"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... yarns it is always the center; and when at last, with uncertain steps, they leave the empty keg and the dying fire to turn homeward through the drifting snow, fearful and furtive glances are cast to where the island looms up like a ghostly sentinel from the sea. Across its high promontory the Northern Lights scintillate and blaze, and out of its moving brightness the terrified fishermen behold the war-canoes of dead Indians freighted with ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... about the Black Watch's ghostly piper that plays proudly when the men of the Black Watch do well, and ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... when put off their nests would commence their outcries, and from all parts they would assemble and flit about almost within reach of one's hand, making an awful noise, and in the dark shade of the forest their white gorgets had quite a ghostly look. The eggs are always three in number, of a beautiful shining blue-green, sometimes of a very long oval type. I have found the nests at Murree from the 3rd May to quite the end ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... were images of him; he had looked thus, perhaps even better; for he remembered that the likeness, when taken, did not satisfy him, and that everybody thought he was really far handsomer. He opened secret drawers, which exhaled an ungodly perfume, very faint, almost imperceptible, like a faded, ghostly odour, yet which excited the nerves in a peculiar way, and somewhat quickened the pulsation of the heart. These were the archives of the history of his own heart. There lay in piles packages of letters, methodically tied with coloured ribbons, withered flowers, whose leaves fell from the corona ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... again I went round this treadmill of thought; and again and again gave up baffled and in despair. The voice was as inexplicable as the apparition, I had originally some wild notion of confiding it all to Kitty; of begging her to marry me at once; and in her arms defying the ghostly occupant of the 'rickshaw. "After all," I argued, "the presence of the 'rickshaw is in itself enough to prove the existence of a spectral illusion. One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... stormy day; great black lurid thunderclouds lay piled along the horizon, and came up slowly and awfully against the wind. I looked upon them with terror; they seemed so near the earth, and so like living, watching things. They hung out of the sky, extending long ghostly arms downwards, and their gloom and density seemed supernatural. The soldiers took us out, our hands bound behind us, into a quadrangle at the back of their barracks. The scene is sharply impressed on my mind. A palisade of two ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... favourite spot of his; and she believed it was owing to some trickery of his that men still declared it haunted by evil or troubled spirits. Travellers passing that way had been scared almost out of their senses by the sight of a ghostly white figure gliding about, or by the sound of hollow moans and the rattling of chains. None but the ignorant stranger ever ventured within half-a-mile of that ill-omened spot. Cuthbert, as he sat thinking over ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... not. Something of the ghost of its father—it was the only child he ever had!—walking there all the night, pausing at the corners to look up at the signs, which bear a strange name, and wringing his ghostly hands in lamentation at the wrong done his memory! Rumor told it in a whisper, many years ago. Perhaps it was believed by a few of the oldest inhabitants of the city; but the highly respectable quarter never heard of it; and, if it ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... nearer, yet nearer. My heart jumped into my mouth, it ceased almost to beat as the strange footsteps stopped on the very threshold of our room. "Oh!" I gasped, thinking that in another moment spirit fingers would turn the handle, and a ghostly figure enter the room. What form would it take? Would the phantom be man or woman—tall or short—an assassin, murderer, or victim? Yes, the steps had ceased at our very door, and the next moment ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... and glory had come to San Francisco. This was the season for winds that seemed to blow from the four points of the compass at once and of ghostly fogs that stole up and down the streets of the city, abandoning the hills to bank in the valleys, as if seeking warmth; abruptly deserting the lowlands to prowl along the heights, always searching, searching, these pure white ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... scraps of talk from other telephones, and curious little squeals that were unlike any known sound. The lines running east and west were noisier than the lines running north and south. The night was noisier than the day, and at the ghostly hour of midnight, for what strange reason no one knows, the babel was at its height. Watson, who had a fanciful mind, suggested that perhaps these sounds were signals from the inhabitants of Mars or some other sociable planet. But the matter-of-fact young ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... wizard Had hushed them with a spell; And every sound was muffled, And every soldier's tread Fell lightly as a mother's 'Round her baby's cradle-bed; And rank, and file, and column, So softly by they swept, It seemed a ghostly army Had passed him as he slept; But mightier than enchantment Was that with magic move— The spell that hushed their voices— Deep reverence ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... The Duke of York was among the former; the King among the latter. Henry is said to have wrestled earnestly with God that no sins of his might be remembered against him, to lead to the discomfiture of his army. There was need for the entreaty. Perchance, had he slept that night, some such ghostly visions, born of his own conscience, might have disturbed his sleep, as those which troubled one of his successors on the eve of ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... early. Earn, eagle. Eastlin, eastern. E'e, eye. E'ebrie, eyebrow. Een, eyes. E'en, even. E'en, evening. E'enin', evening. E'er, ever. Eerie, apprehensive; inspiring ghostly fear. Eild, eld. Eke, also. Elbuck, elbow. Eldritch, unearthly, haunted, fearsome. Elekit, elected. Ell (Scots), thirty-seven inches. Eller, elder. En', end. Eneugh, enough. Enfauld, infold. Enow, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the coyote, and the sacks about him were filled with powder. He was sitting on something hard—a box—fifty pounds of dynamite! The cold sweat stood out in beads on his face, glistening in the lantern-glow. From between his feet a thin, white, ghostly line ran out until it lost itself in the blackness under the lantern. It was the fuse, leading to the box of dynamite ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... had covered a mile or so of the plain our ghostly escort crossed the pass, and came full gallop down the hill. I gave orders to my men to halt. The soldiers also came to a dead stop. I watched them through the telescope. They seemed to be holding a discussion. At last five men rode full speed northward, probably to guard the ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... that the building is of brick. The southern entrance, by which we approach, is the most imposing part of the ruin. We enter by a wooden bridge across the moat; this replaces the drawbridge. In the recessed chamber behind the central arch a ghostly drum was sometimes heard, and the supernatural drummer was supposed to guard hidden treasure. This legend was made good use of by the smuggling fraternity, the thumping of an empty keg being sufficient ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... moved to the door, while the second returned to the bedroom and snapped off the light. A moment later Grace saw her ghostly figure pass the couch, and then the snapping of the door catch told her ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... sea-green depths of the place—which darkened into absolute blackness, with ghostly projections from the sides, and dim icicles pendent from the invisible roof, he felt a suspicion that the cave might be the vestibule to that dread world of the departed which he had ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... at a ghostly pace and stood beside the widow, contrasting the awful simplicity of his shroud with the glare and glitter in which she had arrayed herself for this unhappy scene. None that beheld them could ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... breathin' corpses! How mothers weep over them! how wives kneel, and beat their hearts out on the rocky barriers that separate them from their hearts' love, their hearts' desire! How little starvin', naked children cower in their ghostly shadows through dark midnights! How fathers weep for their children, dead to them, dead to honor, to shame, to humanity! How the cries of the mourners ascend to ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... play her arts upon him—he was just about, I say, to show to the Count the folly and danger of renewing an old liaison with a woman such as he had described Mrs. Cat to be, when his Excellency, starting up, and interrupting his ghostly adviser at the very beginning of his sentence, said, "Egad, l'Abbe, you are right—it IS my son, and a mighty smart-looking creature with him. Hey! Mr. What's-your-name—Tom, you rogue, don't you know your own father?" And so saying, ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... set out through new and always beautiful ways; through tunnels where feet and voices rang with ghostly boomings most pleasant to the ear; over bridges whence they saw—in partial proof of Isaac Borrachsohn's veracity—"mans und ladies ridin'." Of a surety they rode nothing more exciting than horses, but that was, to East Side eyes, an ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... "worked," and he snuffled and grunted faster and faster. He made up his mind to fight. And the extraordinary combat began. Lit by the blood rays of a setting sun, from a sky all raw and red, backed by the blue-gray haze of the watching woods, the silence broken only by the ghostly whisper of the snake's scales and the tiny pig-like grunting of the hundred-spiked hedgehog, that ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... right, Frank, but the rash continually comes back, a ghostly visitant, Frank: I'm afraid the doctors are in league with the devil. It generally returns after a good dinner, a sort of aftermath of champagne. The doctors say I must not drink champagne, and must stop smoking, the silly people, who regard pleasure as their natural enemies; ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... for poking its ghostly nose into other people's affairs it reminded me of my earthly friend Poppleton. Nothing pleased it better than being appealed to for aid and advice, and Whibley, who was a perfect slave to it, would hunt half over the parish for people ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... "I trust your over-sensitive, artistic temperament is not to be so influenced by our ghostly visitor that you will be unfitted ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... buildings rose up grimly into the night; the faces that flitted to and fro along the pavements, kept ever sliding past him, melting into the darkness; and the cabs and 'buses, still astir in the streets, had a ghostly air as they vanished in ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... the shadow of a great tree, he sat down with his pistol across his knees. The moon had arisen and cast ghostly shadows over everything. It was a time for repentance, for thoughts of the past with him, and as he sat there, that terrible hour, with murder in his heart, ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... like Zofloya the Moor—a work as wild, apparently, as anything Cyril Tourneur ever wrote—excited his imagination to impossible flights of adventure. Few of us have the endurance to study the effects of this ghostly reading in Shelley's own work—his forgotten novels, Zastrossi, and St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian—but we can see how his life itself borrowed some of the extravagances of fiction. Many of his recorded ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... merchant and seeing him changed of colour and conduct asked him, "What is with thee to do, and what ill hast thou to rue that thy case and complexion are so changed to view?" "O Fakir," answered the other, "verily a matter of marvel hath betided me and I know not how to act therein." Quoth the ghostly man, "And what may that be?" whereupon the Merchant related to him all his affair first and last, and how he had heard a Voice saying to him, "In very deed thy daughter shall conceive after unlawful ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... the clearing, but he did not leave the obscurity of the forest. The black recesses served him for a hiding-place from which he could obtain a perfect view of the ghostly enclosure. The tumbled hut and the weirdly-outlined graves with their crowning monuments showed up distinctly in the starlight. And he settled himself for ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... A ghostly echo touched his mind; restless, poignantly yearning. He swung to face the locked door, knowing there could be nothing behind it. The first real fear came to him as he did so. The thing was lonely—the thing that watched him was as lonely as ...
— Cry from a Far Planet • Tom Godwin
... have seen nothing. Why do you ask?" Not for worlds would she own to any one the ghostly fears that shook her out there in the dusky avenue, with the sound of those following ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... He drew up his battered chair to the window, threw it open, and sat looking out. The bridge and the river were alike silent now. The sky signs had gone, the murky darkness blotted out the whole scene, against which the curving arc of lights shone with a fitful, ghostly light. For a moment his fancy served him an evil trick. He saw the barge with the blood-red sails. A cargo of evil beings thronged its side. He saw their faces leering at him. Sabatini was there, standing at the helm, calm and scornful. There was the dead man and Isaac, Groves the butler, ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... just been promenading the line of tents in his nightshirt, with a club, in search of some scoundrel, supposed to be the Adjutant, who has stuffed his bed with stove-wood and stones. Wilson, on seeing the ghostly apparition approach, breaks ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... Loggia de' Lanzi the moonlight fell among the statues, and in that fairy light I seemed to see in those ghostly still figures of marble and bronze some strange fantastic parable, the inscrutable prophecy of the scornful past. Gian Bologna's Sabine woman, was she not Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini's Perseus with Medusa's head, has it not in ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... The thousand ghostly shapes of mist which had thronged the heights, shutting in the prospect on every side, had now vanished, discovering as wild and melancholy a spot as a romantic heart could desire. There was something sinister ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... I lived thus, filling all the duties of my calling with the most scrupulous exactitude, praying and fasting, exhorting and lending ghostly aid to the sick, and bestowing alms even to the extent of frequently depriving myself of the very necessaries of life. But I felt a great aridness within me, and the sources of grace seemed closed against me. I never found that happiness ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... through it. The hallway was dimly alight from a lamp, set, for safety's sake, within a pewter bowl. The house of Sawyer slept. Gathering his train in his hand, Jimsy hurried through the hall and down the stairs to the lower floor, quite dark now, save for barred patches of window framing ghostly landscapes. A gust of wind and snow whirled in as he unbarred the kitchen door. Then something with an ingratiating waggle pushed gladly against his feet. Five seconds later Jimsy and Stump were on their ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... in the department to-day. He has a ghostly appearance. He is announced to speak in Richmond to-morrow; but I believe he starts for Georgia to-day. He may publish a letter. He had a long interview ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... only the ordinary pine box, with what seemed to be a square paper, or placard, on the side facing me. Probably the address, bunglingly adjusted on the side instead of the top, or else a stain of mud from the late rough drive. At all events I was not curious enough to approach more nearly the ghostly visitant. ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... half an hour since the flowering of life! What a change in both! She was pacing along slowly, her head thrown back; the oval of her face white among her furs, under the ghostly touch of the moonlight; a suggestion of something austere—finely remote—in her attitude and movement. His eyes were on the ground, his shoulders bent; she ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... where the path parted to the men's and to the ladies' dressing-rooms, he perceived a ghostly figure in the obscurity which also prevailed here from the general extinction of the illuminant. He was about shrinking back and fleeing in another direction when eyes blazed in the dark like a ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... The cactus tree, like the eastern forest tree, is often found bored full of round, holes that are made by the Gila woodpecker. When the tree dies its pulp dries up and blows away and there remains standing only a spectral figure composed of white slats and fiber that looks ghostly ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... old hall near the road: nothing remained of it but the tall gate posts and rusty iron gates looking strangely dreary and deserted, and within one could see, between some dark yew trees, an old terrace walk with stone steps and balustrades—the most ghostly-looking ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... expensive; she was impatient till this was performed, and deferred the sending to Don Alonzo, though her thoughts were perpetually on him. She, by the advice of Brilliard, writes a letter to Octavio; which was not like those she had before written, but as an humble penitent would write to a ghostly Father, treating him with all the respect that was possible; and if ever she mentioned love, it was as if her heart had violently, and against her will, burst out into softness, as still she retained there; and then she would take up again, and ask pardon for ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... in maintaining that Mozart's operas contain his best music. Where among all his purely instrumental works is anything to be found as inspired as the music in the scenes where the ghostly statue nods at Don Juan, and subsequently where it enters his room and clutches his hand in its marble grasp? I venture to add that even Beethoven, although he is not generally regarded as an operatic composer par excellence, and although his fame chiefly rests on his symphonies and other ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... as the ghostly procession drew near. The song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his eyes, half afraid that sight ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... were to be redressed, and unworthy ambitions to be checked, that the voice of LOWELL'S scornful laughter was heard in the land, piercing, with its keen cadences and mirth-provoking rhyme, the policy of government and the ghostly armor of many a spectral faith ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... After an hour's conversation in privacy, Henrietta took her dinner surrounded by the court; and the king, who had already dined, performing the office of her carver, cut a pheasant and some venison. By the side of the queen stood her ghostly confessor, solemnly reminding her that this was the eve of John the Baptist, and was to be fasted, exhorting her to be cautious that she set no scandalous example on her first arrival. But Charles and his court were now to be gained over, as well as John the Baptist. She ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there alone,—how do you think he will like it? He doesn't believe one word of ghosts,—but then he knows, that, whether waking or sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghostly images. It is not what we believe, as I said before, that frightens us commonly, but what we conceive. A principle that reaches a good way if I am not mistaken. I say, then, that, if these odd sounds coming from the Little Gentleman's chamber sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... a real swamp than anything we've struck yet," declared Jack, as he looked around at their ghostly surroundings, with the trailing Spanish moss festooning many of ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... buoy at the harbor's mouth began to bellow sadly,—reminders all of the shell of that world towards which they sailed. And at last the harbor, with its echoing bells and fog-whistles, the protesting shrieks of its man-machines; suddenly the colossal hull of a schooner at anchor. Then the ghostly outlines of the huddled shipping, the city roofs, the steeples, the shriek of engines in the freight yards—they touched the earth! It had ended. The noise of ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the burning of the clipper-ship 'Hornet' on the line, May 3, 1866. There were thirty-one men on board at the time, and I was in Honolulu when the fifteen lean and ghostly survivors arrived there after a voyage of forty-three days in an open boat, through the blazing tropics, on ten days' rations of food. A very remarkable trip; but it was conducted by a captain who was a remarkable man, otherwise there would have been no survivors. He was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... walking Ghosts, the opinion of them has I think been on purpose, either taught, or not confuted, to keep in credit the use of Exorcisme, of Crosses, of holy Water, and other such inventions of Ghostly men. Neverthelesse, there is no doubt, but God can make unnaturall Apparitions. But that he does it so often, as men need to feare such things, more than they feare the stay, or change, of the course of Nature, which ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... be a more thrilling road than the road along which we came to Chichester, and by which we will leave it in a few minutes now. Think of Roman Stane Street, and listen for the rumble of ghostly chariot wheels! Then—if you've not come this way for Goodwood races—you can throw your mind a little further ahead to the days of the crusaders and the pilgrims; and to kings' processions glittering with ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... hurled me, far beneath The vast and ghostly halls of Death, Down to the limitless profound Of Tartarus, in fetters bound, Fixed by his unrelenting hand! So had no man, nor God on high, Exulted o'er mine agony— But now, a sport to wind and sky, Mocked by ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... mother, smiling at his enthusiasm, "that since you seem to like the ghostly part, you would be more than ever pleased ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... the camps: there was nothing else to do, with Gray Billy Batch lost in Rattle Water, and now decently stowed away by the Reverend John Fairmeadow. It was lonely in Gray Billy Batch's cabin, now, of course; it was sometimes almost intolerably so—and ghostly, too, with echoes of long-past footsteps and memories of soft motherly words. Pattie Batch, however, a practical little person, knew in her own mind, you must be informed, exactly how to still the haunting ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... in their office as prelates be, we should not long live, for lack of sustenance. And as it is necessary for to have this ploughing for the sustentation of the body, so must we have also the other for the satisfaction of the soul, or else we cannot live long ghostly. For as the body wasteth and consumeth away for lack of bodily meat, so doth the soul pine away for default of ghostly meat. But there be two kinds of inclosing, to let or hinder both these kinds of ploughing: the one is an ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... his benumbed state. It had all seemed a fantastic dream, but he had only to look around him to know that it was reality. Three or four battle lanterns were shining and they threw a ghostly light over the deck of the schooner, which was littered with spars and sails, and the bodies of men who had fallen before the fire of the sloop. Streams of blood flowed everywhere. He sickened and ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that Adah was in the kitchen at the moment, for I lost at once my ghostly pallor. "Yes," said Mrs. Yocomb heartily, "come in and make this man eat, and scold him soundly for going so far away as to get lost when he's scarcely able to walk at all. I've kind of promised I wouldn't scold ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... half-unseen beings that my fears acknowledged in the deep darknesses of the vast chamber. And then that lonely orchestra,— often did I think that I heard low music from the organ, as if touched by ghostly fingers—how gladly I would have sunk down from my solitude to the vulgarity of the servant's hall—but that was now carefully interdicted. The consequences of all this seclusion to a highly imaginative and totally unregulated mind, must have been much worse than putting me to sleep in the haunted ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Father Blake, whom he found at home, and who suggested that a magistrate might be also useful upon the occasion; and as Merryvale lay not much out of the way, Andy made a detour to obtain the presence of Squire Egan, while Father Blake pushed directly onward upon his ghostly mission. ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... and looked up. Then he called half savagely to come in; but there was no response. With a muttered blasphemy he renewed his potations. Presently he forgot all around him, sank into a daze, but suddenly awoke to see standing before him someone or something like a battered, ghostly edition of his sister. For a few moments there came upon him a sort of fear. The woman before him, with distorted features and burning eyes seemed hardly human, and the only thing that seemed a reality of his sister, as she had been, was her wealth of golden ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... at his comrade, in a sort of droll assurance that it could be no voice from the grave, no ghostly inhabitant of a cave, who could require to have such a matter explained. He then condescendingly told her that when the eggs of the eider-duck are taken she lays more; and this twice over, before giving up in despair. Of course, this puts off the season ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... caldron of the "Pagan Poem," that transcription of the most sensual and impassioned of Virgil's eclogues, with its mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that beat through the close of "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty, almost metaphysical, first few periods, the severe and pathetic second movement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs like "Le Son du cor," that have atmosphere and a delicate ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... The ghostly prudes, with hagged[7] face, Already had condemn'd the sinner: My Lady rose, and with a grace— She smiled, and bid ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... have left those voices still muttering and sighing through the walls that had sheltered so many generations, such various lives of men. Ian was used to the creaking and groaning of the wood-work; he knew how on the staircase the rising of the boards, which had been pressed down in the day, simulated ghostly footsteps in the night. He was in his mental self the most rational of mortals, but at times the Highland strain in his blood, call it sensitive or superstitious, spoke faintly to his nerves—never ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... What did he want? To have told all this would have been better than to fill the novel with padding about Rome, sculpture, and the Ethics of Art. As the silly saying runs: "the people has a right to know" about Miriam and her ghostly acquaintance. {10} But the "Marble Faun" is not of Hawthorne's best period, beautiful as are a hundred passages ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... lasted long, and she suddenly broke in, "O mother, Master Eyre saith there is a marvellous cavern near his father's house, all full of pendants from the roof like a minster, and great sheeted tables and statues standing up, all grand and ghostly on the floor, far better than in this Pool's Hole. He says his father will have it lighted up if we will ride ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a physical terror, but with me in the presence of this unspeakable Thing was only the utter and awful terror of the mind, the mad fear of a prolonged and ghostly nightmare. Again and again I tried to shriek, to make some noise, but physically I was utterly dead. I could only feel myself go mad with the terror of hideous death. The eyes were close on me,—their movement so swift that they seemed to be but palpitating flames, the dead ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... all probability died in the faith of a roman catholick. This, however, I am apt to think, will not disparage his declaration in the opinion of some great men at home, even tho he did not make his confession to a ghostly physician. ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... long struggle, and of hoping against hope, laid themselves down and yielded to their fate. In the six weeks that we were at Millen, one man in every ten died. The ghostly pines there sigh over the unnoted graves of seven hundred boys, for whom life's morning closed in the gloomiest shadows. As many as would form a splendid regiment—as many as constitute the first born of a populous City—more ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... anxious glance in the direction of the wretch whom he meant to abandon to the desert. To his horror he saw a lean, smirched, ghostly face looking at him in a dazed way, as if out of the blinding shades of death. The quickness of this villain was so wonderful that one is almost tempted to call it praiseworthy. He perceived at once that Thurstane would be discovered, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... rain-drops whisper solemn secrets to the listening leaves and the twilight lingers in the lanes! And autumn! ah, how sadly fair, with its golden glow and the dying grandeur of its tinted woods—its blood-red sunsets and its ghostly evening mists, with its busy murmur of reapers, and its laden orchards, and the calling of the gleaners, and ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... who never purchased a new dress without duly consulting Mr. Alfred as to the fashion of the material and the becomingness of the color. Besides all these useful accomplishments, he visited the poor when they were sick, occasionally acting as their medical and ghostly adviser, and would take infinite pains in carrying about subscriptions for distressed individuals, whom he was unable to assist out of his own scanty funds. He sang Italian and French songs with great taste and execution, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... another familiar; for there the headless horseman rides, not on his own horse, but on yours, seated on the crupper with his ghostly arms encircling your waist. His name is Powlett, but I know no more, except that his presence is an additional reason why one should ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... th' abundance of his young bride's hair Loosed on his breast he lay and dared not sleep, Listening for the scarce motion of your boughs, Which sighed with bliss as she with blissful sleep, And drinking desperately each honied wave Of perfume wafted past the ghostly blind Knew first th' implacable and bitter sense Of Time that hastes and Death who need not haste. Shed your last sweetness, limes! But now no more. She, fruit of that night's love, she heeds you not, Who bent, compassionate, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... young detective. We were also opposite the marble yard of Cornelius Lawson, who wrought monuments for the dead of Little Arcady. In front of the shop were a dozen finished and half-finished stones, ghostly white in the dusk. It seemed indeed to be a spot impressive enough to meet even Billy's captious requirements, but we had underrated the demands of his artist's conscience. Solon called ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... moonlight, white and black and hard across the spaces of the park, but now the light was livid and full of the quality of haze. An extraordinarily low white mist, not three feet above the ground, drifted broodingly across the grass, and the trees rose ghostly out of that phantom sea. Great and shadowy and strange was the world that night, no one seemed abroad; I and my little cracked voice drifted solitary through the silent mysteries. Sometimes I argued as I have told, sometimes I tumbled along ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... wheeled round upon the frightened woman, rearing, snorting, and showing his long, yellow teeth. Sary fled at once and barred the door behind her; but neither she nor Scott ever saw their "gift horse" again. For aught I know he still roams the Adirondack forest, and maybe personates the ghostly and ghastly white deer of song and legend. Who can tell? But he was lifted off Scott Peck's shoulders, and all Scott said by way of epitaph on the departed, when he came home to find his white steed gone, was, ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... for wine." After this remark she remained motionless and silent. To her tired eyes Charlotte throbbed and swelled like a ghostly figure ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... name it is needful that you should remove from such company at once, as there is talk about you and the said Sir Christopher Harflete. I purpose, therefore, God permitting me, to ride this day to Cranwell Towers, and if you be there, as your lawful guardian and ghostly father, to command you, being an infant under age, to accompany me thence to the Nunnery of Blossholme. There I have determined, in the exercise of my authority, you shall abide until a fitting husband is found for you, unless, indeed, ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... sounding clear and solemn in the stillness and Tom moved ever so slightly in unison with it, hoping by changing his angle of vision to catch a better glimpse. He could see the bright spot now, the grim figure standing directly facing him in ghostly silence. ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... instead of the last, we could not refrain from describing it. Yet in its presence the impulse is toward silence. We feel, that, viewed even in its mere external, it is as simple and majestic as the Hebrew language. The far sky, with its pallid moon,—the deep, shadowy valley, with its ghostly warriors,—the group on the near mountain, with its superb youth, its venerable age, and its manhood too strong and vital for the destructive years;—in the presence of such a creation there is time for a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... hour from far-away Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone. No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the hour out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away in outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Jack to have started too early, for it was very dark, and the lanterns they carried in the bows shed a strange light across the smooth water. There was the black forest on their left, and the ghostly-looking reef with its billows on their right, with the dull thunderous roar sounding strangely awe-inspiring, and the boy could not help feeling a sensation of nervousness as he thought of what the consequences ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... river's bank at last, The weary warriors paused for their repast. A couch of ice and falling snows for spread Made many a suffering soldier's chilling bed. They slept to dream of glory and delight, While the pale fingers of the pitying night Wove ghostly winding sheets for that doomed score Who, ere another eve, should sleep ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... wheels rattled all the way out the Riverfield ribbon, and I thought an old owl hooted the question at me from a dead tree beside the road, while I felt also that a mocking-bird sang it from a thicket of dogwood in ghostly bloom opposite. "Will there be ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... gull flapped by them heavily, and the red sun went down. England was growing lonely. A great barge laden with straw came out of the dusk, and was gone without a sound, its ghostly sail drawing in a wind that the wherry sat too low to feel. Nick held his breath as the barge went by: ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... and endeavor. His huntsman's ear detected its significance at once, and springing to the corner of the room he seized his rifle, threw open the cabin door and stood on the threshold. A full moon shone on the snow and in that white and ghostly light his quick eye caught sight of a spectacle that made his pulses leap. A fawn bounded out into the open field and headed for his cabin, attracted by the firelight gleaming through the window and door. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... First a dusky whiteness glimmered from the black of the further end, where the half-ghost sat on its shelf; then gradually the whiteness detached itself, took shape,—if it could be called shape,—emerged into the dim half-light,—came on slowly, silently. Shrouded, like the ghostly bust behind it, tall and slender, with dark locks escaping beneath the hood or cowl that drooped low over its face,—with one hand raised, and pointing stiffly at the unhappy woman,—the figure came on—and on—till it saw Margaret. Then it stopped. Next came in view the bright, eager face ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... guessed rightly; it was the stranger. The moonlight fell full upon the side of the house and the road, and the panting horse stood revealed in a bright light which gave the man's face a ghostly look added to his natural pallor. As he leaned forward, Tom saw that he was as much exhausted as was the animal he ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... at last, with Destournier on an improvised hemlock litter. The fire blazed up brightly, making a striking picture of the eager faces. The men lowered the litter to the ground, and they crowded around it. Destournier was ghostly pale, but full of thankfulness. When there was a little space open he reached ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... quake, alas! might I but see You smile, death's rigorous law repealing! Pale lips, your mystery so well concealing, May not the eloquent, varied minstrelsy Of my inspired ardor potent be To touch your chords to music's uttered feeling? Friend, here you cherished flowers: send me now One ghostly bloom to prove that you are blessed. No? If denial such as brands my brow Be in your heavenly regions, too, confessed, Oh may it prove the truth that your still eyes Foresee the end of ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... she walked out into the moonlit garden, and went slowly down the whitened road toward the station. A magical, dewless night! The moonbeams had stolen in to the beech clump, frosting the boles and boughs, casting a fine ghostly grey over the shadow-patterned beech-mast. Gyp took the short cut through it. Not a leaf moved in there, no living thing stirred; so might an earth be where only trees inhabited! She thought: 'I'll bring him back through here.' And she waited at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... one of the leaves in the old registry book, and for a moment as he raised his eyes to the silent, white figure before the altar, he took her for a ghostly visitant; but Valmai, with a sudden inrush of recognition, clasped her hands, a faint exclamation escaped her lips, and the "Vicare du" knew it was no spirit who stood trembling before him. For a moment both were speechless—then pointing to the page ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... And to repay each other! Why rejoices Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good? Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood, Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices, Image of Image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf, That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold? Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold These costless shadows of thy shadowy self? Be sad! be glad! be neither! seek, or shun! Thou hast no reason why! Thou canst have none; Thy being's ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... a new sacrifice, and each fall the death of a hero. Soon there was no one left standing, no man and no standard, nothing but a gray heap of bodies, whose limbs palpitated and moved like some fabulous sea creature, making groaning, ghostly sounds. Ten or twelve poor fellows wounded by stray shots sheltered themselves in the sandpit without weapons, with staring eyes and distorted features. That was all there was left of the ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... whether Mrs. Ponsonby were a prude or no, but it had its rise in quite a different cause. She had no dress she considered suitable for such an occasion. Her wedding dress still hung in ghostly splendor in a closet all by itself, but that was too grand, and the others of her trousseau had been few in number and plain in make, and would now have been consigned to the rag bag had she seen any means of supplying their place. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... to a pallid yellow. The distance was losing itself in the rising purple shadows. Already the dark patches of woodlands were assuming that ghostly vagueness which belongs to twilight. The ranch was wrapped in a deep repose. A sense of rest had fallen upon the great valley. All life seemed satisfied with its long day's effort and desired ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... lake, and indeed they were too worn with battling with the storm to do any more than keep the tossed skiff from capsizing. Morning dawned wet and gray, after a miserable night; they were drenched to the skin, and almost spent with weariness and hunger, and now that a wan and ghostly daylight had come they were no better for it, for an impenetrable fog shut them in on every side. Marie and her mother began to pray. The Black Beaver sat dogged and inert, with upturned ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... chill feeling of fear she shut the door and turned again to her game. But for once the charm of the cards failed her. Where was Jasper, and why did he not return? Silence held oppressive empire; her fears plucked at her like ghostly hands. The lamp and the footstep—what did they mean? Had ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... moon—just as there had been that night, only now it fell on a many bridged river across which were ghostly cypress trees, rising along the hillside to a strangely outlined church behind ruined fortifications. I was wondering, against my will, at what hour that moon rose over the distant New England village, which came before me in a vision that wiped out ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... of the lean, white figure, which stood looking at him with great eyes that seemed to draw the darkness into them. The meeting with Morten had put him into an expectant frame of mind. He still had the call sounding in his ears, and gazed in amazement at the ghostly apparition. The delicate lines, spoiled by want, the expression of childlike terror of the dark— all this twofold picture of wanness stamped with the stamp of death, and of an unfulfilled promise of beauty—was ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and feel no shame? Trade in the blood of innocence, and plead Experience as a warrant for the deed? So may the wolf whom famine has made bold, To quit the forest and invade the fold: So may the ruffian, who, with ghostly glide, Dagger in hand, steals close to your bedside; Not he, but his emergence forced the door— He found it inconvenient to be poor. Has God then given its sweetness to the cane— Unless his laws be trampled on—in vain? Built a brave world, which cannot yet subsist, Unless his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... overhead. One green star Was slipping from sight in the pale void afar; The spirits of change and of awe, with faint breath, Were shifting the midnight, above and beneath. The spirits of awe and of change were around And about, and upon her. A dull muffled sound, And a hand on her hand, like a ghostly surprise, And she felt herself fix'd by the hot hollow eyes Of the Frenchman before her: those eyes seemed to burn, And scorch out the darkness between them, and turn Into fire as they fix'd her. He look'd like the ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... "Here," said she. "Set down here." She drew up another chair close beside Rose and sat down. There came a flash of lightning and a terrible crash of thunder. A blind slammed somewhere. Out in the great front yard the rain swirled in misty columns, like ghostly dancers, and the flowering shrubs lashed the ground. Horace watched it until Sylvia called him, also, to what she considered a place of safety. "If you don't come away from that window and set on the sofa I shall have a conniption fit," she said. Horace obeyed. As he sat down he thought of Henry, ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... independence exhibited by her in all secular affairs, in her own spiritual concerns she uniformly testified the deepest humility, and deferred too implicitly to what she deemed the superior sagacity, or sanctity, of her ghostly counsellors. An instance of this humility may be worth recording. When Fray Fernando de Talavera, afterwards archbishop of Granada, who had been appointed confessor to the queen, attended her for ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... turned to her lover, and gave him both her hands, looking up at him through a mist of tears, but still with that ghostly smile upon her ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... In a ghostly way you see Stanley turning the pump handle. With a handful of waste which he has borrowed from the Rosa's engine room, the Professor wipes from the section of wall through which the searchlight plays the moisture that constantly collects there. I sit with my hand near the key, peering downward ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... but a Democratic Congress turned its back on the proposed improvement. No boat bigger than a skiff ever ascended Salt River, though there was a wild report, evidently a hoax, that a party of picnickers had seen one night a ghostly steamer, loaded and manned, puffing up the stream. An old Scotchman, Hugh Robinson, when ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... forlornly about the corners of the house. The door unlatched itself, swung inward hesitatingly, and hung wavering for a moment on its sagging hinges. A formless cloud of gray fog blew into the warm, steamy room. But whatever ghostly visitant had paused upon the threshold, he had evidently decided not to enter, for the catch snapped shut with a quick, passionate vigor. The echo of the slamming door rang ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been inclined, for I knew that at the first faint dawn of ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... an instant the vision of the young telepath hung in the air over her couch like a ghostly double exposure. Then it faded and the room ...
— The Passenger • Kenneth Harmon
... there was practically no undergrowth, perhaps for the reason that their dense, spreading tops shut out the light. As I saw afterwards both trunks and boughs were clothed with long grey moss, which even at midday gave the place a very ghostly appearance. The darkness beneath those trees was intense, literally we could not see an inch before our faces. Yet rather than stand still we struggled on, Hans leading the way, for his instincts were quicker than ours. The steep rise of the ground beneath ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... destination was, long before we got there. In the centre of one of the glades, there is the shattered stump of what must at some time have been a most gigantic tree. It is called the Abbot's Beech, and there are so many ghostly stories about it, that I know many a brave soldier who would not care about mounting sentinel over it. However, I cared as little for such folly as the Emperor did, so we crossed the glade and made straight for the ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... said Innstetten. "As a matter of fact, however, there is a difference. Ghostly apparitions are always artificial, or at least that is said to have been the case in the Belvedere, as Cousin von Briest told me only yesterday, but hauntings are never artificial; ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... probably employ a "bird chorus," the use of talking-birds as messengers; that they would repeat the plots current in other countries, and display the same non-Christian idea of death and of the future world (see "The Lyke-wake Dirge"), the same ghostly superstitions and stories of metamorphosis, and the same belief in elves and fairies, as are found in the ballads of Greece, of Provence, of Brittany, Denmark and Scotland. We shall now examine these supposed common notes of all genuine popular ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... King's Great Drawing-room was not far from the Duchess of Kent's rooms, and was, in fact, put at her disposal in its dismantled, ghostly condition. Among its pictures—freely attributed to many schools and masters—including several battle-pieces and many portraits, there were three representations of English palaces: old Greenwich, where Elizabeth was born; ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... renew, When I am dead. While onward bent, with typic woes, I seek the red man's last repose; Let no rude hand the flame destroy, Nor mar the scene with festive joy; While night by night, a ghostly guest, I journey to my final rest, ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... his duty. Being a priest, he must go forth and find the soul, and bring it back to God. He remembered no more until he found himself in the midst of a great wood, standing in an open space; about him were dripping trees, and a ghostly sky overhead, and no sound but that of falling leaves. Large leaves floated down, and each interested him till it reached the ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... the streets wandering from ghostly passage to passage, one hears no step but that of the watchman with staff and lantern. Presently there appears, far off, a light like a low-flying firefly, as it comes nearer, it is seen to proceed from ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... paced up and down the circumscribed space that was left to them of the chamber, being the only evidence she had till she dropped off to sleep that she was not without company. But with the daylight he was gone, and feeling almost panic-stricken with ghostly fears and loneliness, ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... old brass lantern, and presently he was flashing his way up among the dark sounds of the black old wood, with that ghostly face tenderly pressed ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... flames blaze up, illumining picturesque groups of men, and casting a wild glare far into the depths of the great, black, silent woods. The trees seem to stand out like startled giants, gazing at the unusual scene; and all above and around the frightened shadows lurk, in ghostly boughs, behind dark trunks, among the deep grasses, and in hollows of the black morass. And the darkness of the night overhangs the army like a ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... moment a superstitious thrill ran through the boy's frame. He had heard stories of ghostly visitants to these woods, some of which wore the garb of the monks of the neighbouring priory; but he had never seen any such apparition, and would not have thought of it now had it not been for the peculiar ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... room is a suite of apartments, ruinous and roofless in his day, but which Colonel Wildman has restored, and furnished most appropriately with old tapestry and antique tables and chairs. These rooms wear a ghostly aspect, and we were not surprised to learn that one, at least, had the reputation of being haunted. The great drawing-room, once the dormitory of the monks, is now a splendid apartment richly decorated; above the chimney is a fine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... was resolved to make her masterpiece. The children were not allowed to enter the room where the work was progressing, though they sometimes took awe-stricken peeps through the crack at the mysterious, sheet-draped object suspended from hooks, and in the twilight taking on an aspect distinctly ghostly. It was necessary, too, to carpet the floor of the workroom with sheets when Diantha had a fitting, all of which added enormously to the romance and mystic glamour inevitably connected with a wedding dress. The children, with whom Diantha had always been a prime favorite, instead of ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith |
