"Haunting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the great care upon his breast—the haunting thought that perhaps, after all, he had had something to do with John Grange's disappearance—now stood in old Tummus's cottage a different being. There was none of the rather pompous, important manner that he was in the habit of putting on when addressing ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... Scansorial Picarians, however (if the reader with his proverbial courtesy will kindly pardon me the inevitable use of such very bad words), are essentially tree-haunters; and the tree-haunting and climbing habit, as is well beknown, seems particularly favourable to the growth of intelligence. Thus schoolboys climb trees—but I forgot: this is a scientific article, and such levity is inconsistent with the dignity of science. Let us be serious! Well, at any rate, monkeys, squirrels, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... for that line, and so many reference notes on different pages to be looked up before it was possible to ascertain with any degree of certainty what trains stopped at Horleydene on week-days, that, in her shaken frame of mind, with the necessity for hurry haunting her, she became confused, and failed to comprehend the perplexing figures. She signalled to the driver to stop, and handed him ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... words! Mine are ghostly children, Haunting all the ways; Latent in the plum bloom, Calling through the birds, Romping with the wheat brood ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... stories the finest are The Pavilion on the Links, a tale of Sicilian vengeance and English love that is full of haunting mystery and the deadly fear of unknown assassins; Markheim, a brilliant example of this author's skill in laying bare the conflict of a soul with evil and its ultimate triumph; The Sire de Maletroit's Door, a vivid picture of the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and, mind you, our house IS a house, a great castle of jointed stone that would weigh up a street of English houses; so that when it quakes, as it did last night, it means something. But the quaking was not what put me about; it was the horrible howl of the wind round the corner; the audible haunting of an incarnate anger about the house; the evil spirit that was abroad; and, above all, the shuddering silent pauses when the storm's heart stands dreadfully still for a moment. O how I hate a storm at night! ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... John had not known an hour devoid of haunting fear. From a cheerful and contented youth he had become despondent, taciturn and nervous. He was the same affectionate husband and attentive son as before, and his general characteristics remained precisely the same. He was scrupulous ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... swoop down upon him with a breezy suggestion of Mrs. Partington, plumes and patchouli, and to disturb his rest with a soaring and beautiful song of future promise. But Raggles would awake to a sense of shivering cold and a haunting impression of ideals lost in a depressing aura ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... to leave "The house where I was born;" Long ago I used to grieve, My home seemed so forlorn. In other years, its silent rooms Were filled with haunting fears; Now, their very memory comes O'ercharged ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... every stroke, and by the time they reached the Gut began to hope that he should not have a fit or lose all his strength just at the start, or cut a crab, or come to some other unutterable grief, the fear of which had been haunting him all day. ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Above the world's dark border burns the moon, Yellow and large; from forest floorways, strewn With flowers, and fields that tingle with new birth, The moist smell of the unimprisoned earth Comes up, a sigh, a haunting promise. Soon, Ah, soon, the teeming triumph! At my feet The river with its stately sweep and wheel Moves on slow-motioned, luminous, grey like steel. From fields far off whose watery hollows gleam, Aye with blown throats that make the long hours ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... their windows with luscious lavenders and faint green stripes and soft silk shirts with comfortable French cuffs, and marking out $2.00 or $3.00, as the case might be, wrote $1.50 or $2.50 below. The song of the shirt was loud in the land, its haunting melody not to be resisted. Is there any lure for a woman in all the fluffy mystery of a January "white sale" comparable to the seduction for a man of a lavender shirt marked down from $2.00 to $1.50? I doubt it. Heaven help the woman if there is! So the unused stock in trunk or bureau drawer ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... sad, a tale is told, Like a penitent hymn of the Psalmist old, Of the fast which the good man life-long kept With a haunting sorrow that never slept, As the circling year brought round the time Of an error that left the sting of crime, When he sat on the bench of the witchcraft courts, With the laws of Moses and 'Hale's ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Night's last hours, like haunting spirits, creep With listening terrors round the couch of sleep, And Midnight, brooding in its deepest dye, Seizes on Fear with dismal sympathy, "I dreamed a dream" something akin to fate, Which Superstition's ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... Dryads haunting the groves, nereids who dwell in wet caves, for all the white leaves of olive-branch, and early roses, and ivy wreaths, woven gold berries, which she once brought to your altars, bear now ripe fruits from Arcadia, and Assyrian wine to shatter ...
— Sea Garden • Hilda Doolittle
... A haunting and devilish desire seized him to break open the skulls of all these yokels and to look into their brains. Above all now the silence of the cottage close to him had become unendurable torment. That closed door, the tiny railing which surrounded the bit of front garden, that little gate ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... by me with reference to both sunbeams and fungi of the word "becomes" I recognise that it may justify much doubt and questioning. The idea of actually becoming the flickering light or the fungus, as distinguished from that of entering into or haunting it, is a difficult one to grasp, especially as regards the flickering light. I tried to get to the bottom of this question when I was at Mafulu; but the belief as to actual becoming was insisted upon, and I could get ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... tide— Dark storms of feeling sweep across her breast— In loneliness there needs no mask of pride— To nerve the soul, and veil the heart's unrest, Amid the crowd her glances brightly beam, Her smiles with undimmed lustre sweetly shine: The haunting visions of life's fevered dream The cold and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... infinite marvel, which vindicates, as a beautiful wonder, the statuary's art from the more Protean rivalry of pictorial skill. If we call to mind even a few of the sculptured creations which are "a joy forever," even to retrospection,—haunting by their pure individuality the temple of memory, permanently enshrined in heartfelt admiration as illustrations of what is noble in man and woman, significant in history, powerful in expression, or irresistible in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... with the gipsies, which I have related in a former paper, I have observed several of them haunting the purlieus of the Hall, in spite of a positive interdiction of the squire. They are part of a gang that has long kept about this neighbourhood, to the great annoyance of the farmers, whose poultry-yards often suffer from their nocturnal invasions. ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... his unhallowed nocturnal rambles with perfect impunity—keeping them secret even from his friend Mr. Blyth, whose toleration, expansive as it was, he well knew would not extend to viewing leniently such offenses as haunting night-houses at two in the morning, while his father believed him to be safe in bed. But one mitigating circumstance can be urged in connection with the course of misconduct which he was now habitually following. He had still grace enough left to ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... fell asleep again being "comforted by the feeling that the Lord would take care of her." Next morning the effects of the "chill" had passed off, but there was left a more or less constant feeling of vague dread and fear of death, and with this a haunting idea born of this strongly felt hallucination of external touch that Satan was within her. The feelings of dread and fear grew steadily and became too strong for her faith in the Lord taking care of her, and very quickly her obsession as to possession by Satan, became the definite ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... ill at ease. He met young Morgan on the steps, and returned his bow very coldly. His usual companions were absent, and, after haunting the saloon restlessly for an hour, he strolled down to his counting-house. He knew that the foreign correspondence had just arrived, and, as he expected, his confidential clerk was still at the desk. And here he found, much to his ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... "The Daffodils" the flowers, jocund in the breeze, drive away the melancholy mood with which the poet had approached them and enable him to carry away a picture in his memory that can be drawn upon for help on future occasions of gloom. In "The Solitary Reaper" the weird and haunting notes of the song coming to his ear in an unknown tongue suggest possible ideas back of the strong feeling which he recognizes in the singer. Here also, the poet's memory ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... purely rational 'over-man' who controls them. It is at this point that a resolute and able statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous. Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his 'Patriot King' how to govern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of 'that staring timid creature man.'[51] A century before Darwin he, like Swift and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see his fellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, was one of those few 'among the societies of men ... who engross almost the whole ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... the passing of the days the envy of his brother's lot grew, and in his heart smouldered a sullen rage. Here was Victor, a man at whom nobody would look twice in passing, happy and contented with his little family, untroubled by any haunting fear of the hand of the law, enjoying the respect of all men, and a veritable hero the length of the three rivers. And beside him, of his own flesh and blood, was himself, a bold figure of a man, a roisterer and a poser, who had sought to gain the admiration and respect of the men of the ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... haunted life. The ghost was fantastic one, truly—that of a butcher's shop; but it was a very real haunting. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... more in the gay courts for a year. Then, of a sudden, she appeared before them all, as dazzlingly beautiful as ever, but with a haunting, wistful look in her dark eyes that could not be mistaken. The old Count found an uneasy delight in exhibiting her to the world once more, plainly as a bit of property that all men were expected to look ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... down. Herbert was rarely there less frequently than three times in a week, and he never brought me a single word of intelligence that was at all alarming. Still, I knew that there was cause for alarm, and I could not get rid of the notion of being watched. Once received, it is a haunting idea; how many undesigning persons I suspected of watching me, it ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... had never bloomed, despite all the coaxing they had given it—"the sulky rose-bush," Sara had been wont to call it. Lo! this summer had flung the hoarded sweetness of years into plentiful white blossoms, like shallow ivory cups with a haunting, spicy fragrance. It was in honour of Sara's home-coming—so Old Man Shaw liked to fancy. All things, even the sulky rose-bush, knew she was coming back, and were making glad ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fluctuations, they always resulted in greater weakness; and the wandering mind was not always able to keep fast hold of the new comfort. Sometimes she would piteously clasp her sister's hand, and entreat, 'Tell me again;' and sometimes the haunting delirious fancies of chains and bars would drop forth from the tongue that had lost its self-control; yet even at the worst came the dear old recurring note, 'God will not let them hurt him, for he has not done it!' Sometimes, more trying to Averil than all, she ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... correction of his own description arose the conception of making Old Moody the later state of the once wealthy and magnificent Fauntleroy. But one of the most striking and imaginative touches in the passage, likening the old waif to a ghost haunting the spot (Parker's liquor-bar) where he was murdered, is omitted in the book, because, striking though it was, it was a little too strong to be in keeping with the rest of the fictitious portrait. How many writers, having hit upon such a simile, would have had conscience and self-denial ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... been now several days loitering and sketching among the ruins, and I feel as if I could willingly wander for months beside these mournful relics, and draw inspiration from the lofty yet melancholy lore they teach. There is a spirit haunting them, real and undoubted. Every shattered column, every broken arch and mouldering wall, but calls up more vividly to mind the glory that has passed away. Each lonely pillar stands as proudly as if it still helped to bear up the front ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Archipelago" (The "Ibis," October, 1865). Mr. Wallace points out (page 366) that "the most striking superabundance of pigeons, as well as of parrots, is confined to the Australo-Malayan sub-region in which...the forest-haunting and fruit-eating mammals, such as monkeys and squirrels, are totally absent." He points out also that monkeys are "exceedingly destructive to eggs and young birds."), which interested me, as everything that you write does. Who would ever have ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... at evasion were useless and, little by little, Emily drew from her the story of the little back bedroom, of her own experience there the night of their first visit, of what Winnie S. had said concerning the haunting of the "Cap'n Abner place," and of Miss Timpson's "warning." She told it in a low tone, so as not to awaken Georgie, and, as she spoke, the wind shrieked and wailed and groaned, the blinds creaked, the water dripped and gurgled ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished some one would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper. ... I do not say the idea is altogether new . . . but no one has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout, that I know of. ... However I had to mark the stresses . . . and a great many more ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... he,—only that death had not been within the compass of her powers as of his. How then could she forget it all, and wipe it away from her mind, as she would figures from a slate with a wet towel? How could it be fit that she should again be a bride with such a spectre of a husband haunting her memory? She had known that the request was to be made when he had come so quickly, and had not doubted it for a moment when he took his sudden departure. She had known it well, when just now the servant told her that ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... amounts to this, that they may exercise ecclesiastical discipline, excommunicate their Prisoner, or perhaps fling Him into jail, possibly scourge Him. But the worst of these punishments will not satisfy their determined hatred, or rid them of the haunting fear inspiring it, that Jesus will undermine their influence with the people. Nothing less than His death will put an end to that danger; so they thought, although the event proved that it was this very death of Christ that was to lead to the victory of Christianity over Judaism. This, however, even ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... hand across his eyes as if to shut out some haunting vision. "There is no news. She is in a cell, I suppose. My God, what does it ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... went their happy way, but in the story of the missing cashier Mr. Chalmers left behind a suggestion that was as hateful as it was painful and haunting. ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... rose again, with his haunting suspicion of a man in the background with whom he would yet have to deal. He knew that here he had no rights, but in ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... She stopped frequently and looked about her; her narrow forehead was wrinkled, and the base of her long nose was set between two deep furrows. Her lips were twisted in a pucker of great perplexity, and her eyes were nearly closed in a desperate endeavor to solve some haunting, puzzling question. ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... fading colours of the sunset that glorified it. And as he dwelt on the vision he felt harmonies and phrases stirring and singing in his brain, like a choir of awakened birds. Quickly he seized paper and wrote down the theme that flowed out at the point of his pen—a reverie full of the haunting magic of quiet waters and woodland sunsets and the gracious innocence of maidenhood. When it was done he felt he must give it a distinctive name. He cast about for one, pondering and rejecting titles innumerable. Countless lines of poetry ran through his head, from which he sought ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... you said last night keeps haunting me all the time, Tom. What if I did run across the chance to make Dock own up, and got him to give me that precious paper? It would make everything look bright again—for with the boom on in the oil region that stock ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... envelopes, he again dreamed a painful dream, and once more that poor, "sinful" woman appeared to him. Again she gazed at him with tears sparkling on her long lashes, and beckoned him after her; and again he awoke, as before, with the picture of her face haunting him. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the picture of an ingenious and a religious mind, drawn by an amiable woman, who, it is evident, lived always in the fear of death. The Gothic skeleton was ever haunting her imagination. In Dr. Johnson the same horror was suggested by the thoughts of death. When Boswell once in conversation persecuted Johnson on this subject, whether we might not fortify our minds for the approach of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... fear De Croix may have exhibited an hour before, however he may have trembled from ghostly haunting and been made coward by contact with the dead, he was a man now, a soldier worthy of his uniform and of his manhood. Merciful God! but it made my heart swell to see the lad, as he faced those dancing ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... was music in herself, A symphony of joyousness. She sang, she sang from finger tips, From every tremble of her dress. I saw sweet haunting harmony, An ecstasy, an ecstasy, In that strange curling of her lips, That happy curling of her lips. And quivering with melody Those eyes I saw, ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... sweet woodland glass? On tender feet that scarcely bow the grass, What stains are those of ripe pomegranate dyes?— When on my breast Thy head in slumber lies, What thorns are those that through my heart do pass? And round about these crowds of haunting forms That burn their splendor through my dimmest dreams! O little Child, Thou Wonder too divine, Thy precious body all my bosom warms With mine own blood, but oftentimes it seems, Too dearly loved,—that yet ...
— The Angel of Thought and Other Poems - Impressions from Old Masters • Ethel Allen Murphy
... man from the man who, last week, in "Mexico's" saloon, had beaten his old antagonist at the old game. His consciousness of himself, of his life purposes, of his outlook, of his deepest emotions, was altogether a different consciousness. And more than all, that haunting, pursuing restlessness was gone and, in its place, a deep peace possessed him. The process by which this had been achieved he could not explain, but the result was undeniable, and it was due, he knew, to an influence the source of which he frankly acknowledged ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... and the cut that follows after—something, at least, speaks clearly of a fearful joy, of Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the horror of the last passage no less than of the glorious coming home. There is that in the action of one of them which always reminds me, with a difference, of that haunting last glimpse of Thomas Idle, travelling to Tyburn in the cart. Next come the Shining Ones, wooden and trivial enough; the pilgrims pass into the river; the blot already mentioned settles over and obliterates Christian. In two more cuts we behold them drawing nearer to the ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... met again, and again Laurence had a vague remembrance as though he and she had stood face to face before in some earlier existence. Then his wandering recollections took shape, and he remembered the face and the form and the haunting mystery of the expression, and he felt for a moment as though he had been permitted to peer into the cabalistic darkness of an awful mystery, though he failed wholly to perceive its occult significance—if significance ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... a heart full of courage, not caring for the haunting pain that will be left when you lay the book aside. What others have had to suffer, you can at least endure to hear about, in order to put a check upon like suffering in the future, and in our own land, too. A country bathed in blood as ours has once been has met already ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... Desperately, at last, he remembered his promise to see Mimi, and he hurried out and made his way afoot to the tattered little buildings in which she lived, hoping there to find forgetfulness. But, go where he would, the haunting black eyes, the cynical smile, that even, persistent voice, the insidious suggestions of Millar, the devil, followed him and would ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... fighting circumstance, as her heart might bid. If she loved a man she would stand by him. No, it was something known only to her and himself in all those crowded rooms. As soon as he set eyes on her, the vision of Radowitz's bleeding hand and prostrate form had emerged in consciousness—a haunting presence, blurring the many-coloured movements of ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... world of spirits little can be said. The departed souls of mortal men, the "good" (-manes-) continued to exist as shades haunting the spot where the body reposed (-dii inferi-), and received meat and drink from the survivors. But they dwelt in the depths beneath, and there was no bridge that led from the lower world either to men ruling on earth or upward to the gods above. The ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Yours the Dream Interpreted, Earth's haunting fairy-tale since life began,— The Dragon of Unfaith, his magic dead, Slain by ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... mother pining for her husband and tormented by her savage brother's avarice, environed the precocious child of ten with sad presentiments. That melancholy temperament which he inherited from Bernardo was nourished by the half-concealed mysteriously-haunting troubles of his parents. And when Porzia died suddenly, in 1556, we can hardly doubt that the father broke out before his son into some such expressions of ungovernable grief as he openly expressed in the letter to Amerigo Sanseverino.[7] Is it possible, then, thought ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... as I could, striving to meet his mood, acquit myself like a man, draw zest instead of humiliation from the irony of our position, but scarcely able to make headway against a numbing sense of defeat and incapacity. A queer thought was haunting me, too, that such skill and judgement as I possessed was slipping from me as we left the land and faced again the rigours of this exacting sea. Davies, I very well knew, was under exactly the opposite spell—a spell which even the reproach of the tow-rope ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... not but I told him then, I told him then, That I had kept me from all men Since we joined lips and swore. Whereat he smiled, and thinned away As the wind stirred to call up day ... —'Tis past! And here alone I stray Haunting ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... But indeed it was not wisely to prepare the way of peace to cast the crime of Montereau in the face of Charles of Valois, who had been dragged there as a child and with whom there had remained ever after a physical trembling and a haunting fear of ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... were again working in her mind late in the afternoon, when the apparition of one of the personages haunting her thoughts passed the parlour window. Miss Keeldar sauntered slowly by, her gait, her countenance, wearing that mixture of wistfulness and carelessness which, when quiescent, was the wonted cast of her look ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... [The flame flashes up. And I! See what a fire I have given thee, Rome for a funeral couch! Had Achilles a pyre like to this Or had Patroclus? Had they mourners such as I give to thee, Bereaved mothers and babes? Now let the wailing cease from thy tomb, Here is a mightier wail! Now let the haunting ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... fully for two or three days before we made up our minds. Lady Meadowcroft was undecided between her hatred of dulness and her haunting fear that scorpions and snakes would intrude upon our tents and beds while we were camping. In the end, however, the desire for change carried the day. She decided to dodge the rainy season by getting behind the Himalayan-passes, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... women learned to read there seemed to be a possibility that some day some good man might come home and find his wife reading, and the dinner not ready—and nothing could be imagined more horrible than that! That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind—that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man's comfort. There are many people who believe that the physical needs of her family are a woman's only care; and that strict attention to her husband's wardrobe and meals will insure ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... drowsy and fancied himself in his dreams once more kneeling on the floor beside the sofa, with his arms round Barbara's shoulders. "As if I'd murdered her." His lips were moving, as he awoke, and he wondered whether the haunting refrain had escaped him. ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... tenant; here are the nails of the invisible curtains, this dent in the wall is all that is sensible of a vanished piano. I could fancy all these things creeping back to visibility as the light grew dim. Someone was irritable in the house, perhaps, and a haunting fragrance of departed quarrels is to be found in the loose door-handles, and the broken bell-pull. Then the blind in the bedroom has a broken string. He was a beer-drinker, for the drip of the tap has left its mark in the cellar; a careless man, for this ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... unique and perfect a thing as "The Ancient Mariner," but it has the same haunting charm, and displays the same subtle art in the use of the supernatural. Coleridge protested that it "pretended to be nothing more than a common fairy tale." [22] But Lowell asserts that it is "tantalising ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... with the dusk. It was the silence that tormented him most. Nothing stirred but the mice behind the boards. The voice was haunting him again: 'I was a stranger and ye took me ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... three continents. There was no spotlight to follow her sinuous, scantily clad figure as it spun and leaped and glided about the dim, starlit Green; there was no blare of brass and cymbals, nor the haunting wail of flageolets,—only the tinkle of mandolins and Spanish guitars to guide her bewildering feet,—and yet she had never been ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... haunting the streets, I suddenly encountered Mrs. Cullerton walking in the Via Tornabuoni, and, raising my hat, ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... idea the transitions are very numerous. We are obliged to recognize "that with certain workers—who are rather taken up with the elaboration of their work, and not masters directing it, quitting it, and resuming it at their pleasure—an artistic, scientific, or mechanical conception succeeds in haunting the mind, imposing itself upon it even to the extent of causing suffering." In reality, pure psychology is unable to discover a positive difference between obsession leading to creative work and the other forms, because in both cases the mental mechanism is, at bottom, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... any thing terrible in a footstep merely because it is masculine; but Madame Delphine's mind was not prepared to consider that. A terrible secret was haunting her. Yesterday morning she had found a shoe-track in the garden. She had not disclosed the discovery to Olive, but she had hardly closed ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... lady prattled on, more and more querulously, and to the increasing exasperation of Miss Gabriel, who on the whole believed that they were making for home, yet could not shake off a haunting suspicion that they were moving in a direction precisely opposite. Moreover, the behaviour of Mumford's pump troubled her more than she cared to confess, even to herself. It stood on the right of the road as you went towards St. Hugh's; but they had encountered it upon ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... a wonderful voice that they heard, deep, full, and mellow, all the more wonderful because they heard it there in those lone mountains. The ridges took up the echo, and gave it back in tones softened but exquisitely haunting. ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a book was meant to be read, you mean, for one thing, of course, that it was not meant to be studied. You do not study a good story, or a haunting poem, or a battle song, or a love ballad, or any moving narrative, whether it be out of history or out of fiction—nor any argument, even, that moves vital in the field of action. You do not have to ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... and decorations were all foreign; the unostentatious little banquet was distinctly foreign. Why, the very bell that had summoned them down—what was there in the soft sound of it that had reminded him of something far away? It was a haunting sound, and he kept puzzling over the vague association it seemed to call up. At last he frankly mentioned the matter to Miss ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... to by the Mayor of Taunton in his allusion to the Drummer of Tedsworth are probably too well known to require elucidation. The haunting of the old Gast House at Burton would, however, be fresh at that time in the minds of Somersetshire folk, occurring as it did in 1677. Some short account from documents of that date may be ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the wedding he paid Ruth his last visit in the quality of a lover, and was received by her in the garden. He found her looking paler than her wont, and there was a cloud of sadness on her brow, a haunting sadness in her eyes. It touched him to the soul, and for a moment he wavered in his purpose. He stood beside her—she seated on the old lichened seat—and a silence fell between them, during which Mr. Wilding's conscience wrestled with his stronger passion. It was his habit to be glib, talking incessantly ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... all drowning, And safe with you for ever? You know all that? How do you know all that, and who has told you? You know so much that I'm an atom frightened Because you know so little. And what is this? You know the luxury there is in haunting The blasted thoroughfares of disillusion — If that's your name for them — with only ghosts For company? You know that when a woman Is blessed, or cursed, with a divine impatience (Another name of yours for a bad ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... thing you do, dear, It's the thing you leave undone That gives you a bit of a heartache At the setting of the sun. The tender word forgotten; The letter you did not write; The flowers you did not send, dear, Are your haunting ghosts at night. ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... (verses 19-39) are one long application of this sublime finality of the one Offering and this presentness of our complete acceptance. First, the new Israelite, his "heart sprinkled from an evil conscience" (ver. 22), released, that is to say, by the applied Sacrifice from the haunting sense of guilt, and having his "body washed with pure water," the baptismal sign and seal of the covenant blessing, is to behave as what he is—the child at home. That home is the Holy Place; it is the very Presence of his God; but it is home. He is to pass into that ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... rescue by marriage the girl Lily, whom (you remember) he loved as a boy, and who has since drifted into the underworld. About this part of the story I will only say that, though the art is still there and the same haunting melody of style, Mr. MACKENZIE has too strong a sense of atmosphere to allow him to treat squalor in a fashion that will be agreeable to the universe. Frankly, the over-nice will be prudent to take leave of Michael on the Oxford platform. The others, following ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... followed, though, at every spring, alighting on the hummocks that Miss Emma had trodden, the water splashed up about her bare ankles, and her heart shook within her at the thought of fierce runaways haunting these inaccessible hollows, and the myths of the deeper district. Before long, she had overtaken her young mistress, and they paused a moment for parley. Miss Emma was convinced, that, if it were no worse than this, it would be delightful. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... was haunting: there was despair and there was hope in it. It implied that she had set him up in her impulsive way as a sort of oracle who alone could help her out of her difficulty. In presence of that look his own conventionality fell away from him, and he spoke the plain, ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in rather a rough spot for both mother and babe. The hasty fleeing for several days and nights to Egypt, with those heart-rending cries of the grief-stricken mothers of Bethlehem haunting their ears, the cautious return, and then apparently the change of plans from a home in historic Bethlehem to the much less favoured village of Nazareth,—it was all a pretty rough beginning on a ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... having come over to the Tory side, he "decided to play the Orange card, which, please God, will prove a trump," and went, with his hands red from making overtures to what they considered the scarlet woman, to rally the Orangemen with the haunting jingle that Home ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... little or nothing of the streets, was given, when by himself, to haunting our neighborhood and the park opposite; so that he came much under the notice and patronage of the friendly policeman, whose daily beat was in that quarter, and who kept him on many an occasion from going astray, or ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... shadows of the days that are no more Stalk around the lakes and meadows, haunting oft the wonted shore,— Hunters from the land of spirits seek the bison and the deer, Where the Saxon now inherits golden field and silver mere; And beside the mound where burried lies the dark-eyed maid he loves, Some ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... German, then forgot all about the crank and his ways, for, coming up behind him, clad just as she had been the night he saw her getting into the cab in the Strand, was the tall girl whose face had been haunting his memory. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... remarks with a wayfaring rustic who proposed to swap horses. He wended his way through the Blue Grass region, through Lexington and Frankfort, and southward into Tennessee. Arlington found keen enjoyment in what he saw and heard, though never quite losing from consciousness a haunting memory of the Lady of the Violets. He read with curiosity the tavern signs, wondering what relation such names as "The General Washington," "The Sign of the Wagon," "The Seven Stars," "The Golden Bull," "The Red Lion" bore to the character of the entertainment advertised by the several ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... it is the story, "incredibly hideous and incredibly heroic," of a nation going into exile, Mr. JONES has always a keen eye for the picturesque and even humorous aspects of the tragedy; he has a quick sense of the effective which enables him to touch in many haunting pictures—the delusive peace of a sunny Autumn day among the Bosnian mountains; the face of KING PETER seen for a moment by lamplight amid a crowd of refugees; and countless others. More than a passing mention also is due to the many quite admirable ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... sense of shame; ordered out a saddle-horse in defiance of doctor's advice, and took to haunting the crossroads and the village on the chance of meeting him alone. This never happened. Fate, rather late in the day, seemed to have taken her good name into its keeping. They met, of course, but under the furtive, curious gaze of ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... vague, haunting half-thoughts of weeks were crystallized on the instant. She felt as if Dick was trying to speak to her from out of the great beyond. With a shudder she into a chair at the ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... the flickering shadows rose and fell upon the inner chamber wall. The room in which Susan Jane had died! No fear of a robber stirred Janet, the time had not come when Quinton must fear that. It could not be Mark Tapkins. He might be foolish enough to use his "off night" haunting the Light—his actions were curious of late—but had it been Mark, he would have been sitting patiently on the outer steps. Janet waited a minute and then went noiselessly into the sitting room, and tiptoed to the bedroom door. Then she started back, nearly dropping the tray of empty dishes. The ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... account of the black races as being untrustworthy, he said, half to himself, that quite probably I was nothing more than an hallucination, a thought projection of his own mind. And after that I got more and more annoyed—partly, I think, because I had a kind of haunting fear that what he had said might be true. When you have been talking to a spirit for over three hours in the middle of the night, you are ...
— The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • J. D. Beresford
... have none sit round where once it was And with full eyes each wonted room require: Haunting the yet warm ashes of the place, As murdered men walk ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... down with the long breath of the man content; and ever in his dreams there came the vague beckoning of a hand still half unseen. Once this disturbing summons to his life was merely disquieting and unformulated, but gradually now it assumed a shape more urgent and more definite. Haunting him with the sense of the unfulfilled, the face of Mary Ellen was ever in the shadow; of Mary Ellen, who had sent him away forever; of Mary Ellen, who was wasting her life on a prairie ranch, with naught to inspire and none to witness the flowering of her ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... fishmongers and the greens-venders would begin their melodious cries, and there would be no repose for a man even in a public garden. It is secluded enough, with the gates locked, and there is plenty of room to turn over and change position; but it is a wakeful situation at the best, a haunting sort of place, and I was not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... pitifully meager to Wade at that despondent moment, exhausted as he was by the long, hard journey and the sultry heat. Never had he been so taunted by a sense of failure, so torn by the haunting knowledge that he must soon leave his family. To die—that was nothing; but the fears of what his death might mean to this group, gripped his heart ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... accept a settlement that would leave undecided the central issue of Boer or British supremacy in South Africa had never been wholly absent from his mind during the harassing negotiations that succeeded the Conference. Up to the very end there had been a haunting dread lest, in spite of his ceaseless vigilance and unstinted toil, a manifestation of British loyalty that would never be repeated should be coldly discouraged, and the nationalist movement allowed to proceed unchecked, until every colonist of British blood ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... his own personality, in the true intention of the myth. This transformation, this image of the beautiful soft creature become an enemy of human kind, putting off himself in his madness, wronged by his own fierce hunger and thirst, and haunting, with terrible sounds, the high Thracian farms, is the most tragic note of the whole picture, and links him on to one of the gloomiest creations of later romance, the werewolf, the belief in which still lingers in Greece, as ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... was at last Commencement, when he sang it for the Seniors going out on their adventures, and when he was done they had all been still and quiet like men who have seen ghosts—as perhaps they had, that night, the phantoms of men and times haunting certain low, arched buildings they ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... that what indeed could the full assurance of this be but that, finding in him the most charming object in its course, the great tide was to lift him and sweep him away? Questions and reflections after the fact perhaps, yet haunting for the time and during the short interval that was still to elapse—when, with the sudden news that he had met his doom, an irrepressible "of course, of course!" contributed its note well-nigh of support. ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the beautiful town That is seated by the sea; Often in thought go up and down The pleasant streets of that dear old town, And my youth comes back to me. And a verse of a Lapland song Is haunting my memory still; 'A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... his slouch hat over his eyes and sat with hunched shoulders staring at the Yale team as it left the field for the intermission. He had forgotten about his story of the game. The old spectre of failure obsessed him. It was already haunting the pathway of his boy. Was he also to be beaten by one colossal blunder? Henry Seeley felt that Ernest's whole career hung upon his behavior in the second half. How would the lad "take his medicine"? Would it break ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... later her fingers were moving softly over the piano keys; melodies in minor, sad and haunting and elusive, melodies that had never been put on paper and would always be her own: in them she might leap from comedy to tragedy, from laughter to tears, and only she would know. The midnight adventure was forgotten, and the ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... a stanza of haunting beauty, the ethic creed set to music, a pathetic pleading, a self-abasement, in the presence of the Immensities around us, and yet a passionate vindication of man's right to sit in judgment on an idol-god ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... directly.' In fact, he began to vanish as he spoke—his legs, indeed, had quite disappeared. 'And if, sir,' said the tenant, calling after him, 'if you would have the goodness to suggest to the other ladies and gentlemen who are now engaged in haunting old empty houses, that they might be much more comfortable elsewhere, you will confer a very great benefit on society.' 'I will,' replied the ghost; 'we must be dull fellows, very dull fellows indeed; I can't imagine how we can have been so stupid.' With these words the ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... seemed to have come as suddenly and unexplainedly as the end of his Pagan era. His teacher had preached 'love,' 'love,' 'love,' with Pauline iteration, and not a little self-repetition. His teacher had taught that war was an unclean thing haunting the heathen world, and lurking in the blackness of Pagan villages. His teacher had deprecated violence; it was his rule never to strike, nor ever to rule by such fear as cast ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... of my thesis I should start on prolonged travels, the real educational travels of a young man's life. I had a little money lying ready, a small bursary, and a promise of a travelling allowance from the State, which promise, however, was not kept. This journey had for a long time been haunting my fancy. I cherished an ardent wish to see France again, but even more especially to go to Italy and countries still farther South. My hope of catching a glimpse of Northern Africa was only fulfilled thirty-five years later; but I got as far as Italy, which was the actual goal of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... tremendous heart and energy into the haunting old song as they sang, and Dick still saw Sam Jarvis, the singer of the hills, and his valley, where the paths of Harry Kenton and himself had crossed, though at ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Highland poetry there is more light than shadow, much symbolism, but no vagueness; pictures are presented in minute detail; stanzas are cunningly wrought in a spirit of keen artistry; and the literary style is direct and clear and comprehensible. In Highland folklore we find associated with the haunting "fear of things invisible," common to all peoples in early stages of development, a confident feeling of security inspired by the minute observances of ceremonial practices. We also note a distinct tendency to discriminate between spirits, some of which are invariably friendly, ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... I got by going to Eucrates's; and, upon my word, Philocles, my overloaded stomach needs an emetic as much as if I had been drinking new wine. I would pay something for the drug that should work oblivion in me: I fear the effects of haunting reminiscence; monsters, demons, Hecates, seem to pass ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... had had an uneasy feeling in the presence of her new servant, a haunting impression when her back was turned to Ellen that if she could turn quickly enough, she would see her cook with some sinister aspect quite other than the decent, respectful mask she presented to her mistress. The second girl of the ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... by haunting the lowe watrie places do become foule and mesled, such Hares doe never follow the hard ways nor make such pathes to their formes, but use all their subtleties and pollecies by the sides of the Ryvers, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... that I would ask,' said he, 'is that you will leave off haunting this well, so that men may go in and ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... through all the ages Has led the world along: The wise words of the sages, The poet in his song, The prophet in his vision,— All these have caught the gleam, Have caught the light elysian, Have told the haunting dream. ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... conscience had not been buried, and it was in a kind of mad attempt to square himself before Heaven, and still the voice of that silent, haunting accuser, that he had performed the most signal act of heroism and willing sacrifice ever known at ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... He watched his friend's face turned eagerly towards his hostess. Wargrave was gazing intently at her as in a voice full of feeling and pathos, a voice with a plaintive little tone in it that thrilled him strangely, she sang that haunting melody "The Love Song of Har Dyal." Wistfully, sadly, she uttered the sorrowful words that Kipling puts into the mouth ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... certain association of ideas, he at times almost imagined himself a murderer. For years, also, a thought would occasionally recur, which, though he perceived all its folly and extravagance, he had not power to banish from his mind. It was a haunting and torturing fancy that his father-in-law was yet sitting at the foot of the rock, on the withered forest leaves, alive, and awaiting his pledged assistance. These mental deceptions, however, came and ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... men who chattered compliments she felt a haunting sense of pursuit and a secret impulse for flight, so that at the first opportunity she slipped away for ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... next door, under whose tuition he might be able to regain his youth without recourse to those expensive subterfuges (for the price of the undetectable toupet astonished him) rang in his head with a melody more haunting than Beethoven's. What he would have liked best of all would have been to have the Guru all to himself, so that he should remain perpetually young, while all the rest of Riseholme, including Hermy and Ursy, grew old. Then, indeed, ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson |
