and they may happen, even to an incredulous man, when awake, for reading and hearing of them would revive their images—these images, adds ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... spectroscopic method applied with the 60-inch Mount Wilson reflector, obtained 0.012. Lee's recent value, secured photographically with the 40-inch Yerkes refractor, is 0.022. The heliometer parallax is doubtless less reliable than the photographic ones, and Doctor Adams states that the spectral type and luminosity of Betelgeuse make his value less certain than in the case of most other stars. If we take a (weighted) mean value of 0.020 of a second, we shall probably not be far from the truth. This parallax represents the angle ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale

... midst of a desolation and a silence that was profound. There was nothing there that lived, except a few fire-blacked trees that stuck up here and there in the shelter of broken walls. Now I understood the meaning of the spectral shapes. They were nothing but the broken walls of the other houses that were. They were all that ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... recognizant of human beings, my dear Beers, and it "sets me up immensely" to be treated by a practical man on practical grounds as you treat me. I inhabit such a realm of abstractions that I only get credit for what I do in that spectral empire; but you are not only a moral idealist and philanthropic enthusiast (and good fellow!), but a tip-top man of business in addition; and to have actually done anything that the like of you can regard as having helped him is an unwonted ground with me for self-gratulation. ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... in the twilight, at the well-known gate I linger, with no heart to enter more. Among the elm-tops the autumnal air Murmurs, and spectral in the fading light A solitary heron wings its way Southward—save this no sound or touch of life. Dark is the window where the scholar's lamp Was used to catch ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... regarded them listlessly, willing to seem to attend to the boy, but, with her thoughts far away, while now and then she turned a weary gaze towards the next window: all she saw thence was a great, mounded country, dreary as sunshine and white cold could make it. Storm, driving endless whirls of spectral snow, would have been less dreary to her than the smiling of this cold antagonism. It was a picture of her own life. Evil greater than she knew had spread a winter around her. If her father suffered for the sins of his fathers, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... and Antonio presently stepped forth leading the horse by the bridle; the macho followed behind. I looked at the horse and shrugged my shoulders: as far as I could scan it, it appeared the most uncouth animal I had ever beheld. It was of a spectral white, short in the body, but with remarkably long legs. I observed that it was particularly high in the cruz or withers. "You are looking at the grasti," said Antonio; "it is eighteen years old, but it is the very best in the Chim del Manro; I have ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... light of the candle he seemed to tower strangely and weirdly above the other man: the pale hue of his coat, his light-coloured hair, the whiteness of his linen, all helped to give to his appearance at that moment a curious spectral effect. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... philosophers having burnt a flower, by calcination disengaged the salts from its ashes, and deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture acted on it, till in the fermentation they assumed a bluish and a spectral hue. This dust, thus excited by heat, shoots upwards into its primitive forms; by sympathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined place, we see distinctly the stalk, the leaves, and the flower arise; it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... turned out of Piccadilly into St. James's Street before either man spoke again. The tossing lights of a windy autumn evening were shimmering on the wet pavement, and faces looked spectral white in the morris-dance of shine and shadow. Wratislaw, whose soul was sick for high, clean winds and the great spaces of the moors, was thinking of Glenavelin and Lewis and the strong, quickening north. His companion was furrowing his brow ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... the glory of Love and Fame In a golden halo about her; She had shared his triumphs and worn his name: But, alas! he had died without her. He had wandered in many a distant realm, And never had left her behind him, But now, with a spectral shape at the helm, He had sailed where ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... for dressing the victuals; and the domestics of the family usually sat around them for a considerable time, until supper was prepared. On the night when the conductors of Thorgunna's funeral returned to Froda, there appeared, visible to all who were present, a meteor, or spectral appearance, resembling a half-moon, which glided around the boarded walls of the mansion in an opposite direction to the course of the sun, and continued to perform its revolutions until the domestics retired to rest. This apparition was renewed every night during a whole week, and was pronounced ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various

... the train of thought into which he had unconsciously fallen by hearing a sound not far from him. He raised his head and rubbed his eyes, half expecting to be confronted by a spectral visitor; but not being able to distinguish anything in the deep gloom to which his eyes were not yet accustomed, he dismissed that theory, and ascribed the ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday

... b are referred to the Milky Way (the Galaxy) as plane of reference. The pole of the Milky Way has according to HOUZEAU and GOULD the position ([alpha][delta]) (124527). From the distribution of the stars of the spectral type B I have in L. M. II, 14[2] found a somewhat different position. But having ascertained later that the real position of the galactic plane requires a greater number of stars for an accurate determination of its value, ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier

... waves, carried them out to the west, they could see the black skarts standing on the rocks of Gometra, and clouds of puffins wheeling round the dark and lonely pillars of Staffa; while away in the north, as they got clear of Treshanish Point, the mountains of Rum and of Skye appeared a pale and spectral blue, like ghostly shadows at the horizon. And there was no end to the sports and pastimes that occupied day after day. On their first expedition up the lonely corries of Ben-an-Sloich young Ogilvie brought down a royal ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... and some unknown, who did things which made one know one's-self a glorious, an immortal creature. See there that ruined abbey—there lie the ashes of brave and good; these are their crumbled monuments—'that fane where fame is A spectral resident!' Alas, there is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... the jug orchid—a veritable jug, lid and all. Raising the lid you would find the jug half filled with water. Sometimes in the tangle up above, between two trees, you would see a thing like a bird come to ruin. Orchids grew here as in a hothouse. All the trees—the few there were—had a spectral and miserable appearance. They were half starved by the voluptuous growth ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... and we had entered on that great sea that stretched northward to the Arctic barrens. Misty and wet was the wind, and cold with the kiss of many icebergs. Under a grey sky, glooming to purple, the gelid water writhed nakedly. Spectral islands elbowed each other, to peer at us as we flitted past. Still more wraithlike the mainland, fringed to the sea foam with saturnine pine, faded away into fastnesses of impregnable desolation. There was a sense of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... concerns our subject: the special sensitisers used by the photographer to modify the spectral distribution of sensibility of the haloid salts, e.g. eosine, fuchsine, cyanine. These again are electron-producers under light stimulus. Now it has been shown by Stoletow, Hallwachs, and Elster and Geitel that there is an intimate connection between photo-electric ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... them you saw the warrior holding his paddle with both hands in the act of rowing, leaning forward and inclining his head, as if eager to hurry on his voyage. Glaring at him forever, and face to face, was a polished human skull, which crowned the prow of the canoe. The spectral figurehead, reversed in its position, glancing backwards, seemed to mock the impatient attitude of ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... cannon smoke shot up from the thickets of vines, rose, and drifted to the west, blotting out the greater portion of the vineyard. The cannon themselves were invisible. At times Jack fancied he saw a human silhouette when the white smoke rushed outward, but the spectral vines loomed up everywhere through the dense cannon-fog and ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers

... be now these silent hosts? Where the camping-ground of ghosts? Where the spectral conscripts led To the white tents of the dead? What strange shore or chartless sea Holds the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... knock against the front door caused everyone to start. A strange eerie feeling descended on the hearts of all, of innocent and of guilty, of accuser and of defender. The knock seemed to have come from spectral hands, for 'twas followed by no ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... thou com'st for me," Lee's spirit to the Spectre said; "I know that I must go with thee— Take me not to the dead. It was not I alone that did the deed!" Dreadful the eye of that still, spectral Steed! ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... be seen from the bastions of the castle of the Holy Trinity, to the right or to the left, in front or in the rear, but dense, motionless, snowy mist; a spectral image of that deluge-wrath which, as it rose to sweep o'er earth, once broke against these stern, steep cliffs and beetling peaks of rock: no trace is to be seen of the buried valley, for the ghostly waves of the cold, white sea of foam shroud it closely in their stifling ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... his head and looked at the spectral forest where dead pines towered, ghastly in the moon's beams. That morning he had cut the last wood on his own land; he had nothing left to sell but a patch of brambles and a hut which no one ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers

... the pleasure which it gave should be indefinite. About his own poetry there was always this indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a strange country of dream—a "ghoul-haunted region of Weir," "out of space, out of time"—filled with unsubstantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes. And yet there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this uncanny scenery. The reader feels that the wild, fantasmal imagery is in itself a kind of language, and that it in some way expresses a brooding thought or passion, the terror and despair of a lost soul. Sometimes there is ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... of his hurts. With straining eyes the fisherman watches the mist-wrapped islet, and, peering through the evening haze, cheats himself into the belief that giant forms are moving upon its shores and that spectral shapes flit across its sands—that the dark hours bring back the activities of the attendant knights and enchantresses of the mighty hero of Celtdom, who, refreshed by his long repose, will one ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... crouched and moved; marched like a battalion of ocean's ghosts; suddenly cohered and sent out light puffs of smoke, as from the crater of a spectral volcano. The moon, full and bright and cold, hung low in the dark sky: one hardly noted the stars. The vast sweep of water was as calm as a lake, dark and metallic like the sky, barely reflecting the silver light between. But although calm it was not quiet. It greeted the forbidding rocks ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... Machaerus. The legends that peopled its corridors had beset him with a sense of reality which before they had never possessed. The leaves of the baaras glittered frenetically in the basalt, and in their spectral light a phantom with eyes that cursed came and went. At night he had drunk, and in the clear forenoons he paced the terrace fancying always that there, beyond in the desert, Aretas prowled like a wolf. Machaerus was unhealthy; men had gone mad there, others had disappeared ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... invention, she got to adding imaginary clothes to Jean's wardrobe, and probably would have doubled it and trebled it if a warning note in her mother's comments had not admonished her that she was spending more money on these spectral gowns and things than the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... was my dear love who pushed aside the arras and came forward into the room,—my dear love, wasted by fever and long imprisonment, white and gaunt and spectral, yet bearing himself with all his ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock

... could not run away. The desolate, plague-stricken place had a dismal fascination for me. I wondered what manner of persons could dwell in it; and, as I lingered, I saw the low door opened, and a thin, spectral figure standing in the gloom within, but delaying to cross the mouldering door-sill as long as I remained in sight. In another minute Pierre had rushed back for me, and dragged me away with all his boyish strength ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... children would have tried to convey a pair of crutches and a lame leg down the cliff to the long level brown sands that lay, farther than the eye could reach, stretched beneath miles on miles of brown crumbling cliffs, whose jagged points and indentations had the kind of spectral look peculiar to that coast. For, alas! the holy water Winifred brought did not 'cure the crutches.' Yet we used to master the difficulty, always selecting the firmer gangway at Flinty Point, and always waiting, before making the attempt, until there ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... landward bound, The spectral camp was seen, And, with a sorrowful, deep sound, The ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... been cherishing in silence. Not only he himself, with his handbreadth of days, that shrink into absolute nothingness when brought into contrast with the life of God, but "every man," even when apparently "standing" most "firm, is only a breath." As a shadow every man moves spectral among shadows. The tumult that fills their lives is madness; "only for a breath are they disquieted." So bitterly, with an anticipation of the sad, clear-eyed pity and scorn of "The Preacher," does the sick ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren

... together, and munched a hard cracker apiece, occasionally exchanging a muttered word or two, thrashing their limbs about to keep up circulation, and dampening their lips with snow. They were but dim, spectral shapes in the darkness, the air filled with crystal pellets, swept about by a merciless wind, the horses standing tails to the storm and heads drooping. In spite of the light refraction of the snow the eyes could scarcely see two yards away through the smother. Above, about, the ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish

... neck once, when the net had been forgotten. They all do it—ils se cassent le cou tous, tot ou tard! Allons toi t'as peur, toi?" Chat noir's great back was quivering with fear; he had no taste, himself, for shapes like these, spectral and wan as ghosts, walking about in the sun. He took us as far away as possible, and as quickly, from these reminders of the thing men ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... he were about to awake, and then his eyes opened and he gazed on the spectral pallor of the dawn in the windows, his brain rousing from dreams slowly into comprehension of the change that had come. Then collecting his thoughts he rose and stood facing the dawn. He stood for a moment like one in combat, and then ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore

... gong had stilled. The audience was hushed and expectant. The white patch of light overhead spread until it encompassed all the top of the globe. The whole area was glowing. The people were white, spectral shapes, transparent! And the top of the globe was transparent; I saw the night sky, with ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings

... the fatal First Volume finished (in the miserablest way, after great efforts) in October last; my head was all in a whirl; I fled to Scotland and my Mother for a month of rest. Rest is nowhere for the Son of Adam: all looked so "spectral" to me in my old-familiar Birthland; Hades itself could not have seemed stranger; Annandale also was part of the kingdom of TIME. Since November I have worked again as I could; a second volume got wrapped up and sealed out of ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... grey, gaunt and haggard, but their colours with them, overpassed the dead and wounded, now choking the sunken road. Behind them were heard the blue, advancing and huzzahing. The grey wave remounted the bank down which it plunged fifteen minutes before. At the top it stayed a moment, thin and grey, spectral in the smoke pall, the battle flags like hovering, crimson birds. A line of flame leaped, one long crackle of musketry, then it resumed its retreat, falling back on the west wood. The blue, checked a ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... in color or spectral character to meet many requirements. Daylight has been reproduced in spectral quality so that certain processes requiring accurate discrimination of color are now prosecuted twenty-four hours a day under artificial daylight. Colored light is made of the correct quality ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... lain, for ages fled, Along the waters, dark and dead; The dying waters wash no more The long black line of spectral shore. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... church. But for a Sister who stood by the convent gate like a statue of Eternal Silence, and a man who was killing a wretched calf in the middle of the road, I might have asked myself if this fantastic Bozouls was not some spectral village, reproducing the past in all except the living beings who had gone down into their graves. When I recrossed the Dourdou, the light was several tones lower than it was when I first descended to the bottom of the ravine, and the vegetation was of a deeper ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... see the ghostly extremities of these spectral trees over the top of the main tent as he lay crouched in his corner, after devoting an hour to the licking of his sores. Presently, an almost full moon rose among the trees' fleshless limbs, and painted their nakedness in more than ever ghostly guise. It was then that Finn rose, painfully and ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... all firing, for the first time we had some idea of the number that had been advanced into the conquered territory since July 1st. The ruins and the sticks of trees of Fricourt and Mametz with their few remaining walls stood out spectral in the flashes of batteries that had found nesting places among the debris. The whole slope had become a volcanic uproar. One might as well have tried to count the number of fireflies over a swamp as the flashes. The limitation ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... and then, though the season was midsummer, husks or twigs. Up went the rooks and down again, rising in lesser numbers each time as the sager birds made ready to settle, for the evening was already spent enough to make the air inside the wood almost dark. The moss was soft; the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay a silvery meadow. The pampas grass raised its feathery spears from mounds of green at the end of the meadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the convolvulus moth was spinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, nasturtium and cherry pie, were washed into ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... with an ill unknown; In sleep she sobs and seems to float, A water-lily, all alone Within a lonely castle-moat; And as the full-moon, spectral, lies Within the crescent's gleaming arms, The present shows her heedless eyes A future dim with vague alarms. She sees, and yet she scarcely sees, For, life-in-life not yet begun, Too many are its mysteries For ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore

... of all is the great need, of course. That looms big and gaunt and spectral in any survey of ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon

... of the sounds of enterprise and excitement; our interest lies too largely and exclusively in the present and the future. The dawning light and the keen air of morning (soevus equis oriens anhelis) are not, as represented by the poets, more uncongenial to the spectral shapes of night, than the recent origin and energetic action of our rising country to the dim traditions and mouldering memories which have grown incorporate with the weather-stains and damps of these hoary sanctuaries. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... sombre thought of death; then a recurrence to the open scenery of the land as it lay in the April light, "the summer approaching with richness and the fields all busy with labor," presently dashed in upon by a spectral vision of armies with torn and bloody battle-flags, and, again, of the white skeletons of young men long afterward strewing the ground. Hence the piece has little or nothing of the character of the usual productions on such occasions. It is dramatic; yet there is ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... that night, it bore every appearance of having been abandoned for years instead of only a few hours. No smoke curled from the chimneys; no light gleamed at any of the windows. In its white setting of snow, it loomed silent and spectral. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk

... is astir. The dogs are driven off. Every wattled hut yields its quota of men, women, and children, spectral in their white djellabas and all eager to see the strangers and their equipment. The men collect in one group and talk seriously of the visit, well assured that it has some significance, probably ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan

... light, was like the rising and falling of billows—like the ebb and flow of the tide upon the stranded shore of the ocean. Close to the house the faces were plainly discernible, but they faded into mere ghostly outlines on the outskirts of the assembly; and what added to the weird, spectral beauty of the scene, was the confused hum of voices that rose above the sea of forms, sounding like the subdued, sullen roar of an ocean storm, or the wind soughing through the dark lonely forest. It was a grand and imposing scene, and when the President, with pale face ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley

... Duchess, not of compliment only; the Letter itself had to be burnt on the spot, being, as would seem, dangerous for the High Lady, who was much a friend of Friedrich's. Their Correspondence, very polite and graceful, but for most part gone to the unintelligible state, and become vacant and spectral, figures considerably in the Books, and was, no doubt, a considerable fact to Friedrich. His Answer on this occasion may be given, since we have it,—lest there should not elsewhere be opportunity for ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... get into the spirit of her letter; on the contrary, her mind wandered away, and she found herself listening, every now and then, and at last she fancied that old Tamar, about whom that dream, and her unexpected appearance at the door, had given her a sort of spectral feeling that night, was up and watching her; and the idea of this white sentinel outside her door excited her so unpleasantly, that she opened it, but found no Tamar there; and then she revisited the kitchen, but that was empty too, and the fire taken down. And, finally, ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... involved himself and his followers in treason, raised the standard of revolt, put his foot upon the neck of the invincible republic which had humbled all the kings of the earth, and founded an empire which was to last for a thousand and half a thousand years. In what manner this spectral appearance was managed—whether Csar were its author, or its dupe—will remain unknown for ever. But undoubtedly this was the first time that the advanced guard of a victorious army was headed by an apparition; and we may conjecture that it will be the last. [Footnote: According to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... necessities; a lesson which they handed down to him, simply and directly, with no inheritance of frivolity. In his world, cause and effect were in a direct line; an obtrusive odor did not translate itself into a spectral chattering of the teeth. The result was in a direct line with the cause —but their relation was often that of the match and the bonfire. Herein lay the strength of his imagination; this was why he could encompass all things with ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... was approaching, though away to the west a road gash of crimson, a seeming wound in the breast of heaven, showed where the sun had set an hour since. Now and again the rising wind moaned sobbingly through the tall and spectral pines that, with knotted roots fast clenched in the reluctant earth, clung tenaciously to their stony vantageground; and mingling with its wailing murmur, there came a distant hoarse roaring as of tumbling ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... low rock that stood out at sea, about three and a half miles south-east-by-east from our cape, now came in sight ahead of us to the windward. In the spectral light, and beaten on by the waves, it looked like some sea monster moving in the water. As we were going we should probably pass close to its lee side in about ten minutes, but the wind blew a tempest, and the sea increased so in a few minutes that our peril was terrible. For two hours we had ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston

... a spectral grin, "what's enough for one is enough for two. We'll get along, old man, on my ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... The women are unaccountably left out. We ought to see not alone the opposing lines of battle writhing and twisting in a death, embrace, the batteries smoking and flaming, the hurricanes of cavalry, but innumerable women also, spectral forms of mothers, wives, sweethearts, clinging about the necks of the advancing soldiers, vainly trying to shield them with their bosoms, extending supplicating hands to the foe, raising eyes of anguish to Heaven. The soldiers, grim-faced, with battle-lighted eyes, do not see the ghostly forms ...
— An Echo Of Antietam - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... had dealt and done with amorous grace and attitude, soaring rapture, and profundity of sigh, suspense (more agonizing than suspension), despair, prostration, grinding of the teeth, the hollow and spectral laugh of a heart forever broken, and all the other symptoms of an annual bill of vitality; and every new pledge of his affections sped him toward the pledge-shop. But never had he crossed that fatal threshold; the thought of his uniform and dignity prevailed; and he was not so mean ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... and all other people know the power of contrast. White never looks so white as when it is relieved against black; black never so intense as when it is relieved against white. A white flower in the twilight gleams out in spectral distinctness, paler and fairer than it looked in the blazing sunshine. So, if we take and put these two things together—the dark mass of man's miseries and the radiant brightness of God's mercies, each heightens ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... zenith, and she gathered courage and shone, till the mountain looked lovely as a ghost in the gleam of its snow and the glimmer of its glaciers. 'Ah!' thought Falconer, 'such a peace at last is all a man can look for—the repose of a spectral Elysium, a world where passion has died away, and only the dim ghost of its memory to disturb with a shadowy sorrow the helpless content of its undreaming years. The religion that can do but this much is not a ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... tall spectral figure, black from head to foot, his face carefully hidden under a velvet mask, walked at the end of the corridor, lamp in hand, and stopped at the first step of a staircase which led to the upper floors. ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... battle-ground The spectral camp is seen, And, with a sorrowful, deep sound, Flows ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various

... night, and the moon was shining with a vaporous, spectral light, when the maddest of chances brought the two husbands together over a body which the tide, with its multitudinous cold fingers, had gently laid upon ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.

... without, as it would seem, having been able to make his inner nature audible to those around him. He had been to the inhabitants of Grimstad a stranger within their gates, not speaking their language; or, rather, wholly "spectral," speaking no language at all, but indulging in cat-calls and grimaces. He was now discovered like Caliban, and tamed, and made vocal, by the strenuous arts of friendship. One of those who thus interpreted him was a young musician, Due, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... trying to find her way back into what we call reality. But it was a reality even more wretched than those recollections to which her dream had recalled her. For it was held and possessed by Winnington, and now by the threatening vision of Monk Lawrence, spectral amid the red ruin of fire. She had stopped the motor that day at the foot of the hill on which the house stood, and using Winnington's name, had made a call on the cripple child. Daunt had received ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... and, if it had, would not have been bribed to believe it, by any sum. Some one had said that some very old person had seen a phantom there. Nobody knew who some one was. Nobody knew who the very old person was. Nobody knew who had seen it; nor when; nor how. The very rumor was spectral. ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor

... fragrant night and listen to the rest. A year ago he had been jolted over rough roads in an ambulance. There had been a moon and men groaning. There had seemed to him something sinister about that white night with its spectral shadows, and with the trenches of the enemy wriggling like great serpents underground. The trail of the serpent was still over the world. He had been caught but not killed. There was ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey

... story of city life from the back windows of the hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox; there are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for Old Moody. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... Heaven-scaling Ixion; and to him, as to the old one, the just gods were very stern! The ever-revolving, never-advancing Wheel (of a kind) was his, through life; and from his Cloud-Juno did not he too procreate strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory Hybrids, and ecclesiastical Chimeras,—which now roam the earth in ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... first, then more swiftly over rumbling bridges and clicking point, more swiftly still, breaking from the fog-banked Seine valley, through snarling tunnel and chattering cutting, faster now and freer, by long lines of poplar trees, mist-strewn, and moonlit ponds and fields, spectral white roads, little winking towns; and now, as if drawn by the magnetic south, swaying to the rock-a-bye of speed, aiming for the lights of Dijon far away south, to the ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... had been placed there by the boys of the town to kindle into bonfires with which to welcome the returning victors. But to-night the faggot-piles and the tar-barrels lay unlighted. In the dark this material for bonfires that never were lighted looked like so many spectral reminders of ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock

... lighthouses when day is finished; dreaming of dead men and women and dead children in the earth, far down beneath the snow-drifts, six feet deep. And then I lift my face, awaking, from my pillow; the pallid moon is on the valley, and the room is filled with spectral light. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... tall and graceful column itself became visible, looking pale and spectral against the black sky. At the same time the roar of the surf broke familiarly on Ruby's ears. He steered close past the north end of the rock, so close that he could see the rocks, and knew that it was low water. A gleam of moonlight broke ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne

... flaming, falling star that any of us had ever seen. The mass drove down the lower skirt of the sky, leaving behind it a wake of fire. It plunged into the sea. There is no sailor but knows shooting stars. But this was a hugely great one, and Ocean-Sea very lonely, and to most there our errand a spectral and frightening one. It needed both the Admiral and Fray Ignatio to quell ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... friendship with John Barleycorn. The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler, easier. He drinks himself into sottish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... the midst of which Richmond, with her ruins, her spectral roof, afar, and her unchanging spires, rests beneath a ghastly, fitful glare,—the night stain which a great conflagration leaves behind it for weeks,—struggling silently with colossal shadows along the foreground, two hideous walls alone ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... the vaulted galleries of the castle, and which had never been heard of before as haunting the locality. The tall white man, in whom Huldbrand recognized only too plainly Uncle Kuhleborn, and Bertalda the spectral master of the fountain, often passed before them with a threatening aspect, and especially before Bertalda; so much so, that she had already several times been made ill with terror, and had frequently thought of quitting the castle. ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque

... rather than in what you see lies half the charm of Andalusia, in the suggestion of all manner of delicate antique things, in the vivid memory of past grandeur. The Moors have gone, but still they inhabit the land in spirit and not seldom in a spectral way seem to regain their old dominion. Often towards evening, as I rode through the desolate country, I thought I saw an half-naked Moor ploughing his field, urging the lazy oxen with a long goad. Often the Spaniard on his horse vanished, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... the valley upwards all round the hill were swarming with men, who from this distance looked like pygmies, fussy and irresponsible, spectral too in the rain-laden mist as they appeared to be running hither and thither in compact groups, but with seeming aimlessness, whilst shouting, always shouting, that perpetual call for vengeance ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... such hours he used to write his wild, fantastic tales. To his excited fancy everything around him had a spectral look. The shadows of fevered thought stalked ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth

... Hunt invariably centered at La Croix du Grand Veneur, a notable landmark of the forest even now, at the intersection of four magnificent forest roads. Its name comes from a legend of a spectral black huntsman who was supposed to haunt the forest, and who appeared for the last time, in reality or imagination, to Henri ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... and illiterate, which is, according to the measure of it, in the truest sense, kingly; conferring indeed the purest kingship that can exist among men: too many other kingships (however distinguished by visible insignia or material power) being either spectral, or tyrannous;—Spectral—that is to say, aspects and shows only of royalty, hollow as death, and which only the "Likeness of a kingly crown have on"; or else tyrannous—that is to say, substituting their own will for the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... from me, and gazed back toward the dismal, miserable, spectral desert; while I stood facing the fruitful, delicious, flowery Paradise of all the world. I thought of the difference in our lots, and my heart was in misery about him. Then I conquered my pride and my littleness and trumpery, and did what the gentle ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... that he would not tell me, but that was just like him. For the last twenty minutes, having something to do, he had become himself again, had come to earth from that unsafe country of the brain where beckoned a spectral Steve. Nothing was left but in his eyes that question which pain had set there; and I wondered if his friend of old, who seemed so brave and amiable, would have dealt him that hurt at the solemn end had he known what a ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister

... crags are, and barren its snows! Blue as the face of the drowned is the shore of it— Shore, with the capes of indefinite cave. Strange is the voice of its wind, and the roar of it Startles the mountain and hushes the wave. Out to the south and away to the north of it, Spectral and sad are the spaces untold! All the year round a great cry goeth forth of it— Sob of this leper of lands in ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... here my grand-dam oft doth come to curse, And haunteth it with spiteful toads and bats, With serpents fell, with ewts and clawful cats. Here doth she revel hold o' moony nights, With grave-rank ghouls and moaning spectral sprites; And ... Saints! what's that? A hook-winged bat? Not so; perchance, within its hairy body fell Is man or maid transformed by magic spell. O, brothers, heedful be, and careful tread Lest magic gin should catch and strike us dead! O would my grannam might go with us here. Since, being witch, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol

... and of their life with absolute certainty. Spectral analysis showed the same composition in the stars as on the earth, consequently if life had arisen in our atom, most certainly it must exist in other celestial bodies, though probably in different forms; in many planets it had already ended, in many it was still to come; but surely ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... it supernatural. Oh, it was frightful! Rather superb, though, to think of such a spectral craft rising to warn us with ghostly flames that the old Belle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... form; and this is a fact to be remembered by those who visit the chapel where Buonarroti laboured both as architect and sculptor. Of the two Medici, it is not fanciful to say that the Duke of Urbino is the most immovable of spectral shapes eternalised in marble; while the Duke of Nemours, more graceful and elegant, seems intended to present a contrast to this terrible thought-burdened form. The allegorical figures, stretched on segments ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... of the physical universe may be thought in the terms of natural science. The uniformitarian method in geology, resolving the history of the crust of the earth into known processes, such as erosion and igneous fusion;[244:13] and spectral analysis, with its discoveries concerning the chemical constituents of distant bodies through the study of their light, have powerfully reenforced this effort of thought, and apparently completed an outline sketch of the universe in terms ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... never rested day nor night till he and his followers had cut off the last vestige of the Terrantines, and avenged the blood of the unhappy maiden. Then for years did he linger about the falls in the vain hope of seeing once more her wild spectral beauty—but she appeared no more in the flesh; though to this, men not romantic nor visionary declare they have seen a figure, slight and beautiful, clad in robe of skin, with moccasoned feet, and long, white ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... us. And now we plunge into the thicket, with scarcely a track to guide our steps. I have by this time made acquaintance with the principal giants of the grove. Some are standing, some are felled; the unmolested monarchs stand full 200 feet high, and heave their white and spectral limbs in all directions; the fallen monsters, crushed with their overthrow, startle you with their strange appearances; whilst underfoot a wild variety of new plants arrest your attention. The bush-shrubs are exquisitely beautiful. Anon ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... reared. He could scarcely take his eyes from the tinsel-crowned Mother of Heaven, resplendent in white and gold and glittering with jewels; the radiant shield before the Host, illuminated by tall spectral candles in the mysterious obscurity of the altar, dazzled him like the rayed disk of ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists, the incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's constancy under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... into the library, with the face of a man who has just been reprieved from sudden death. As he re-entered the library, he paused and started a step back, gazing fixedly at one of the windows. The heavy curtain had been partially drawn back, and a white, spectral face was glued to ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming

... so strangely situated, and the fear that she might somehow come to hear of it, oppressed me like guilt. I blamed myself besides for my suspicions of the night before; wondered that I should ever have attributed those shocking cries to one of whom I now conceived as of a saint, spectral of mien, wasted with maceration, bound up in the practices of a mechanical devotion, and dwelling in a great isolation of soul with her incongruous relatives; and as I leaned on the balustrade of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... comes it? whence this mimic shape? In look and lineament so like our kind. You might accost the spectral thing, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various

... colossus and baked earth hovel, sycamore, and tamarisk, statue and trotting donkey. It looked like a mysterious finger pointed in warning toward the sky. The Nile began to gleam. Upon its steel and silver torches of amber flame were lighted. The Libyan mountains became spectral beyond the tombs of the kings. The tiny, rough cupolas that mark a grave close to the sphinxes, in daytime dingy and poor, now seemed made of some splendid material worthy to roof the mummy of a king. Far off a pool of the Nile, that from here looked ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... wistfully pursuing its eccentric sweep, suddenly loses it in impenetrable shadows. There is not a vestige of any other ruin near it, and the long lines it here and there shows, ghostly white in the moonlight, seem like spectral strands of sand. ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... like a spectral curtain over the little demesne of Martinhoe Manor, had almost entirely disappeared when, at a few minutes before eight, with all traces of his long journey obliterated, Andrew Tallente stepped out on to the stone-flagged ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... in speechless eloquence, The waving shadows of the cypress fall In spectral patches on the quaint old wall, Nodding ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning

... nor pieces of candle, but here and there he perceived the ends of burnt wooden matches. Going on, he found more matches, two or three with the heads broken off and unburnt. In a few moments the mound loomed up out of the darkness like a spectral dome, and, looking no more upon the ground, the captain ran toward it. By means of the stony projections he quickly mounted to the top, and there the sight he saw almost made him drop his lantern. The great lid of the mound had been moved and was now awry, leaving about ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton

... of the ancient padres. Nero could be made as white as any ghost horse by the application of a little paint; and shod with rubber could pass over the sandy roads with almost as little noise as any spectral steed. It was easy to bribe and terrify two small boys into securing and restoring to him the pointed wand, even if by their effort to obtain it they might happen to fall and break it. That mattered ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond



Words linked to "Spectral" :   apparitional, spiritual, supernatural, phantasmal, spectral colour, ghostly, spectral color, spectrum, ghostlike



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