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More "Spectre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... greeting was intended, did not observe this mute courtship, for her eyes followed the travellers, and especially the young man, as if spellbound. As soon as the three were far enough off not to hear her, the girl asked with a shiver, as if some desert-spectre had passed by-and in a low voice "Grandmother, who ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... vanished as a dying spark. The trance passed from his spirit, and nature recommenced her operations like the clanking of a vast machinery. Yet his eye, as if it could not recover from its vision of terror, remained glaring upon the spot where the spectre had been; and it was not until several minutes had elapsed that the sharp agony which had contracted his features died away. He sprung forward with a wild cry, but the echo alone replied. No voice but his own awoke the awful stillness, pulseless it reigned around him. The stars glittered ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... correct outline marked off in dark paint there is but a vague, uniform mass of pale colour; the body of the hand is missing, and there remains only its ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight or warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between this spectre hand of the Giottesques, and the sinewy, muscular hand which can shake and crush of Masaccio and Signorelli, or the soft hand with throbbing pulse and warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,—this difference is typical of the difference between the art of the fourteenth ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... bundle, held it out. There were the eyes. She chilled. No imagination here. No spectre from ...
— I'll Kill You Tomorrow • Helen Huber
... What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stood for a few seconds without uttering a word. The savage shrank back and shuddered from head to foot. Then, with a noiseless step, Martin retreated slowly backward towards the door and passed out like a spectre—never for a moment taking his eyes off those of the savage until he was lost in darkness. On gaining the forest he fled with a beating heart to his former retreat; but his fears were groundless, for the Indian firmly believed that ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... New York, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities of America are aroused over the visit of a spectre called Nationalism, alias Territorialism. Like all spectres, it is doing a lot of mischief and causing much confusion in the heads of the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... her. He was dully sensible to the fact that she was beautiful, uncommonly beautiful. It did not occur to him to feel that she was out of place among them, that she belonged downstairs. Somehow she was a part of the surroundings, like the spectre at the feast. ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... able to sit up?" queried this visitor Lane took for the spectre of a dream. He advanced into the room. He grasped Lane with firm hand. And then Lane realized this was no nightmare. He began ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... gates. My lodgings were as near to them as possible. At our first entry towards the Queen's lodge we encountered Dr. Fisher and his lady: the sight of me there, in a dress announcing indisputably whither I was hieing, was such an Astonishment, that they looked at me rather as a recollected spectre than a renewed acquaintance. When we came to the iron rails poor Miss Planta, in much fidget, begged to take the books from M. d'Arblay, terrified, I imagine, lest French feet should contaminate the gravel within!—while ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... ghostly counsellor fell upon an admirable expedient to console him. This was nothing less than dispensing with the further solemnity of banns, and marrying him, without an hour's delay, to the young woman to whom he was affianced; after which no spectre ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... towards a tall monk in the Cistertian habit, standing between the bodies, with the cowl drawn over his face. As Paslew gazed at him, the monk slowly raised his hood, and partially disclosed features that smote the abbot as if he had beheld a spectre. Could it be? Could fancy cheat him thus? He looked again. The monk was still standing there, but the cowl had dropped over his face. Striving to shake off the horror that possessed him, the abbot staggered forward, and reaching the presbytery, sank ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... which has been made common property by writers of fiction in all generations; it occurs at least thrice in the Ingoldsby Legends; Sir Walter Scott gives a terrible instance in his story of the Scotch judge haunted by the spectre of the bandit he had sentenced to death {2}, which appears to be founded on fact; and indeed the present narrative was suggested by one of Washington Irving's short stories, read by the writer when a boy ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... speeches, none ever was so full of wit as Mr. Pultney's last. He said, "I have heard this committee represented as a most dreadful spectre; it has been likened to all terrible things; it has been likened to the King; to the inquisition; it will be a committee of safety; it is a committee of danger; I don't know what it is to be! One gentleman, I think, called it a cloud! (this ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... nationality and no one type of character. He is the image of humanity. Hamlet is to me not a man, but Man. The sufferings, the doubts, the vague mysteries of life are incarnate in his person. He is ever checked by the Unknown. He is tortured by the phantasm of Doubt. Is the spectre indeed his father's shade? has it spoken truth? is it well to live? is it best to die?—such are the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... disguised in male attire, robbed travellers upon the highway, and being wounded in one of these exploits, was discovered lying dead outside the walls of the house; and the malignant nature of this lady's spectre is said to have had so firm a hold upon the villagers that no local labourer could be induced to work upon that particular ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... turn'd.—His guide was gone; A broad chaotic cloud appear'd alone. His limbs no more their chilly weight sustained, A deathlike torpor o'er his bosom reign'd, His stony eyeballs fix'd in silent trance Met the terrific Spectre's withering glance. And lo! the Phantom waves, with sudden glare, His burning sceptre thro' the starless air! High o'er the bark the booming billows spread, The deafening waves were closing o'er his head; When rushing clouds the towering form involved, And all the ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... in this letter that was wounding to his vanity, and bitter to his feelings; but he had triumphed! The stately pride of this girl was humbled before him—her spirit bowed in the dust before the gaunt spectre she had thought herself capable of braving. She would be his—the fair, the pure in heart, would link herself to vice, infamy and crime, for money. Money! the world's god! See the countless millions groveling upon the earth before the great idol—the golden calf, which so ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... "A horrid spectre rises to my sight, Close by my side, and plain, and palpable In all good seeming and close circumstance As man ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... waning glory of the day, Down cool, green lanes, and through the length'ning shadows, Silent, we wandered back across the meadows. The wreath was finished, and adorned my room; Long afterward, the lilies' copied bloom Was like a horrid spectre in my sight, Staring upon me morning, noon, ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... place, such homes are being destroyed and made impossible now by the very causes against which Socialism fights, and because in this world at the present time very few homes are at all like this ideal. In reality every poor home is haunted by the spectre of irregular employment and undermined by untrustworthy insurance, it must shelter in insanitary dwellings and its children eat adulterated food because none other can be got. And that, I am sorry to say, it is only too easy ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... its champagne; such smiling, brilliant-looking impudence, that comes out fizz—bang! and that's the end of it; there's not so much as the quaver of an echo. You drink it, and instead of seeing cool vineyards and purple waters and cataracts of icicles in your glass, you find a pale, gaunt spectre, or a poor, half-drowned Bacchus, staring at you. It's just so with your Landon Snowe. You, and other people, too, have a habit of admiring him, a great creature with eyes of milky blue, who goes about disbursing his small coin like some old Aladdin! Why, my dear children, the man, I don't ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... guidance fail, Whereby my prophet-soul is onwards led? Look! for their flesh the spectre-children wail, Their sodden limbs ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... sheathing his dagger, those apparently capricious actions would be found to be done because they were illustrative parts of that monarch's personality, warranted by the text and context. Many years ago an accidental impulse led him, as Hamlet, to hold out his sword, hilt foremost, toward the receding spectre, as a protective cross—the symbol of that religion to which Hamlet so frequently recurs. The expedient was found to justify itself and he made it a custom. In the graveyard scene of this tragedy ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... images among the realities of the soul,—though the grave should forever shut them from our communion. But this relation of memory has peculiar propriety and efficacy when associated with a Christian faith. If the dead live no more, what would memory be to us but a spectre and a sting? Should we not then seek to repress those tender recollections,—to close our eyes to those pale, sad visions of departed love? Should we not invoke the glare and tumult of the world to distract or absorb our thoughts? Would we not say, "Let it come, the pleasure, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... between them, in the filthy den, Were twenty-three more miserable men, Who hardly could be said to be alive, So fearfully did death among them strive To make them all his own, leaving no trace Of aught but spectre life in that vile place. This dreadful history cannot fail to show, How fatal consequences surely flow, From disregard of the Creator's laws, For these foul poisonous vapours were the cause Of five score agonising deaths, within The space of a few hours, ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... slumber bound. Or, panting like the ocean, when a dream Of storm awakes her:—Heaven and Earth are still; In radiant loveliness the stars pursue Their pilgrimage, while moonlight's wizard hand Throws beauty, like a spectre light, on all. At Judah's tent the lion-banner stands Unfolded, and the pacing sentinels,— What awe pervades them, when the dusky groves, The rocks Titanian, by the moonshine made Unearthly, or yon mountains vast, they view! But soon as morning bids the sky exult, As earth from nothing, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... the first part of the 'Suspiria,' as we find from a note of the author's own, was to include 'The Dark Interpreter,' 'The Spectre of the Brocken,' and 'Savannah-la-Mar.' The references to 'The Dark Interpreter' in the latter would thus become intelligible, as the reader is not there in any full sense informed who the 'Dark Interpreter' was; and the piece, recovered from his MSS. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... They cry out with a shriek of terror—because Jesus Christ is coming to them in so strange a fashion! Have we never shrieked and groaned, and passionately wept aloud for the same reason; and mistaken the Lord of love and consolation for some grisly spectre? When He comes it is with the old word on His lips, 'Be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... community of brave men in dread of some indefinable tragedy. Mobs and riots of much greater magnitude than the John Brown uprising had frequently occurred in the free States, and they were put down by the firm authority of law, without the dread hand of a spectre behind which might in a moment light the horizon with the conflagration of homes, and subject wives and daughters to a fate of nameless horror. Instead, therefore, of arresting the spread of Republican principles, the mad scheme of John Brown tended to develop and strengthen them. The conviction ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... always anxious to avoid the sight of her husband in such a state as this, which had become as dreadful to her as the trial scene was to Judas Iscariot. It brought before her eyes the spectre of a worn-out woman knocking at a door which she would not open; and she shrank from contemplating it. Yet it was better for Yeobright himself when he spoke openly of his sharp regret, for in silence he endured infinitely more, and would sometimes remain ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... profitably, landed her in Standard Oil is not a part of this drama. But meanwhile she had shuddered. Like many another widow, to whom New Haven was as good as Governments, she might have been in the street. Pointing at her had been that spectre—Want! ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... celestial harem. As the apparition of a man wanders into the next state, a shadow of his present state floats over into the future with him. The Hereafter is the image flung by the Now. Heaven and hell are the upward and downward echoes of the earth. Like the spectre of the Brocken on the Hartz Mountains, our ideas of another life are a reflection of our present experience thrown in colossal on the cloud curtains of futurity. Charles Lamb, pushing this elucidating observation much ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Hapford,—far less of a Julia Tinker living with him. But they all listened to the contributor's explanation with interest and eventual sympathy; and in truth,—briefly told, with a word now and then thrown in by Jonathan Tinker, who kept at the bottom of the steps, showing like a gloomy spectre in the night, or, in his grotesque length and gauntness, like the other's shadow cast there by the lamplight,—it was a story which could hardly fail ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... All eyes were turned to the leeward. A stately ship, under full sail, had suddenly appeared, bearing down upon us. She came silently, the water splitting in foam at her bows. We could see the crew working about her decks, but no sound came from the spectre. All at once we noticed her hull and sails were transparent. We could see through them ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... and his courtiers were sleeping, Sabbatai wrestled sore with himself in his lonely audience-chamber. The spectre of self-doubt—long laid to rest by music and pageantry—was raised afresh by this new and unexpected development. It was a rude reminder that this pompous and voluptuous existence was, after all, premature, that the Kingdom had yet to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... not live a hole-and-corner life in China, but boldly come out and take their part in the pleasures and business of life. It has always been a question with me whether ghosts, in a haunted house, appear when there is no audience. What does the spectre in the tapestried chamber do when the house is NOT full, and no guest is put in the room to bury strangers in, the haunted room? Does the ghost sulk and complain that there is "no house," and refuse to rehearse his little performance, in ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... employer would be helpless without his aid. Medland's sanguine mind caught eagerly at the chance, and in a moment turned it into a hope—almost a conviction. Then the whole thing would go down to the grave with the unlucky man, and not even its spectre survive to trouble him. For if no one had certain knowledge, if there were never more than gossip, growing, as time passed, fainter and fainter from having no food to feed on, would not utter silence follow at last, so that ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... morrow he will face the waves again, though the winds blow ever so fiercely. In Unorna the master passion was as strong as ever. In a dim vision the wreck of her pride floated still in the stormy distance, but she turned her eyes away, for it was no longer a part of her. The spectre of her humiliation rose up and tried to taunt her with her shame—she almost smiled at the thought that she could still remember it. He lived, she lived, and he should yet be hers. As her physical weariness began ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... panic-terror pervaded the halls, and like an evil-announcing night-spectre passed over the heads of the stiffened, lifeless crowd the dismal rumor—"The regent and the princess are at variance; the regent is speaking to her with vehemence, and the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... On the road are many wonders, Three times Death appears to frighten, Thrice destruction hovers over!" Spake the reckless Lemminkainen, These the words of Kaukomieli: "Death is seen by aged people, Everywhere they see perdition, Death can never frighten heroes, Heroes do not fear the spectre; Be that as it may, dear mother, Tell that I may understand thee, Name the first of all destructions, Name the first and last destroyers!" Lemminkainen's mother answered: "I will tell thee, son and hero, Not because I wish to speak it, But because the ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... community, arrive at the state of mind in which unconsciously and as a matter of second nature he estimates the quality of the most trivial act by its relation to the standard set by the Military High Command. Like a spectre does that solemn, impalpable, often perfectly unreasonable omniscient and omnipotent entity lurk in the shadow ready to reach out a clutching hand, and for some infraction of regulations, wilful or inadvertent, hale the luckless and shivering defaulter to judgment. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... a sinister apparition, looming through a cloud-rent in the west—a scarlet sun in a green sky. His sanguine disk, enormously magnified, seemed barred like the body of a belted planet. A moment, and the crimson spectre vanished; and the ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... say I am altogether at my ease when I see anywhere in my path that meagre, squalid, famine-faced spectre, Poverty; attended as he always is, by iron-fisted oppression, and leering contempt; but I have sturdily withstood his buffetings many a hard-laboured day already, and still my motto is—I DARE! My worst enemy is moi-meme. I lie so miserably open to the inroads and incursions of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... outward as if awaiting unconsciously some imminent solution from the gliding spectre, it seemed as if the night suddenly opened on the left to shoot forth a burst of red fire. A few seconds later, the hollow boom of cannon shook the air around them. Sir Adrian's nails ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... edge. The boiling liquid splashed over the table. I stood fascinated by the horrible apparition as the captain continued to hold its dreadful bones in view. Presently my head swam; a painful oppression weighed at my heart; I was ill; and, in a jiffy, the appalling spectre was laid beneath the calm waters of the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... spirit. He removes all the impediments between His love and us. His love can now come undisturbed. His deepest and solemnest judgments do not need to come; and no more does there stand frowning between us and Him the spectre of our past. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... plays were being enacted in dumb show on the stages of theatres apparently decorated by Rothenstein. The Russian ballet had stopped in the midst of "Le Spectre de la Rose." Suits of armour, which Ursus called "pewter raincoats," glimmered in dark spaces behind piled drums and under limply hanging flags or aeroplanes ready to take flight. Almost everything was mechanical—each article warranted to do what it ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... remains of his once happy friend; but so miserably altered and disguised, that his features were scarce cognisable. The florid, the sprightly, the gay, the elevated youth, was now metamorphosed into a wan, dejected, meagre, squalid spectre; the hollow-eyed representative of distemper, indigence, and despair. Yet his eyes retained a certain ferocity, which threw a dismal gleam athwart the cloudiness of his aspect, and he, in silence, viewed his ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... rugged features that we seemed to see him through a web of silver gauze. His torch was out; his fires were smoldering; a tall column of smoke that rose up and lost itself in the growing moonlight was all the sign he gave that he was a living Autocrat of the Sea and not the spectre of a dead one. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... again laying his hand upon my arm, and glancing over his shoulder with hollow eyes, "was just a year ago. Six or seven months passed, and I had recovered from the surprise and shock, when one morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at that door, looked towards the red light, and saw the spectre again." He stopped, with a ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... jungen Geislein," in his Kinder und Hausmaerchen, vol. I. p. 29. In the notes to this story, vol. III. p. 15, Grimm says, "In Pomerania this is told of a child who when his mother had gone out was swallowed by the child-spectre, resembling the varlet Ruprecht. But the stones which he swallows with the child make the spectre so heavy that he falls to the earth, and the child unhurt springs out of him." See, too, the demons at p. 99 of these stories, who swallow ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... basking like monsters along the shore, half out of the water, half in; a solitary heron starting up here and there, as you rounded some point, and flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to view, or standing like a gaunt spectre on the umbrageous side of the mountain, his motionless form revealed against the dark green as you passed; the trees and willows and alders that hemmed you in on either side, and hid the fields and the farmhouses and the road that ran near by,—these things and others ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... with bated breath and gaping month. It was late before Ida got to bed, and later still before she fell asleep; for, somehow, now that she was back at Herondale the memory of that happy past grew more vivid; in fact, the whole place was haunted by the spectre of her lost love: and of all spectres this is the most ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... in vain for the thin, bowed figure of his grief-stricken sister. There were two willow-shaded graves in the grass-grown church-yard, and o'er them bent the spectre-like form of the Hermit of the Cedars, his gray locks moistened by the falling night-dews, and his pale face turned upward to the midnight stars with ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... majority of the deputies looked forward to the return of the King (whether the Comte de Chambord of the elder Bourbons, or the Comte de Paris of the House of Orleans) as soon as France should be freed from the German armies of occupation and the spectre of the Red Terror. Some of their more impatient members openly showed their hand, and while at Bordeaux began to upbraid Thiers for his obstinate neutrality on this question. For his part, the wise old man had early seen ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... lay down on the bench in her rags and Slimak went into the alcove. He sat on the bed, determined to be on the watch. He did not know that this strange state of mind is called 'nerves'. Yet a kind of relief had come in with Zoska; she had driven away the spectre of Maciek and the child. But an iron ring was beginning to press on his head. This was sleep, heavy sleep, the companion of great anguish. He dreamt that he was split in two; one part of him was sitting by his sick wife, the other was Maciek, standing outside the window, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... me in the face every waking hour, like a grisly spectre with bloody fang and claw, is the extermination of species. To me, that is a horrible thing. It is wholesale murder, no less. It is capital crime, and a black disgrace to the races of civilized mankind. I say "civilized mankind," because savages ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... cried the duchess, sympathizing, in spite of herself, with his sudden sorrow. He was ghastly as a spectre, and his whole frame shook like the leaf of ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... he had loosened, he softly raised it, listened, and climbing through, dropped noiselessly to the floor. Feeling his way in the darkness amid the bales and boxes, he reached a nook behind a piano-case he had previously noted, and settling down, prepared to await the appearance of the "spectre." ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... drew it back, but as he did so he recoiled violently, for he saw advancing upon him a terrible spectre, holding its head in its two hands. Its eyes seemed full of blood and fire, and rolled round and round in a most horrible manner. The hermit was about to shriek in terror when the head of the apparition, after laughing ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... other with a frightened air. She advanced to him and asked him what was the matter, in his native tongue. He shrunk farther back. The man could not or would not speak. He murmured something to himself, and stared at her as if she were a spectre. ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Apology of St. Perpetua," over which thou porest, for under all thy dignity and formalism there beats a loving father's heart. The shadows are gathering, dear sir, around thy fifth son in a far country, and in the gathering shadows there stalks, noiselessly, relentlessly, that grim, gray spectre, Death. On thy knees, then, oh Rector of St. Agnes, and blend thy prayers with the feeble petitions of her who even now, for thy house, entreats the Throne of Grace. Pray, oh thou on whom the bishop's ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... well-meaning men who, as a parish council, might conduct the affairs of Dorminster Town with unqualified success. As statesmen they do not exist. It seems to me, Nigel, that you and I are going to see in reality that spectre which terrified the world twenty years ago. We are going to see the breaking up of a ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings from broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to-night, O Sweet, and wail, A spectre at my door, Shall mortal Fear make Love immortal fail— I shall but love you more, Who, from Death's house returning, give me still One moment's comfort in ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... that Wallace actually saw the visions, and that the legend originated in the fact. I do not mean to imply that Fawdon became present, embodied or disembodied, whatever may have been the case with his spectre. I only say that what the legend reports Wallace to have seen, was actually in the hero's eyes. The remainder of the question I leave ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... still remained in the sack had completely whitened his fellow-traveller and given him a most unearthly appearance. The frightened miller was "putrified," as Mrs. Malaprop would say, at the sight, and a push from the white spectre brought the unfortunate man to the ground, when away rode the gallant quartermaster with his sacks of flour, which, at length bursting, made a ludicrous spectacle of man ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... not dead, then, since he rose of a sudden, like a spectre, took up his wife in his arms, and descended from the pyre in the midst of the clouds of smoke, which only heightened ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... he had just made, weakly, it seemed to him. A good deal of the importance of his revolt against commercial medicine disappeared. Lindsay tried oily, obsequious means of attracting attention. He was to hang his sign from a corner store. Some dim idea of the terrible spectre that haunts the days and nights of those without capital or position confronted him. If he had never been rich, he had always the means to give him time to look about, to select from a number of opportunities. If he could ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... less a person than Marshal Saxe. One night, on the march, he bivouacked in a haunted castle, and slept the sleep of the brave until midnight, when he was awakened by hideous howls heralding the approach of the spectre. When it appeared, the Marshal first discharged his pistol point-blank at it without effect, and then struck it with his sabre, which was shivered in his hand. The invulnerable spectre then beckoned the amazed Marshal to follow, and preceded him to a spot where the floor of the gallery ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... The spectre of death that hovered above his head imparted such an imposing majesty to his person that the soldiers paused, ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... house there is a gruesome witch, and I felt her breath and her long nails in my face; and by the door there stands a man who stabbed me in the leg with a knife, and in the yard there lies a black spectre, who beat me with his wooden club; and above, upon the roof, there sits the justice, who cried, 'bring that rogue here!' And so I ran away from the place as fast as ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... he paced his narrow room, In the bright sunshine of that Paris day; Saw in his thought the awful hand of doom; Saw in his dream his glory pass away; Tried in his heart, his weary heart, to pray: "O God! who made me, give me strength to face The spectre of this ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... scientist fought off the grim spectre valiantly. He patted Ulana's hand as his weak voice resumed. "You will take care of her I know, Carson. Take her with you to your own world; make her happy." He fell silent ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... and rumbled up the street, disappearing in the twilight, while the ear still tracked its course. Scarcely was it gone when the people began to question whether the coach and attendants, the ancient lady, the spectre of old Caesar and the Old Maid herself were not all a strangely-combined delusion with some dark purport in its mystery. The whole town was astir, so that, instead of dispersing, the crowd continually ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... apostleship of equality that was M. de Vilmorin's. You lacked the vision that would have shown you that God did not create men equals. Well, you are in case to-night to judge which of us was right, which wrong. You see what is happening here in Paris. You see the foul spectre of Anarchy stalking through a land fallen into confusion. Probably you have enough imagination to conceive something of what must follow. And do you deceive yourself that out of this filth and ruin there will rise up an ideal form of society? Don't ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... and through the darkness shout again, Rousing the streets, and call and call anew 'Creusa,' and 'Creusa,' but in vain. From house to house in frenzy as I flew, A melancholy spectre rose in view, Creusa's very image; ay, 'twas there, But larger than the living form I knew. Aghast I stood, tongue-tied, with stiffening hair. Then she addressed me ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... the Indian's plume, a single feather waving silver-white. Then it became riveted on the bubbling, refulgent spring. The pool was round, perhaps five feet across, and shone like a burnished shield. It mirrored the moon, the twinkling stars, the spectre trees. ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... another victim as soon after as I conveniently could. The one spectre superseded the other, until all vanished. They never trouble me now, though sometimes, in my waking moments, I have met them on the roadside, glaring at me from bush or tree, until I shouted at them fiercely, and then they were gone. These are my terrors, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... all-pervading and impalpable as the air we drew into our lungs. And suddenly this danger, this breath of our life, had taken this material form. It was material and expected, and yet it had the effect of an evil spectre, inasmuch as one did not know where and how it was vulnerable, what precisely it would do, how one ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and calmly, indeed he was surprised that he could face it like that, but his one thought was for peace, to put this spectre that had haunted him these ten days behind him and watch the world again with a straight ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... of the gown, Oh! be it mine, unknowing and unknown, [45]With deans deceased, to sleep beneath the stone." As tearful thus, and half convulsed with spite, He lengthen'd out with plaints the livelong night, At that still hour of night, when dreams are oft'nest true, A well-known spectre rose before his view, As in some lake, when hush'd in every breeze, The bending ape his form reflected sees,[46] Such and so like the Doctor's angel shone, And by his gait the guardian sprite was known, Benignly bending o'er his aching head— "Sleep, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... was capable of taking part in the whole round of the British drama, provided he was allowed to use his own language in getting through the dialogue. It happened one night that Reginald, in the Castle Spectre, was taken ill, and this veteran of a hundred characters was, of course, called up for the vacant part. He responded with his usual promptitude, although knowing nothing whatever of the character, but while they were getting him into the dress, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... point from their experiences in the war. All they wanted to do was to sit down together, and, man to man, talk their difficulties over. He would be glad to assist them, and he had no doubt as to the result. He warned the working man that hard times were coming. The spectre of unemployment was already parading their streets. Unemployment meant disorder, rioting. This, he assured them, would not be permitted. At all costs order would be maintained. He had no wish to threaten, but he promised them that the peace would be preserved at all costs. He suggested ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... something very much like horror. Some words certainly left his lips, but they did not carry to the hearing of any one of those three people. He looked at Maraton with the fierce, terrified intentness of one who looks upon a spectre! ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dissent, And at the stake teach wretches to repent. Clad cap-a-pie in mail we'll face our foes, And arm our British soldiery with bows. Dirt and disease shall rule us as of yore, The Plague's grim spectre stalk from shore to shore. Proceed, brave BALFOUR, whom no flouts appal, Collect stupidities and do them all. Uneducate our men, unplough our land, Bid heathen temples rise on every hand; Unmake our progress and revoke our laws, Or stuff ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... hours and for hours You are alone with your husband and lord. There is a skeleton hid in yon flowers; There is a spectre at bed and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... the Jacobins was a dictatorship, which was quite a new substitute for monarchy, and the Orleans spectre was no more than an illusion on which the Gironde spent much of its strength. In retaliation, they were accused of Federalism, and this also was a false suspicion. Federal ideas, the characteristic of America, had the sanction of the greatest names in the political literature of France—Montesquieu ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Aunt Olivia's flower garden, and sat with little brown chin palm-deep on the doorsteps. Gradually the indignation melted out of existence and only the homesickness was left. It sat on her small, lean face like a little spectre. It troubled ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... himself, as his sole purpose was to make good acting plays. Had it been necessary to that end to make Richard walk on three legs, or Henry on one leg, no doubt he would have done so,—just as Monk Lewis said he would have made Lady Angela blue, in his "Castle Spectre," if by such painting he could have made the play more effective. Prince Henry was a very precocious youth, and had the management of great affairs when he was but a child, and when it would have been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... sense had rolled back at last and shown a sweet, eternal landscape behind—a shadowless land of peace where the lion lay down with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid. There should be war no more: that bloody spectre was dead, and with him the brood of evil that lived in his shadow—superstition, conflict, terror, and unreality. The idols were smashed, and rats had run out; Jehovah was fallen; the wild-eyed dreamer of Galilee was in ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... He was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... that made a light curtain about this fantasia, and from time to time, with a shrill cry of exultation, a half-naked form, all gleaming eyes and teeth and polished bronze-hued limbs, rushed out of the blackness beyond the fire, leaped through the tongues of flame and vanished like a spectre into the ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... twenty-seven years, who had been carried to the tribunal almost in a dying state wrapped in blankets, to vote against the death of the "Tyrant," and who was termed, from this act and this costume, the "Spectre of Tyranny." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... in his ever-helpful Diary: "Sept. 20. Now I hear from Salem that about 18 years agoe, he [Giles Cory] was suspected to have stamp'd and press'd a man to death, but was cleared. Twas not remembered till Ann Putnam was told of it by said Cory's Spectre the Sabbath day night before ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... was not a sight that we should wish any one to see in our house, as desirable as a dignified spectre might have been. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... deserving of better treatment than she received at the hands of the hard-hearted author, who suffered her to be cheated and bullied by a scheming and brutal guardian, to be slandered by his envious daughter, persecuted by a dissolute nobleman, haunted by a spectre, shut up in a tower, exposed to manifold dangers, beset by robbers, abducted, assaulted, barely rescued, and, finally, even teased and tormented by the chosen lover of her heart, a jealous-pated fellow, who was always making ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... air above the promontory! The spectre of a woman—of his wife, clad, as she had been clad that fatal night! Outlined in supernatural light, it faces them with lifted arms showing the ends of rope dangling from either wrist. A sight awful to any eye, but to the man of ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... to see any one enter her apartments. When the mulatto chambermaid came there, in the ordinary course of her duties, she would shrink back in her chair and shade her eyes, as if some hideous spectre had crossed her path; but, if Agnes Barker entered, this nervous shock became unendurable, and it was with the greatest effort that she could refrain from rushing madly into the next room, and holding the ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... to be abandoned: but the objectives were not. Most of them were eventually to be translated into action and actuality. It was in their modification, perhaps, that the author was to display most of all his foresight and acumen. From 1848 onwards he recognised the true nature of "the spectre which haunted Europe"—and which still haunts the world. From then onwards he was not to write in the way which ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... that he entered the dreaded shades with fear, yet no spectre ever crossed his path. But perhaps that was because the thoughts of the old man were pure, or perhaps because he never entered the forest without singing a hymn in ...
— Undine • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... connected with these voyages. The inflammation, which had proceeded from it, had reached his eyes; it could not be dispersed; and the consequence was, that he was then blind. The second was lame; he had badly ulcerated legs, and appeared to be very weak. The third was a mere spectre; I think he was the most pitiable object I ever saw. I considered him as irrecoverably gone. They all complained to me of their bad usage on board the Thomas. They said they had heard, of my being in Bristol, and they hoped I ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... no one had as yet been found who had really seen the spectre old man, nevertheless the place kept its ghost reputation and was ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... front of you; fluted columns and draperies in broad folds with a formation that resembles the finest hemstitching may be seen all around you, while Pluto's chasm, a wide rift in the walls, contains a spectre clothed in shadowy draperies. One wonders how long this grim, ghastly person has stood here. Long ages came and went in that shadowy and evanescent time with no record save these stony ghosts, and over all a black pall of ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... the ivied ruins of yonder elm There glides and gazes a sadder face; Spectre Queen of a vanished race— 'Tis the full moon shrunk to a fleeting film, And she lingers for love of her ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... of being able to see things inside his head; in his drunken hysteria he was to see them always. The vision he beheld against the darkness of his mind projected itself and glared at him. He was pursued by a spectre in his own brain, and for that reason there was no escape. Wherever ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... in this vortex of existence, can the Son of Time not pretend: still less if some Spectre haunt him from the Past; and the Future is wholly a Stygian Darkness, spectre-bearing. Reasonably might the Wanderer exclaim to himself: Are not the gates of this world's happiness inexorably shut against thee; hast thou a hope that is not ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... experience, suppose you hint to any one inclined to spectre-shooting, that he runs the risk of killing a live man, and having two ghosts on his hands,—the ghost of the poor devil shot, and one of himself hanged for murder. As for you, young girls, remember that when you go forth to meet the perils of dark mornings, you are more likely to encounter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... state of things is dreary enough, but what unimaginable dreariness there will be when there are neither rich nor poor, when all have been educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and hopelessness than Dante's lowest circle of hell. The spectre of famine, of the plague, of war, etc., are mild and gracious symbols compared with that menacing figure, Universal Education, with which we are threatened, which has already eunuched the genius of the last five-and-twenty years of the nineteenth century, and produced ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... terminating, like an ancient satyr's, in a cloven foot; but it is furnished with two arms, bearing hard fists at the end of them, with which it has been known to strike the benighted traveller in the face, or to tumble him over into some dark pool. The spectre may be seen at the close of evening hopping vigorously among the distant bogs, like a felt ball on its electric platform; and when the mist lies thick in the hollows, an occasional glimpse may be caught of it even ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... struggle of the marketplace, money had lost its high value for him. Money was only a means, not an end. But to have it, to be able to bestow it where it was sadly needed, was worth while, after all. If he "crashed" over there, it was something to have banished the grim spectre of want from these two who were old ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... man whom guilt chases from his country! He flies to distant lands in the hope of shaking off the remembrance of his crime. He finds that, go where he will, the spectre dogs his steps. In Paris, in Milan, in Rome, the grizzly form starts up before him. He must change, not his country, but his heart—himself—before he ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... I was in a deep recess, and in a seat hardly raised above the level of the floor, I escaped her, although it seemed to me for some seconds, as I gazed on this spectre, that our ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... A spectre that impresses as wearing rags under a gorgeous robe, lurks among the foliage of the quiet bosquet beyond the orangerie. It is the infamous Madame de la Motte, chief of adventuresses, and it was in that secluded grove that her tool, Cardinal de Rohan, had his pretended interview with ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... upon his sad burden as it loomed faintly through the flowering laurustinus, then at the unfathomable gloom amid the high trees on each hand, indistinct, shadowless, and spectre-like in their monochrome of grey. He felt anything but cheerful, and wished he had the company even of a child or dog. Stopping the horse, he listened. Not a footstep or wheel was audible anywhere around, and the dead silence was broken ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... The history of the soup was fallen into the great forgotten, like one of M. Heller's speeches. In the baggage room, Meiser had already seized the handle of a black leather trunk, when, at the other end, he saw the spectre of Fougas, which was pulling in the opposite direction, and seemed inclined to dispute possession. He bristled up, pulled stronger, and even plunged his left hand into the pocket where the revolver was lying. But the luminous ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... the love of my mother, and mounting to the top of the pedestal, I look up and behold my mother before me. The spectre of her, standing before the monument, looks down upon me, reproachfully, piteously, affectionately. I sit down at the feet of the Virgin Mary and bury my face in my hands and weep. I love what thou lovest, O my mother, but I can see no ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... in stone, these gods were dog-headed or longly beaked. Some, though, were alive. In temples were saurians on purple carpets, bulls draped with spangled shawls, hawks on shimmering perches, that little gold chains detained. Among gods of this character, the Sphinx, in its role of eternal spectre, must have seemed the ideal. Others were nearly sublime. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... are ready for him" says the Major and brings him in here. But on the way Mr. Buffle looks about him in his usual suspicious manner and the Major fires and asks him "Do you see a Ghost sir?" "No sir" says Mr. Buffle. "Because I have before noticed you" says the Major "apparently looking for a spectre very hard beneath the roof of my respected friend. When you find that supernatural agent, be so good as point him out sir." Mr. Buffle stares at the Major and then nods at me. "Mrs. Lirriper sir" says the Major going off into a perfect steam and introducing me with his hand. "Pleasure ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... away I grew morose, morbid, and hypochondriacal. The pride which kept me from sharing my secret with my friend also held me at my post and nerved me to endure the torment in the rapidly diminishing hope of finally exorcising the spectre or recovering my usual healthy tone of mind. The difficulty of my position was increased by the fact that the apparition failed to appear occasionally, and while I welcomed each failure as a sign that the visits were to cease, they continued spasmodically for weeks, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... at the dismal sounds, But vainly strove a word to say; So, pointing to his bleeding wounds, The threat'ning spectre stalk'd away. ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... earth owns not"—he hears, and starts, And grasps the handle of his weapon tried; Then, while the rustling tent-cloth slowly parts, A figure enters and stands by his side: There was an air of majesty and pride In the bold bearing of that spectre pale— The crimson on its robe was still undried, And dagger wounds, that tell a bloody tale Beyond the power of words, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... the welter of the east One gaunt barque like a spectre bore; The mad wind trumpeted, then ceased, Then trumpeted ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... more about missing links than what I have said. I should rely much on pre-Silurian times; but then comes Sir W. Thomson like an odious spectre. Farewell.—Yours most sincerely, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... term second sight seems to be meant a mode of seeing superadded to that which nature generally bestows. In the Erse it is called Taisch; which signifies likewise a spectre or a vision.' Johnson's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... modern communism in all this, but there is a lesson to the modern Church as to the obligations of wealth and the claims of brotherhood, which is all but universally disregarded. The spectre of communism is troubling every nation, and it will become more and more formidable, unless the Church learns that the only way to lay it is to live by the precepts of Jesus and to repeat in new forms the spirit of the primitive Church. The Christian sense of stewardship, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... between St. John and the Virgin,' bearing the name of Ignatius: and it is not improbably connected with the outburst of Mariolatry in the eleventh and following centuries. But with 'the first streak of intellectual dawn this Ignatian spectre vanished into its kindred darkness.' The forgery was 'consigned to the limbo of foolish and forgotten things.' This pretender set aside, St. Ignatius was represented in Western Europe by the epistles ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... played, besides the characters already named, Rolla, Penruddock, Lothaire, Othello, George Barnwell, Octavian, Osmond (Castle Spectre) Hotspur, Frederick in Lovers Vows, Petruchio, Gondebert, and many others, if not all with equal excellence, at least with so much as to rank him among the first ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... Blaize, was a stout, stumpy fellow, about four feet ten, with a head somewhat too large for his body, and extremely long arms. Ever since the plague had broken out in Drury-lane, it haunted him like a spectre, and scattered the few faculties he possessed. In vain he tried to combat his alarm—in vain his mother endeavoured to laugh him out of it. Nothing would do. He read the bills of mortality daily; ascertained the ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... renders them miserable and unamiable—a real London rain—an eternal drizzle accompanied with mist and fog. When the sun shone it appeared but a pale image of itself, and old pagazis, wise in their traditions as old whaling captains, shook their heads ominously at the dull spectre, and declared it was doubtful if the rain would ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Nevertheless, the Imperial Government, not finding it possible to suppress the social democrats, does its best to employ them for its own ends. It uses them in fact as it uses irreconcilable France, namely, for the purpose of terrorisation, since it has discovered that the spectre of socialism is as effective to keep the middle classes loyal as the spectre of French revenge is to keep the Southern States loyal. But it also hopes in time to eradicate socialism from the State. "A vigorous national policy" Prince von Buelow declares to be "the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... ornamental design, and took the Great Exhibition to witness the fact. We have also pointed to that strange phenomenon, the rise anew of monastic institutions among us, long after their object is accomplished, giving a spectre-like expression to an obsolete idea; we have exposed, likewise, the inclination of the working-classes to trust to the protection, and, on every emergency, claim as a matter of right the aid of the wealthy, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... 1590. Then the morbid poet turned suspicious, and began to indulge fresh hopes of fortune in another place. He would again offer himself to the Medici. In April he set off for Tuscany, and alighted at the convent of Monte Oliveto, near Florence. Nobody wanted him; he wandered about the Pitti like a spectre, and the Florentines wrote: actum est de eo.[59] Some parting compliments and presents from the Grand Duke sweetened his dismissal. He returned to Rome; but each new journey told upon his broken health, and another illness made him desire a change of scene. This time Antonio ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... carried off Petrarch's Laura, and those other thousands of whom the world knew nothing then and knows nothing now. Some, too, have heard that the plague swept over Europe—desolating, devastating—the spectre with the swinging scythe mowing down broad swathes of men. Some, when they hear of it, picture to themselves Pope Clement VI. at Avignon, sitting in that vast palace that overlooks the Rhone, the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... it, when a sigh from Captain Nemo nailed me to the spot. I knew that he was rising. I could even see him, for the light from the library came through to the saloon. He came towards me silently, with his arms crossed, gliding like a spectre rather than walking. His breast was swelling with sobs; and I heard him murmur these words (the last which ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... with the fever, and never was there such an evidence of the racking of a bad conscience. In his ravings he shrieked for mercy, and then would blaspheme in the most awful manner. At one moment the spectre of his dead comrade would be invoked by him, requesting it to depart, or desiring those around him to take it away. At others, the murdered man was standing at his bed-side, and he would attempt to run, that he might ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... with the light that came through leaves of ivy, completed the interior of this portion of the ruin. It was not quite destitute of furniture. A few strange chairs, whose arms and legs looked as though they had dwindled away with age; a table, the very spectre of its race: a great old chest that had once held records in the church, with other quaintly-fashioned domestic necessaries, and store of fire-wood for the winter, were scattered around, and gave evident tokens of its occupation as a dwelling-place ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... possible here! He must feel as young Goethe felt when he first peered into the melancholy atheistic twilight of the Systme de la Nature; to him this book seemed so grey, so Cimmerian and deadly, that he could only endure its presence with difficulty, and shuddered at it as one shudders at a spectre. ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... thoughts, he put it away desperately. The man was dead—or his fickle fancy had veered elsewhere. Nothing else could explain his absence. But they could never know, and the uncertainty would forever stand between him and Lynde like a spectre. But he thought more of Lynde's pain than his own. He would have elected to bear any suffering if by so doing he could have freed her from the nightmare dread of Harmon's returning to claim her. That dread had always hung over her and now it must be intensified to agony by her ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Allies could not properly refuse to recognize Japan's claims. The secret agreements themselves hardly speak as eloquently for the absence of China from the average western consciousness. In saying that China and Asia are to be enormously significant figures in future reckonings, the spectre of a military Yellow Peril is not meant nor even the more credible spectre of an industrial Yellow Peril. But Asia has come to consciousness, and her consciousness of herself will soon be such a massive and persistent thing that it will force itself upon ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... like a spectre ship, so shattered was her framework. From the main-mast to the stern post, her timbers above the water-line were shot away, a few blackened posts alone preventing the upper deck from falling. Through this ruined ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... I bet you do a jolly rank paper too,' I said, remembering that the sceptic is sometimes vouchsafed revelations to which the most devout believer may not aspire. It is, for instance, always the young man who scoffs at ghosts that the family spectre chooses as his audience. But it required more than a mere sneer or an empty gibe to pump information out of Bradshaw. He took me ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... and spiral columns of vapour rose around the altar, and from each column came a spectre of fire and stood with ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... part of the river Wye, between the city of Hereford and the town of Moss, which was distinguished and well known for upwards of two centuries, by the appellation of the Spectre's Voyage; across which, so long as it retained that name, neither entreaty nor remuneration could induce any boatman to convey passengers after a certain hour of the night. The superstitious ideas current amongst the lower ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... board with my own money,' replied the spectre. It is all my own, and I shall keep it. The church shall never have one stiva of it if I can ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... reappeared; but it had yet some spots which were never to fade away. The word "separation" which Bonaparte, so often in Egypt, and now in Paris, had launched against Josephine, was to be henceforth the sword of Damocles, ever suspended over her head: like a dark, shadowy spectre it was to follow her everywhere; even amid scenes of happiness, joy, and glory, it was to be there to terrify her by its sinister presence, and by its ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... before her dressing-room fire, she heard her maid soliciting entrance, and paid no heed, the door being locked—as though a spectre could be bolted out of rooms and houses! Pacing the floor, restless, annoyed, and dismayed by turns, she flung her wet skirt and coat from her, piece by piece, and stood for awhile, like some slender youth in riding breeches and shirt, facing the fire, her fingers ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... sorrow—she won't expect you to; but you mustn't fail her; and you must do as you are bid. This afternoon you must just go out for a walk, and you must SLEEP, dear; that's what you want; you don't know what a spectre you are; and you must just get well as quick as you can, for ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... needle darting from north to south and from south to north. In public he still played the part of chorus to the wild speeches of his friends: but he would have taken in petto the first dictator who came along and swept away the red spectre. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... minutes afterwards we were desired to lie down. Feeling helpless as babes, we passively obeyed, and watched our guide as he moved about like a spectre in the long grass on the banks of the Potomac, looking for his canoe. At last he returned and whispered that the boat was all right, and we all crept like serpents to where it was concealed. Nothing could be heard but the wind blowing through the trees, and the discordant noises of frogs and ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... going deranged together?" retorted he, wondering what had come to the house. "Seen a spectre, Joyce?" ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... to glimpses of the earl in his restless night-walks; but by the domestics, both such as had seen something and such as had not, the apparition was naturally associated with the lost chamber, as the place whence the spectre ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... may be committed, and much more, convictions whereupon persons may be condemned as guilty of witchcrafts, ought certainly to be more considerable than barely the accused persons being represented by a spectre unto the afflicted, inasmuch as it is an undoubted and notorious thing that a demon may by God's permission appear even to ill purposes, in the shape of an innocent, yea, and a virtuous man. Nor can we esteem alterations made in the sufferers, by a look or touch of ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... before me at different times and in different forms during that eventful journey,—that youth, whose features are imprinted on my memory, is the very individual forester who this day rescued us in the forest. I cannot be mistaken; and connecting these marvellous appearances with the spectre which I saw while at Gay Bowers, I cannot resist the conviction that Heaven has permitted my guardian angel to assume mortal shape for ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... her Ladyship begins to doubt whether this romantic gentleman was not hoaxing her, and certes it was time; but 'melt and disperse ye spectre doubts!' an attempt to hoax Lady Morgan, impossible! They do quickly pass away, and the conversation is pursued in the same strain, until "Monsieur de —— one of the conscript fathers of classicism" is announced. No sooner has his name passed the lips of the servant, than the romantic ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... considerably. Nervously active by habit, he found delay doubly hard. The days we had spent on Lake Disappointment in a vain search for a river had been particularly trying on his nerves, and had left him a prey to many fears. The spectre of an early winter in this sub-Arctic land began to haunt him constantly. The days were slipping away and were becoming visibly shorter with each sunset. If we could get to the Indians on the George, ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... was undoubtedly saved by a French Canadian. But for Jacques Baby, the grim spectre Starvation would have stalked through the little fortress. Baby was a prosperous trader and merchant who, with his wife Susanne Reaume, lived on the east shore of the river, almost opposite the fort. He had a farm of one thousand acres, ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... trampling and climbing over the roof, making branches creak, springing out of the trees upon the chimney, popping its head into the flue, and shrieking and blaspheming at every corner of the walls. As in the old story, the assailant was a spectre which could be felt but not seen. She had never before been so struck with the devilry of a gusty night in a wood, because she had never been so entirely alone in spirit as she was now. She seemed almost to be apart from herself—a vacuous duplicate only. The recent self of physical animation ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... slept quietly as an infant all that night. Next morning I found him up and dressed. Looking like a spectre, indeed; but with health, courage, and hope in his eyes. Even my father noticed it, when at dinner-time, with Jael's help—poor old Jael! how proud she ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... ghost, as he believed, for the flour that still remained in the sack had completely whitened his fellow-traveller and given him a most unearthly appearance. The frightened miller was "putrified," as Mrs. Malaprop would say, at the sight, and a push from the white spectre brought the unfortunate man to the ground, when away rode the gallant quartermaster with his sacks of flour, which, at length bursting, made a ludicrous spectacle of man ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... heaven I've learned that craft! These keys would mock hell's foresight. (He takes a key, and opens the gate of the tower. An old man comes from below emaciated like a skeleton. MOOR springs back with of right.) Horrible spectre! my father! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... circles in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities of America are aroused over the visit of a spectre called Nationalism, alias Territorialism. Like all spectres, it is doing a lot of mischief and causing much confusion in the heads of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... as they. Not a word, whether of sympathy or of animosity, greeted the silent procession. On went the noiseless, spectre-like train until it reached the market-place. There the superior stopped, and the brothers gathered around him in one ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... With the rod of sickness smote her; And the ruddy color left her, And those lofty airs and manners; Sickness and a ghastly pallor Came upon her limbs and forehead, And she hourly sank and wasted Till a spectre she resembled. Then the spirit fled the body, And was carried unto Sero; Sero through the wicket passed it To the pit of Long Damnation. What is now this pompous woman, And her great imagination? These have vanished like a ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... a half-playful lunge with his bayonet at a gaunt, yellow-faced spectre of a man who staggered on to the boat with a child in his arms wrapped in a tattered blue quilt. A gust of the chilly wind picked his shapeless, loose-fitting hat off as he leaped to avoid the bayonet-point, and his head ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... and have seen the whole assembly in very great alarm all the while it has been ringing. But there is nothing which delights and terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody shirt. A spectre has very often saved a play, though he has done nothing but stalked solemnly across the stage, or rose through a cleft in it and sunk again without speaking one word. There may be a proper season for these several terrors, and when they only come in as aids and assistances ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... it was that night when there was an alarm of fire. I went close up to you to take Master Archibald from your arms; and, as sure as I am now standing here, I believe that for the moment my senses left me. I thought I saw a spectre—the spectre of my dead lady. I forgot the present; I forgot that all were standing round me; that you, Madame Vine, were alive before me. Your face was not disguised then; the moonlight shone full upon it, and ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... I am altogether at my ease when I see anywhere in my path that meagre, squalid, famine-faced spectre, Poverty; attended as he always is, by iron-fisted oppression, and leering contempt; but I have sturdily withstood his buffetings many a hard-laboured day already, and still my motto is—I DARE! My worst enemy is moi-meme. I lie ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... weary wretch and worn, A roundel shrill and obsolete. The spectre of a dog forlorn ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... reddish-brown white. We call wine "white wine" which is as yellow as a Blue-coat boy's legs. We call grapes "white grapes" which are manifestly pale green. We give to the European, whose complexion is a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a "white man"—a picture more blood-curdling than any spectre in Poe. ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... found himself trying to take an inventory of his own stock. And since the material question of money did not come in to cloud the horizon, he felt he could do it impartially. There are many now who, having sacrificed every prospect, find their outlook haunted by the spectre of want; there are many more, formerly engaged in skilled trades such as engineering or mining, who find that they have four years of leeway to make up in their profession—four years of increased knowledge and mechanical improvements—unknown to them, but not to their competitors, ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... render possible, the application of scientific tests. We may compare him once more to Miss Bronte, who introduces, in 'Villette,' a haunted garden. She shows us a ghost who is for a moment a very terrible spectre indeed, and then, very much to our annoyance, rationalises him into a flesh-and-blood lover. Hawthorne would neither have allowed the ghost to intrude so forcibly, nor have expelled him so decisively. The garden in his hands would have been haunted by a shadowy terror of which ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... "The poor man is a king in his own house." But he is not to be let alone. He gets summoned, must answer for himself in the Imperial Court. So he goes, like an old-world spectre, whom no one knows any more. "What is he?" ask the young. "Ah, he is neither a lord, nor a serf! Yet ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... all was joy and congratulation. Her incurable disease was for the time forgotten, and although pain would occasionally draw down the muscles of her face, as soon as the pang was over, so was the remembrance of her precarious situation. Wan and wasted as a spectre, she indulged in anticipation of again mixing with the fashionable world, and talked of chaperoning Isabel to private parties and public amusements, when she was standing at the brink of eternity. Isabel sighed as she listened to her mother, and observed ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... thy suffering; let those kisses that have wasted thee close thy lids! Descend into the cold earth, poor trembling body that can no longer support its own weight. When thou art there, perchance thou wilt be believed, if doubt believes in death. O sorrowful spectre! On the banks of what stream wilt thou wander and groan? What fires devour thee? Thou dreamest of a long journey and thou hast one ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... too late. The helpless loveliness lying in his arms was not for him. It was Ahmed whom she loved, Ahmed who had waked to such a tardy recognition of the priceless gift that she had given him, Ahmed whom he must wrest from the grim spectre that was hovering near him lest the light that shone in her violet eyes should go out in the blackness of despair. And yet as he looked at her with eyes filled with hopeless misery a demon of suggestion whispered within him, tempting him. He knew ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... rim dips: the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; 200 With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... bodies of those who in the eastern countries of Europe are called vampires. They buried the corpse under the gallows; but neither the digging up nor the re-burying were of avail to banish the spectre. Again the spade and pick-axe were set to work, and the dead man being found considerably improved in condition since his last interment, was, with various horrible indignities, burnt to ashes, 'after which the spectrum was ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... the name of Huguenot applied to the Protestants, hitherto called "Lutherans," "heretics of Meaux" and, more rarely, "Calvinists." The origin of the word, first used at Tours in 1560, is uncertain. It may possibly come from "le roi Huguet" or "Hugon," a night spectre; the allusion then would be to the ghostly manner in which the heretics crept by night to their conventicles. Huguenot is also found as a family name at Belfort as early as 1425. It may possibly come from the term "Hausgenossen" ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... was gone she abandoned herself to an impassioned dramatization of her own death from blood-poisoning, and her husband's early marriage with the actress, who then appeared in all his plays, though they were not happy together. Her own spectre was always rising between them, and she got some fearful joy out of that. She counted his absence by her heart-beats, but he came back so soon that she was ashamed, and was afraid that he had behaved so as to give the woman a notion ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... a vacant chair Fills with quick tears some tender eye, And at our maddest sports appear Those well-loved forms that will not die. We lift the glass, our hand is stayed— We jest, a spectre rises up— And weeping, though no word is said, We kiss and pass the ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... which a great deal of nonsense has been written by English writers on the early history of Canada, most of whom have been able to see nothing but the spectre of paternalism in every domain of colonial life. It is quite true, as Tocqueville tells us, that the physiognomy of a government can be best judged in its colonies, for there its merits and faults appear as through a microscope. But in Canada it ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... need of haste. On Friday, while the flames were still making their way onward, General Funston telegraphed: "Famine seems inevitable." The people of the country took a more hopeful view of it, and by Saturday night the spectre of famine was definitely driven from the field and food for all the fugitives was ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... with my own money,' replied the spectre. It is all my own, and I shall keep it. The church shall never have one stiva of it if ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... sure no one had as yet been found who had really seen the spectre old man, nevertheless the place kept its ghost reputation ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... sentence gravely in any company, and you are certain to provoke laughter. And yet some subtile recognition of the fact of death runs constantly through the warp and woof of the most ordinary human existence. And this recognition does not always terrify. The spectre has the most cunning disguises, and often when near us we are unaware of the fact of proximity. Unsuspected, this idea of death lurks in the sweetness of music; it has something to do with the pleasures with which we behold the vapours of morning; it comes between the ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... remain untrue in the future. The vain desire of creating beyond the present for the future I abandon, but if I am to create for the present, that present must appear to me in a less disgusting form than it actually does. I renounce fame, and more especially the ridiculous spectre of posthumous fame, because I love my fellow-men too much to condemn them, for the sake of my vanity, to the poverty in which alone the posthumous fame of dead people finds ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... and, quite illegally but profitably, landed her in Standard Oil is not a part of this drama. But meanwhile she had shuddered. Like many another widow, to whom New Haven was as good as Governments, she might have been in the street. Pointing at her had been that spectre—Want! ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... the Spaniard. Then, with horrified gestures, as directed against some spectre, he unconsciously fell into the ready arms of his attendant, who, with a silent appeal toward Captain Delano, seemed beseeching him not again to broach a theme so unspeakably ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... arouse the bitter resentment he expected. There even came whispers to his ears that he had sold out to the landlords, and there was enough truth in the report to scare him. Thus to both parties came the uncomfortable spectre of the black men, and both sides went to work to ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... protest against the tame and unimpressive manner in which that supernatural personage is permitted to make his appearance. It should seem that our managers reserve all their decorations for the inexplicable dumb show of the Wood Daemon (that diphthong is my delight), the Castle Spectre, &c. &c. The Bleeding Nun in Raymond and Agnes is ushered in with a pre-scent-iment of blue flame and brimstone. Angela's mother advances in a minuet step, to soft music, like Goldsmith's bear, and is absolutely ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... reason why you want him to go. You think if he really asserted himself, really knocked down the spectre of his old distrust and stamped on it, he would be a different man. If he had once proved himself, as we say of younger chaps, ...
— Different Girls • Various
... section a white-lipped girl strained forward, silently intreating. Her face was tear-streaked. There was something desperately compelling about her attitude. The spectre of defeat to her was as grim as the spectre of death. Almost unconsciously her lips parted and she started to sing ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... magic, because they know not how they are produced. Eyes that are diseased do not see things as others see them, or else behold them differently. A drunken man will see objects double; to one who has the jaundice they will appear yellow: in the obscurity people fancy they see a spectre, where there is but the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... pestilence had broken out in Rome, and the spectre of a mysterious and mortal sickness distracted those who had survived the terrors of sword and flame. The Spanish and German soldiery either fell victims to the plague or deserted in haste and fear; and ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life—so far as memory serves in things so long ago—without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel—(O that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe—not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy—but the shape and manner of their visitation. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Ghost, as far as possible, the Mother's attributes —Love, Charity, Grace; but in spite of conscientious effort and unswerving faith, the Holy Ghost remained to the mass of Frenchmen somewhat apart, feared rather than loved. The sin against the Holy Ghost was a haunting spectre, for no one knew what else ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... though audible, caused him to crouch behind a cedar bush again. He held his breath, listened, and peered through the branches. Soon a man appeared,—a Navajo; but whether it was Nacaytzusle or not, he could not discover. The Indian glided across the open space as noiselessly as a spectre, and disappeared in a northerly direction. Tyope remained in his concealment for a while, and as nothing more was heard or seen, he crawled to the nearest shrub to the west. There he again listened and watched, then rose to his feet and moved ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... called MONK Lewis, from his once popular romance of that name, was a good-hearted man, and, like too many of that fraternity, a disagreeable one—verbose, disputatious and paradoxical. His Monk and Castle Spectre elevated him into fame; and he continued to write ghost-stories till, following as he did in the wake of Mrs. Radcliffe, he quite overstocked the market. Lewis visited his estates in Jamaica, and came back perfectly negro-bitten. He promulgated ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... of Faith, awake, arise, illume The dread unknown, the chaos of the tomb Melt, and dispel, ye spectre doubts that roll Cimmerian darkness o'er the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... feet. But she, for whom the greeting was intended, did not observe this mute courtship, for her eyes followed the travellers, and especially the young man, as if spellbound. As soon as the three were far enough off not to hear her, the girl asked with a shiver, as if some desert-spectre had passed by-and in a low ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... do to us. That accounts for our politeness. Death, universal and inevitable, is none the less a villainous institution. Every other antagonist can be ignored or bribed or circumvented or crushed outright. But here is a damnable spectre who knocks at the door and does not wait to hear you say, 'Come in.' Hateful! If other people think differently it is because they live differently. How do they live? Like a cow that has stumbled into a dark hole, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... clear as anything in reason[857]. She had no patience with English anti-slavery people who believed Northern protestations, and she did not express concern over the horrors of a possible servile insurrection. Nevertheless this spectre was constantly appearing. Again the Spectator sought to allay such fears; but yet again also proclaimed that even such a contingency was less fearful than the consolidation of the slave-power ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... the slain— For her, the sole, the one More dear to him than daylight or the sun, That perished to be pure! No more! no more! Hath that stern mourner language! But the vow, Late breathed before those spectre witnesses, His secret spirit mutters o'er and o'er, As 't were the very life of him and his— Dear to his memory, needful to him now! A moment and his right hand grasped his brow— Then, bending to the waters, his canoe, Like some etherial ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... no little exercise of the imagination to form a mental picture of Lord HALDANE as a member of the Russian ballet, or, to put it in a more concrete form, making the famous flying exit in Le Spectre da la Rose. Could fancy be translated into fact, the drawing power of such a spectacle would be prodigious. On the other hand, and in view of the notorious adaptability of the Slavonic temperament, we can well imagine NIJINSKY proving ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... strange visions. And in the midst of those ruins, which began to assume fantastic forms, and which seemed to move, in the gathering shades of twilight, Berta, her father, and the nurse might well believe themselves in the presence of a spectre evoked there ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... hunt is a spectre; sighted, it steals away; and if one remains very, very still and listens, one may hear, far and faint, the undertone of phantom horns mocking the field that rides ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... I was lying on the floor, holding the half- perused paper in my hand. Grief and horror had locked up the avenues of complaint, and I sat as one petrified to stone. My father entered. At the sight of me, he started as if he had been a spectre. His well- known features opened at once my agonized heart. With fearful cries I cast myself at his feet, and putting the letter into his hand, clung, almost expiring, to ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... shook, and spiral columns of vapour rose around the altar, and from each column came a spectre of fire and stood ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... hands it to the Duke. Macias is arrested after a tumultuous scene, and is led away, shaking off Elvira's efforts to save him with bitter contempt, and breaking loose from her with the prophecy that in every joy of the future and every incident of her wedded life, the spectre of his murdered love will rise before her, and 'every echo and every breeze repeat the ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... out, the camp-fire fades, The wild auroral ghost-lights die, And stealing up the distant wood The moon's white spectre floats on high, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... the fire, the vast apartment was so ill-lighted by a single candle that he could be no longer seen, he could still be heard marching about in the dark, however, and presently returned slowly towards the light, and emerged by degrees from obscurity, looking like a spectre, with his white robe and cap, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... you die to-night, O Sweet, and wail, A spectre at my door, Shall mortal Fear make Love immortal fail— I shall but love you more, Who, from Death's house returning, give me still One moment's ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... grew irritating to him; it drew so marked a contrast 'twixt Crispin's frame of mind and his own. Whilst Crispin had related his story, the interest it awakened had served to banish the spectre of fear which the thought of the morrow conjured up. Now that Crispin was silent and asleep, that spectre returned, and the lad grew numb and sick with the horror ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... hear of Finance-Minister Creutz, once a poor Regiment's Auditor, when his Majesty, as yet Crown-Prince, found talent in him? Can readers fish up from their memory, twenty years back, anything of a terrific Spectre walking in the Berlin Palace, for certain nights, during that "Stralsund Expedition" or famed Swedish-War time, to the terror of mankind? Terrific Spectre, thought to be in Swedish pay,—properly a spy Scullion, in a small concern of Grumkow VERSUS Creutz? [Antea, vol. v. pp. 356-358; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... from south to north. In public he still played the part of chorus to the wild speeches of his friends: but he would have taken in petto the first dictator who came along and swept away the red spectre. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... soon one gets accustomed to a sudden change of fortune. The novelty of the situation had worn off by the time the home journey was finished. She was again in the grip of overwhelming fear. The horrible dread of a prosecution stood like a spectre in her path. ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... memory and for tears. Within the deep, Still chambers of the heart a spectre dim, Whose tones are like the wizard voice of Time, Heard from the tomb of ages, points its cold And solemn finger to the beautiful And holy visions that have passed away And left no shadow of their loveliness On the dead waste of life. That ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... alone with thee for two whole days, And all the day thou wrapped in sleep didst lie. Where wouldst thou go, my dove?" The gentle girl Was much afraid and trembled, and she thought: "Is it a spirit come to find me here? Avaunt thee and begone, O spectre dread," She said, amid her tears. "No phantom I," Replied the King; "be not afraid. I wish To marry thee." Then Bidasari strove Again to flee. Then sang the King a song That told of love and happiness. Its words ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... there are when spectre-like, Moving among tall haycocks lightly piled, I enter alone upon the stubble field, From which the laborers' voices late have died, And in the antiphony of afterglow And rising full moon, sit me down Upon the full moon's side of the first haycock And lose myself amid so many alike. I ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... crowding out of the houses and towards the great marketplace, where the assembly to hear the conditions was likeliest to meet. The soldiers, who had been better cared for than the more useless townsfolk, were spectre-like in all conscience; but the starving children, and the desperate mothers who could only weep and wring their hands in answer to the piteous demand for bread, were the beings who most stirred Raymond's heart as he ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... funnier figure in my life. The coat was once my grandfather's—a colonel of West India Militia, I believe. Now my grandfather had been a rather short man, but very broad and stout, particularly round the stomach. Old Clump was tall and thin as a spectre, so the epaulettes fell over his shoulders, the waist flapped loosely eight inches above his trousers, and the short swallow-tails did not sufficiently cover the spot which the venerable darky usually placed on the chair to hide a patch, the bigness of a frying-pan ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... As he spoke the spectre-like clerk put down a neatly-ruled bit of paper and an unsigned cheque on the desk before his employer, and then smiled a ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... habitations, and the cave-like refuges in which the citizens sought safety from the death-dealing missiles. It was a scene never to be forgotten, a spectacle of ruin, suffering, and death. And the suffering was not alone from the terrible enginery of war, but from lack of food as well, for that dread spectre of famine, that in a few weeks more was to force the surrender of the valiantly defended city, was already showing its gaunt form in the desolated ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... scythe and darts supply, How great a king of fears am I! They view me like the last of things, They make and then they draw my stings. Fools! if you less provoked your fears, No more my spectre form appears. Death's but a path that must be trod, If man would ever pass to God; A port of calms, a state to ease From the rough rage of swelling seas. Why then thy flowing sable stoles, Deep pendent cypress, mourning poles, Loose scarfs to fall athwart thy weeds, Long palls, drawn hearses, covered ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Mar. 20. Dvo[vr]ak's cantata "The Spectre Bride" given in Brooklyn, N.Y., under Theodore Thomas; also Raff's "Die Jahreszeiten" for chorus, pianoforte ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... was taken with a panic; she fancied herself deserted in a giant tomb, with dead men gathering about her. She herself was in truth the grisliest spectre there, in her white satin gown and feathers, and the horror of her hideous face. But she took to flight, and the key remained unnoticed ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... shall return To dare the weeds of death, And plunge through the coned pink bloom, And cry on that spectre set In its silent ring of gloom, And stay my youth to learn The thing that my ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Piercie Shafton, by presenting him with a bodkin, indicative of his descent from a tailor, is borrowed from a German romance, by the celebrated Tieck, called Das Peter Manchem, i. e. The Dwarf Peter. The being who gives name to the tale, is the Burg-geist, or castle spectre, of a German family, whom he aids with his counsel, as he defends their castle by his supernatural power. But the Dwarf Peter is so unfortunate an adviser, that all his counsels, though producing success in the immediate results, are in the issue attended with ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... secured my complete forgiveness. Consequently, the khan repeatedly appeals to me as "bur-raa-ther," lays his forefingers together, and enlarges upon the fact that we have passed through the dangers and difficulties of the Dasht-i-na-oomid together. The dread spectre of possible mutilation and disgrace as the consequence of their misdeeds pursues these guileful, grown-up children even in their dreams. All through the night they are moaning and muttering uneasily in their ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Mazarine (who had the devil always present in his black imagination) wakes his best beloved, to make her partaker—you will never be able to guess of what—to make her partaker of his nocturnal visions. Flambeaux are lighted, and search is made everywhere; but no spectre does Madame Mazarine find, except that which lay by ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... and provident father, this scheme threatened to fructify sooner than he wished, if indeed it could ever have fructified to his satisfaction; for the grisly spectre of typhus laid his relentless hand upon Mary when she—and of a consequence Annie—was somewhere about eight years old. And surely, being as we are very hopeful optimists in the cause of human nature, we need not say that ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... suppress the social democrats, does its best to employ them for its own ends. It uses them in fact as it uses irreconcilable France, namely, for the purpose of terrorisation, since it has discovered that the spectre of socialism is as effective to keep the middle classes loyal as the spectre of French revenge is to keep the Southern States loyal. But it also hopes in time to eradicate socialism from the State. "A vigorous national policy" ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... completely vanished. The huge solid shell is full of expression; it looks as if it had been hollowed out by the sincerity of early faith, and it opens into a cloister as impressive as itself. Wherever one goes, in France, one meets, looking backward a little, the spectre of the great Revolution; and one meets it always in the shape of the destruction of something beautiful and precious. To make us forgive it at all, how much it must also have destroyed that was more hateful than itself! Beneath the church ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... is to leave what does not belong to one severely alone. In other sins there may be something gained in the long run, but here no such illusion can be entertained, for the spectre of restitution, as we shall see, follows every injustice as a shadow follows its object, and its business is to see that no man ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... If a spectre had made its appearance in their midst, the girls could not have been more disconcerted. A horrible hush spread over the room, and for a moment everybody stared in frozen horror. The musicians slipped down from the dressing-table and ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... brother-surgeon and the servant brought him home, but neither candles nor the light of day could allay his fears; his disordered brain showed him Grandier ever standing at the foot of his bed. A whole week he continued, as was known all over the town, in this condition of abject terror; then the spectre seemed to move from its place and gradually to draw nearer, for he kept on repeating, "He is coming! he is coming!" and at length, towards evening, at about the same hour at which Grandier expired, Surgeon Mannouri drew his ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... But there was a ship—safe, convenient, roomy: a ship with beds, bedding, knives, forks, comfortable cabins, glass and china, and a complete cook's galley, pervaded, ruled and possessed by the pitiless spectre of starvation. The lamp oil had been drunk, the wicks cut up for food, the candles eaten. At night she floated dark in all her recesses, and full of fears. One day Falk came upon a man gnawing a splinter of pine wood. Suddenly he threw the piece of wood ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... had been the wreck of weeks instead of minutes, and the level rays of the setting sun flashed and blazed into its windows as though fire had been added to the ruin. But even this presently faded, leaving the abandoned coach a rigid, lifeless spectre on the twilight plain. ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... not sprung into life full grown. It had gradually taken form after Michael's imprisonment. At first it had been only an uneasy ghost that could be laid, a spectre across her path that could be avoided; but since she had come home it had slowly attained gigantic and terrifying proportions. It loomed before her now as a vague but insistent menace, from which she ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... Adown his cheeks Seem'd real tears to flow; and even his hand With Ceyx' motion mov'd. Deeply she groan'd, Ev'n in her sleep, and rais'd her longing arms To clasp his body; empty air she clasp'd: Exclaiming;—"stay; O whither dost thou fly? "Together let us hence!"—Rous'd with the noise, And spectre of her spouse; sleep fled her eyes, And round she cast her gaze for that to seek Which she but now beheld. Wak'd by her voice, Her slaves approach'd with lights; but when in vain She search'd for what she lack'd, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... what ghost? Thy fancy hath converted some white cow into a spectre, in the uncertain ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Worcester and the English dictionaries spell re, while Webster, the Century, and the Standard prefer er:Calibre, centre, litre, lustre, maneuvre (I. maneuver), meagre, metre, mitre, nitre, ochre, ombre, piastre, sabre, sceptre, sepulchre, sombre, spectre, theatre, zaffre,{.} ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... a wonderful winter to the Bean family. Never before had Mrs. Bean known what it was to be free from the oppressing spectre of want. No longer was she forced to worry about household supplies; neither was it necessary for Steve to go to the store each week with his basket of eggs and a few rolls of butter. He carried, instead, ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... A third spectre appeared, rising like Banquo's spirit at Macbeth's feast. This was too much for the plump girl's self-control. She opened her mouth, and her half-strangled shriek, the partially masticated cap-strings all but choking her, aroused Ruth and Helen ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... ears of those who preach dissent, And at the stake teach wretches to repent. Clad cap-a-pie in mail we'll face our foes, And arm our British soldiery with bows. Dirt and disease shall rule us as of yore, The Plague's grim spectre stalk from shore to shore. Proceed, brave BALFOUR, whom no flouts appal, Collect stupidities and do them all. Uneducate our men, unplough our land, Bid heathen temples rise on every hand; Unmake our progress and revoke our laws, Or stuff them full of all their banished flaws. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... there came a vague light—the spectre of a smile. And as Recklow looked at her he remembered the living glory she had once been; and wrath blazed wildly within him. "What have they done to you?" he asked in an unsteady voice. But McKay laid his hand on ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... helpless without his aid. Medland's sanguine mind caught eagerly at the chance, and in a moment turned it into a hope—almost a conviction. Then the whole thing would go down to the grave with the unlucky man, and not even its spectre survive to trouble him. For if no one had certain knowledge, if there were never more than gossip, growing, as time passed, fainter and fainter from having no food to feed on, would not utter silence follow at last, so ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... state of the atmosphere, known as the Fata Morgana of Sicily, the Mirage of the Desert, the Spectre of the Brocken, and the more common exhibitions of halos, coronae, and mock suns. The Mountain House at Catskill has repeatedly been seen brightly pictured on the clouds below. Rainbows are also due to this condition of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... water left in the bottom of a bucket overnight was frozen into a thick cake in the morning, the thermometer indicating 18 degrees. The nights I pass in these fearful regions are more dreadful than the days, for "night is the time for care, brooding o'er days misspent, when the pale spectre of despair comes to our lonely tent;" and often when I lay me down I fall into a dim and death-like trance, wakeful, yet "dreaming dreams no mortals had ever dared ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... the first word uttered loud enough to reach the strange four-armed, one-headed, but legless spectre. It produced a wonderful effect, for the odd figure wheeled about and started off at something like a run. Sukey brought his gun to his shoulder ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... of the other, Attusah of Kanootare, this was necessary in the event that submission to the British government became inevitable. For since he claimed to be a ghost, surely never was spectre so reckless. He had indeed appeared to so many favored individuals that the English might fairly have cause to doubt his execution in satisfaction of his crimes against the government; and the breach of faith on the part of the Cherokee ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the old seaman had been severely tried. Misfortune had followed upon misfortune; until the hardy veteran looked like the spectre of his former self. His only daughter, a pretty girl of eighteen, was engaged to marry the ostler at the Crown Inn, a fine-looking young man, who had lately come from London. He saw Nancy Jarvis, became enamoured of the fisherman's ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... eyes were lit with something very much like horror. Some words certainly left his lips, but they did not carry to the hearing of any one of those three people. He looked at Maraton with the fierce, terrified intentness of one who looks upon a spectre! ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and on his way home. He was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... vices to abhor: And the first wisdom, to be fool no more. But to the world no bugbear is so great, As want of figure, and a small estate. To either India see the merchant fly, Scared at the spectre of pale poverty! 70 See him, with pains of body, pangs of soul, Burn through the tropic, freeze beneath the pole! Wilt thou do nothing for a nobler end, Nothing, to make philosophy thy friend? To stop thy ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... peace and love will be banished from among mortals. God, take yourself away! for, from this day forth, cured of your fear and become wise, I swear, with hand extended to heaven, that you are only the tormentor of my reason, the spectre of my conscience. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... had proceeded from it, had reached his eyes; it could not be dispersed; and the consequence was, that he was then blind. The second was lame; he had badly ulcerated legs, and appeared to be very weak. The third was a mere spectre; I think he was the most pitiable object I ever saw. I considered him as irrecoverably gone. They all complained to me of their bad usage on board the Thomas. They said they had heard, of my being in Bristol, and they hoped I would not leave it without inquiring into ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... comfort still, In a whole land's good-will, In hope that pallid spectre shall not slay. The unwelcome hand of Death Closes on that white wreath; But there is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... O listen to the Sea-maid's shell; Ye who have fled your natal shores in hate Or anger, urged by pale disease, or want, Or grief, that clinging like the spectre bat, Sucks drop by drop the life-blood from the heart, And hither come to learn forgetfulness, Or to prolong existence! ye shall find Both—though the spring Lethean flow no more, There is a power in these entrancing skies And murmuring waters and delicious ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... heart and voice! For Athens, leave pasture and flock! Present to help, potent to save, Pan deg.—patron I call! deg.8 Archons deg. of Athens, topped by the tettix, deg. see, I return! deg.9 See, 'tis myself here standing alive, no spectre that speaks! 10 Crowned with the myrtle, did you command me, Athens and you, "Run, Pheidippides, run and race, reach Sparta for aid! Persia has come, deg. we are here, where is She?" Your command I obeyed, deg.13 Ran and raced: like ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... anguish. But by and by their feelings got the better of them, and when he was asleep in his chair after dinner Mrs. Millborne's irritation broke out. The embittered Frances joined her in reproaching the man who had come as the spectre to their intended feast of Hymen, and turned its promise ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... Spectre-like Famine drew near; Her doom-word hummed in his ear: Ah, weak were woman's hands to reach And save him from the hellish charms And wizard motion of those arms! Yet only noble womanhood The wife her dauntless part could teach: She shared with him the last dry food And thronged with hopefulness ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... that was precisely what Mr Bickersdyke was doing. He was feeling thoroughly pleased with life. For nearly nine months Psmith had been to him a sort of spectre at the feast inspiring him with an ever-present feeling of discomfort which he had found impossible to shake off. And tonight he saw his way of getting ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... ghosts. Taking advantage of these superstitions, my brother and myself made him the sufferer in many a practical joke. Upon one occasion, we put into circulation, in the neighborhood, a story full of wonder. A remarkable spectre had been seen near the mill on dark nights, and especially on those misty nights of murky gloom, common in early spring to this latitude. Its form was unique and exaggerated, with flaming eyes, and mouth of ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... through the heavy door, and a spectre passed into the room before his eyes. And upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I know ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... element into criminal cases, be strictly enforced in the Kingdom of Poland. This action saved the lives of scores of prisoners, and put a stop to the obscure agitation which endeavored to revive the medieval spectre. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... and stood for a few seconds without uttering a word. The savage shrank back and shuddered from head to foot. Then, with a noiseless step, Martin retreated slowly backward towards the door and passed out like a spectre—never for a moment taking his eyes off those of the savage until he was lost in darkness. On gaining the forest he fled with a beating heart to his former retreat; but his fears were groundless, for the Indian firmly believed that Martin's spirit had visited his hut and carried away ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... a spectre had been evoked by that thrilling, though deep-toned roar, a huge unforeseen gray form suddenly arose very loftily and towered threateningly right beside them; masts, spars, rigging, all like a ship that had taken sudden shape in the air instantly, just as ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... this megacephalous gentleman, nor did we ever encounter any one who professed to have seen him, otherwise we would certainly have reported the case to the Phrenological Society. But we no more doubt his existence than that of the spectre of the Brocken. Sometimes the shadowy spectre of Ben Muich Dhui is a gigantic exaggeration of the ordinary human form seen stalking in a line with the traveller's route, striding from mountain-top to mountain-top as he steps from stone to stone, and imitating ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... by Rodin in an abrupt voice, made the Princess and Father d'Aigrigny grow pale and tremble. Rodin's look was gloomy and chilling, like a spectre's. For some moments, the silence of the tomb reigned in the saloon. Rodin was the first to break it. Still impassible, he pointed with imperious gesture to the table, where a few minutes before he ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... of human hands conquers the spectre, and, puffing and whistling, the locomotive breaks through the dark haze. Once again the iron serpent disappears into the bowels of the rock, and as it emerges it crosses another valley and is greeted by a clear heaven and a multitude of ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... keep an entire community of brave men in dread of some indefinable tragedy. Mobs and riots of much greater magnitude than the John Brown uprising had frequently occurred in the free States, and they were put down by the firm authority of law, without the dread hand of a spectre behind which might in a moment light the horizon with the conflagration of homes, and subject wives and daughters to a fate of nameless horror. Instead, therefore, of arresting the spread of Republican ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... ridicule and derision for their temerity and presumption in giving countenance to this wild projector and visionary madman. The company thereupon gave up the ghost, the boat went to pieces, and Fitch became bankrupt and brokenhearted. Often have I seen him stalking about like a troubled spectre, with downcast eye and lowering countenance, his coarse, soiled linen peeping through the elbows ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... on the bench in her rags and Slimak went into the alcove. He sat on the bed, determined to be on the watch. He did not know that this strange state of mind is called 'nerves'. Yet a kind of relief had come in with Zoska; she had driven away the spectre of Maciek and the child. But an iron ring was beginning to press on his head. This was sleep, heavy sleep, the companion of great anguish. He dreamt that he was split in two; one part of him was sitting ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... from the shrine Not aid but agony is mine. As a spider he creeps and he clutches his prey, And he hales me away. A spectre of darkness, of darkness. Alas and alas! well-a-day! O Earth, O my mother! O Zeus, thou king of the earth, and her child! Turn back, we pray thee, from us ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... passive mass obeyed the vague motions of space. It was an object to inspire indescribable dread. Horror, which disproportions everything, blurred its dimensions while retaining its shape. It was a condensation of darkness, which had a defined form. Night was above and within the spectre; it was a prey of ghastly exaggeration. Twilight and moonrise, stars setting behind the cliff, floating things in space, the clouds, winds from all quarters, had ended by penetrating into the composition of this visible ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... monotone and soliloquy of the stream; the unheeding rocks basking like monsters along the shore, half out of the water, half in; a solitary heron starting up here and there, as you rounded some point, and flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to view, or standing like a gaunt spectre on the umbrageous side of the mountain, his motionless form revealed against the dark green as you passed; the trees and willows and alders that hemmed you in on either side, and hid the fields and ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... of the dawn which is neither night nor day; they found him seated on a lime-sack filled with bones, clad in the mantle of egoism, and shivering in terrible cold. The anguish of death entered into the soul at the sight of that spectre, half mummy and half foetus; they approached it as does the traveller who is shown at Strasburg the daughter of an old count of Sarvenden, embalmed in her bride's dress: that childish skeleton makes one shudder, for her slender and livid hand wears ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... Division. We were all sincerely sorry to lose him from the 3rd Brigade. He was ever a good and true friend, and took a deep interest in his men. But the immediate effect of his departure, as far as I was concerned, was to remove out of my life the hideous spectre of No. 2 General Hospital, and to give me absolute liberty in wandering through the trenches. In fact, as I told him sometime afterwards, I was beginning a little poem, the first line of which was "I never knew what freedom ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... This is a word probably derived from "mostellum," the diminutive of "monstrum," a "spectre" or "prodigy." It was probably coined by Plautus to serve as the title of this Play, which is called by several of the ancient Commentators by the ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... sit up?" queried this visitor Lane took for the spectre of a dream. He advanced into the room. He grasped Lane with firm hand. And then Lane realized this was no nightmare. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... burn! And thro' the hyoids, huge and red, Past portals black and guidons bright To onyx lees and opal sands, The Cyclopean vaults of dwale, And cavern'd shapes that Typhon bled, Greet each wand'ring spectre's sight; Where pixies dance on wind-blown strands, Lurke gyte incubi in a hall. Here, then, reigns gyving, batter'd Doom! Where shadows vague and coffined light, Spit broths from splinter'd wracks and domes. Where ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... admits, revolutions in the moral as well as the physical world; and inspired reformers, who were born to carry them on; but these men are rare and portentous as the physical agencies to which they correspond, and whether "dervish (desert-spectre), swordsman, saint, lawgiver," or "lyrist," appear only when the time is ripe for them. Meanwhile, the great machine advances by means of the minute springs, the revolving wheel-work, of individual lives. Let each of these be content with ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... prodigious clatter on the pavement and rumbled up the street, disappearing in the twilight, while the ear still tracked its course. Scarcely was it gone when the people began to question whether the coach and attendants, the ancient lady, the spectre of old Caesar and the Old Maid herself were not all a strangely-combined delusion with some dark purport in its mystery. The whole town was astir, so that, instead of dispersing, the crowd continually increased, and stood gazing up at the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... madness of despair, He roar'd, he beat his breast, he tore his hair. Dry sorrow in his stupid eyes appears, For, wanting nourishment, he wanted tears: His eye-balls in their hollow sockets sink, Bereft of sleep, he loathes his meat and drink. He withers at his heart, and looks as wan As the pale spectre of a murder'd man: That pale turns yellow, and his face receives 530 The faded hue of sapless boxen leaves: In solitary groves he makes his moan, Walks early out, and ever is alone: Nor, mix'd in mirth, in youthful pleasures shares, But sighs when songs and instruments ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Varillo had not gone to Naples. He had been turned back by a spectre evoked from his own conscience—coward fear. He was on his way to the station when he suddenly discovered that he had lost the sheath of his dagger. A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead as ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... eyes seemed quenched in tears, passed often down the street, hardly able to drag himself along; it was Monsieur de Lamotte, who lodged, as we have said, in the rue de la Mortellerie, and who seemed like a spectre wandering round a tomb. The crowd made way and uncovered before him, everybody respected such terrible misfortune, and when he had passed, the groups formed up again, and continued discussing the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the Dutch clock looked wise, and swung its pendulum with studied exactness, like one who is determined to do his precise duty and shun responsibility; the cat assumed an attitude of intelligent neutrality. Finally the spectre trained his pale eyes upon his host, pulled in a long breath ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... as suddenly as the idea of the means had come to him, came now the spectre of the consequences to affright him. How would it fare with him on Robespierre's return? How angered would not Robespierre be upon discovering that his wishes had been set at naught, his very measures contravened—and this by fraud? And than Robespierre's ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... apparition, decked in trim finery, mowing and wringing her hands, shown under the hood of the phaeton in the blended light of the moon and the mountaineer's lantern, while his household stood half-clad in the doorway and peered out, mute and affrighted, as at a spectre. ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... International had become the terror of Europe. Its strength and influence were vastly overestimated by the reactionary powers. Its hand was seen in every act of the discontented masses. It became the "Red Spectre," and all the powers of Europe were now seeking to destroy it. Looming thus large to the outside world, those within the International knew how baseless were the fears of its opponents. They realized that internecine war was eating its heart ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... again, and Archer felt the spectre of Count Olenski's letter grimacing hideously between them. The letter filled only half a page, and was just what he had described it to be in speaking of it to Mr. Letterblair: the vague charge of an angry ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... this fantasia, and from time to time, with a shrill cry of exultation, a half-naked form, all gleaming eyes and teeth and polished bronze-hued limbs, rushed out of the blackness beyond the fire, leaped through the tongues of flame and vanished like a spectre into the embrace of ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... mists on the spectre meadows Were the eyes that on my eyes she laid, And her hair's red splendor through the shadows Like to ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... Kennedy. But Joe clung to him only the more fiercely, and they had been contending thus without the doctor seeing them for many seconds, when, suddenly the rifle went off. At the sound of its discharge, the doctor rose up erect, like a spectre, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... imagined that he was your spectre, when you spoke of Harley Street. Does he send ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... all too swiftly three full years—years crowded with work and play and many rare experiences—and less darkly shadowed by the spectre that had stalked beside them ever since their marriage. For this short space he knew what it was to live like a man, not like a "pallid weevil in a biscuit," and she, though her vigilance was never relaxed for a moment, breathed somewhat more freely. The ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... Ha Balder! thou hast slain him! Ah, forgive me! My dream confuses me—thou see'st I tremble. I heard the fall of gods—the gods lamenting; And bloody by the Hall there stood a spectre: Big was the ruddy wound whereto it pointed. Like one deep musing it conceal'd its visage; But big the tears were through its fingers streaming: Ah, the pale son of night ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... as near to them as possible. At our first entry towards the Queen's lodge we encountered Dr. Fisher and his lady: the sight of me there, in a dress announcing indisputably whither I was hieing, was such an Astonishment, that they looked at me rather as a recollected spectre than a renewed acquaintance. When we came to the iron rails poor Miss Planta, in much fidget, begged to take the books from M. d'Arblay, terrified, I imagine, lest French feet should contaminate the gravel within!—while he, innocent of her fears, was insisting ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... from death to life. Its contrasts were overwhelming to his starved senses: from the dirt and dearth and grimy despair of his burial hutch in the snow to this softly lighted, close-curtained room, warm and sweet with flowers; from the gaunt, unshaven spectre of the packer and his ghostly revelations, to Moya, meekly beautiful, her bright eyes lowered as she trailed her soft skirts across the carpet; Moya seated opposite, silent, conscious of him in every look and movement. ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... you perceive a gaunt, yellow spectre of a man, reduced to his last chemise, and that a sad spectacle of ancient purity, starting from Lincoln's-Inn, and making all haste for Waterloo-bridge, the inference is rather natural, that he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... view of the phantom, I mustered up all my resolution, jumped out of bed, and boldly went up to the figure, grasped it round and round, and found it incorporeal. I then looked at it again, and felt it again; when, reader, judge of my astonishment—this ghostly spectre proved to be nothing more than a large new flannel dressing-gown which had been sent home to me in the course of the day, and which had been hung on some pegs against the wainscot at the foot of my bed. One arm accidentally crossed two or three ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... his mind. The sulphurous steam of Albula suggests to him several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna without recollecting the Spectre Huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini without one thought of Francesca. At Paris, he had eagerly sought an introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that at Florence he was in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... jury were Jacobites. The prisoners' counsel, as one of them told Sir Walter Scott, knew that their clients were guilty. A witness had seen them in the act. But the advocate (Lockhart, a Jacobite) made such fun out of the ghost that an Edinburgh jury, disbelieving in the spectre, and not loving the House of Hanover, very logically disregarded also the crushing evidence for a crime which was actually described ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... pleasure in every increase of Knowledge, every problem solved, every witty thought, whether of his own or another's; and so his mind will have no further aim than to be constantly active. This will be an inexhaustible spring of delight; and boredom, that spectre which haunts the ordinary man, can never ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... provocation of her features Chang'd all to sickly twilight, blank dismay— And when thought comes, to see the poor wretch quiver, Her eyes' fire turn'd to water—those blue eyes, Where once sweet fancies woven danc'd in fight— To see the Present, Future, Past, appal her?— The Spectre of her grown up life arise Ever between her childhood's innocent dawn, And the lost thing, herself—to see her choke Upon her scanty food?—see grim Despair Clutch her polluted bosom?—see her teeth, Pearls that have outliv'd their neglected home, ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... his hair bristled and his heart came up like a plug in his throat to hinder his breathing, for he saw a headless horseman coming over the ridge behind him, blackly defined against the starry sky. Setting spurs to his nag with a hope of being first to reach Sleepy Hollow bridge, which the spectre never passed, the unhappy man made the best possible time in that direction, for his follower was surely overtaking him. Another minute and the bridge would be reached; but, to Ichabod's horror, the Hessian dashed alongside and, rising in his stirrups, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... night when there was an alarm of fire. I went close up to you to take Master Archibald from your arms; and, as sure as I am now standing here, I believe that for the moment my senses left me. I thought I saw a spectre—the spectre of my dead lady. I forgot the present; I forgot that all were standing round me; that you, Madame Vine, were alive before me. Your face was not disguised then; the moonlight shone full upon it, and I knew it, after the first few moments of terror, to be, in dreadful truth, the ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... bound with a white cloth and his eyes were fixed with a glassy stare upon Major B., who felt his blood run cold at the singular apparition. At last the Major mustered up courage to ask the stranger what he wanted. The spectre replied "I am a dead man, and was buried in the graveyard yonder" (pointing as he spoke to a dilapidated enclosure a few yards distant). "The dogs," he continued, "have found their way into my shallow grave, and are gnawing ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... now leading a somewhat more agreeable life, as of late I have been associating more with other people. You could scarcely believe what a sad and dreary life mine has been for the last two years; my defective hearing everywhere pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear a misanthrope; and yet no one is in reality less so! This change has been wrought by a lovely fascinating girl [undoubtedly Giulietta], who loves me and whom I love. I have once more had some blissful ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... the stalwart figure's heart, and he bows his head, and thinks—it is but justice! In the same instant, a cry of intensest pain and horror escapes him: the deadly arrow, additionally poisoned by the blood it has just shed, has passed quite through the spectre of his former pupil, and is buried up to the feather in Professor Valeyon's own vitals! This shock effectually wakened the old gentleman—for, after all, he had only been having an uneasy nap in his straight-backed chair!—and he started to his feet, and fumbled nervously for the ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... sure that this effort towards perfection, though it is part of existence, is strong enough to deliver man in this world from the web of evil in which also he is involved, nor even that he makes any approach on the whole towards the loosening of the toils. The spectre of world-destruction, as Whitman says of Carlyle, was always before them. And I wish to ask later on if we may not surmise definite reasons in their own history for this recurring note of discouragement. But let us first look at the positive side, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... hot proud colour flared in her cheeks as she drew quietly aside and stood with averted head to let her pass." In all my researches in modern fiction I cannot recall a more dramatic and satisfying situation. It is, I believe, the first instance on record of a spectre being snubbed. SHAKSPEARE never thought of anything like that. As regards the other aspects of Athalie, the book, I cannot see what else a reviewer can say but that it is written by Mr. CHAMBERS. The world is divided into those who read ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... are not voluntarily seeking the rational ideal of peace, but are being driven by urgent necessity into the course of reason. Statesmanship would have disarmed the world before 1914. It was only after 1918 that the spectre of Universal Bankruptcy drove the poor trembling immortals who pass for statesmen to embrace each other as heroes in search of an ideal. Humanity has achieved nothing noble or glorious in the last thirty years; it ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... no! my presence will not be a source of fresh calamity to it. The Lord, in His unsearchable wisdom, has brought me hither across France, making me avoid on my route all but the humblest villages, so that no increase of the funeral knell has, marked my journey. And then, moreover, the spectre has left me—that spectre, livid and green, with its deep bloodshot eyes. When I touched the soil of France, its moist and icy hand abandoned mine—it disappeared. And yet I feel the atmosphere of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... thus became a means for preserving the records of history, and it has also been a treasure house of stories, furnishing material for much of the poetry of Europe. One of these legends gave Scott the story of the combat between Marmion and the Spectre Knight. ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Vere, There stands a spectre in your hall: The guilt of blood is at your door: You changed a wholesome heart to gall. You held your course without remorse, To make him trust his modest worth, And, last, you fixed a vacant stare, And slew him ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... becoming, in fact, almost too much for Lady Agatha. Most unpleasant things were happening at home, and occasionally Castle Clare loomed up grayly in the distance like a spectre. Certain tradespeople who ought, in Lady Claraway's opinion, to have kept quiet and waited in patience until things became better, were becoming hideously persistent. In view of the fact that Alix's next season must be provided ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... altogether at my ease when I see anywhere in my path that meagre, squalid, famine-faced spectre, Poverty; attended as he always is, by iron-fisted oppression, and leering contempt; but I have sturdily withstood his buffetings many a hard-laboured day already, and still my motto is—I DARE! My worst enemy is moi-meme. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... a wraith sits by my side, A spectre grim and dark; Are you gazing here open-eyed Out to ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... The Germans and Austrians were exultant, for another couple of weeks' strike would have given them the victory. Already the collapse of our defence was become a definite eventuality. The tact and statesmanship of Mr. Lloyd George exorcised the redoubtable spectre, but the spirit which that piece of treason revealed filled the most sanguine with dread and set those of little faith asking themselves whether this lamentable phenomenon was not one of certain ill-boding symptoms which seemed to reveal the smoothly ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the middle being about five feet high; and on each of them were piled numerous withered branches and limbs of trees, forming no unsuitable emblems of mortality. There were no trees on this hill, save one quite dead, which seemed to point with its hoary arms, like a spectre, to the tombs. A melancholy waste, where a level country and boundless woods extended beyond the reach of vision, was in perfect harmony with the dreary foreground ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... Unionist general, Guzman Bento. It was the same Guzman Bento who, becoming later Perpetual President, famed for his ruthless and cruel tyranny, readied his apotheosis in the popular legend of a sanguinary land-haunting spectre whose body had been carried off by the devil in person from the brick mausoleum in the nave of the Church of Assumption in Sta. Marta. Thus, at least, the priests explained its disappearance to the barefooted multitude that streamed in, awestruck, to gaze ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... but saw this terrible danger of disrupting the nation over Quebec. The war only had staved off the Irish question, a conference on which was in session when war was declared. Laurier dreaded the spectre of a second Ireland in Quebec. He knew all the forces and how they would operate. By his own methods, mistaken or otherwise, he had spent most of his life to achieve unity. He dreaded to see that unity imperilled. I think he would have been glad to see Quebec ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... to the ground, with a stony fixedness in their eyes: every other object grew dim before me. The living faces and full-grown forms which until now had mingled with and played their part among my younger phantoms, altogether disappeared. I had no longer any eyes, any soul, but for this my new spectre-world. Life, and the things of life, had lost their interest; and I knew of nothing, conceived of nothing, but those still, inanimate forms from which the informing soul had ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... go in. He declared that the door was closed. She pushed it, and slipped into the immense nave, where the inanimate trees of the columns ascended in darkness. In the rear, candles were moving in front of spectre-like priests, under the last reverberations of the organs. She trembled in the ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... school, Is not a theme for mocking merriment. As MORLEY says, he is the fool Who never ventures bold experiment. Against the ills our State that shake, The spectre Vice, Want the pale ogress, Punch hopes the Magic Horse may make ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various
... vision lasted as long as the sun stayed yet above the Alps; and the images with their aureoles shrank and dilated with the undulations of the mist. I could not but think of that old formula for an anthropomorphic Deity—'the Brocken-spectre of the human spirit projected on the mists of the Non-ego.' Even like those cloud-phantoms are the gods made in the image of man, who have been worshipped through successive ages of the world, gods dowered with like passions to those of the races who have crouched before them, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... not fall," continued the old gentleman, and Fritz Nettenmair's bright, new heaven sank into nothingness. The old spectre held him again in its grasp. He loved again the woman from whom he had just wanted to flee. The old gentleman had awaited his son's assent. "You will go," he said, when the son remained silent. "You will go. Tomorrow before day-break you will be on your way ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... despair. But there was a ship—safe, convenient, roomy: a ship with beds, bedding, knives, forks, comfortable cabins, glass and china, and a complete cook's galley, pervaded, ruled and possessed by the pitiless spectre of starvation. The lamp oil had been drunk, the wicks cut up for food, the candles eaten. At night she floated dark in all her recesses, and full of fears. One day Falk came upon a man gnawing a splinter of pine wood. Suddenly he ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... wonderful winter to the Bean family. Never before had Mrs. Bean known what it was to be free from the oppressing spectre of want. No longer was she forced to worry about household supplies; neither was it necessary for Steve to go to the store each week with his basket of eggs and a few rolls of butter. He carried, instead, an order from ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... her, like a spectre from the grave he came, passed, and vanished, leaving her frozen with horror, as if she had beheld a phantom ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... the boys back from their country haunts, and Celeste and Mimi from Ostende. How gay it will be—this Quartier Latin then! How gay it always is in winter—and then the rainy season. Ah! but one can not have everything. Thus it was that Lachaume and I sat talking, when suddenly a spectre passed—a spectre of a man, his face silent, white, and pinched—drawn like ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... letter—verbosa et grandis epistola—which undid Sejanus and shook Rome. Riding to Ana-Capri and the Salto di Tiberio, exploring the remains of his favourite twelve villas, and gliding over the smooth waters paved with the white marbles of his baths, we are for ever attended by the same forbidding spectre. Here, perchance, were the sedes arcanarum libidinum whereof Suetonius speaks; the Spintrian medals, found in these recesses, still bear witness that the biographer trusted no mere fables for the picture he has drawn. Here, too, below ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... owns not"—he hears, and starts, And grasps the handle of his weapon tried; Then, while the rustling tent-cloth slowly parts, A figure enters and stands by his side: There was an air of majesty and pride In the bold bearing of that spectre pale— The crimson on its robe was still undried, And dagger wounds, that tell a bloody tale Beyond the power of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... lifting her long veil, turned round on the lisping dandy, who staggered back, when the dowager O'Grady appeared before him, drawn up to her full height, and anything but an agreeable expression in her eye. She stalked up towards him, something in the style of a spectre in a romance, which she was not very unlike; and as she advanced, he retreated, until he got the table between him ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... the camp the blackness of the night had given way to the jewel-studded velvet of a clearing sky. The spectre lights of the north were already dancing their sombre measure. There was no moon. These things all ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... encouraged it, my wife's and boy's too. We have cast off the absurd restraints imposed by the law of probability. In the old days, when I used to think, say, of motors, I was invariably badgered by the spectre of improbability. I used to think of a four-hundred-pound car, or perhaps, in a daring moment, my thoughts would creep timidly, like mice out into a still kitchen, on to the six-hundred- pound plane, only to scurry back to the lower plane almost instantly. Now I've thrown all that overboard. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... turning round, saw a ghost, as he believed, for the flour that still remained in the sack had completely whitened his fellow-traveller and given him a most unearthly appearance. The frightened miller was "putrified," as Mrs. Malaprop would say, at the sight, and a push from the white spectre brought the unfortunate man to the ground, when away rode the gallant quartermaster with his sacks of flour, which, at length bursting, made a ludicrous spectacle of man ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... proper food, and effective medicine, until, with waking, they craved an easier boon, and died. But the hospital fever, the calenturas, the gangrene, were not to be all. Out of the diseased air, mid the fumes of pious tapers, the spectre of epidemic was taking hideous shape over the many, many upturned faces. The spectre was the tifo, a plague more dreaded in high altitudes than black ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... is addressing a promising spectre, an old gentleman of sweet aspect—"have I passed the Hurkaru Club?" The spectre helps an imperfect hearing with an ear-covering outspread hand, and Sally repeats ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... spectre that now haunts American politics, and may make it just as vital and necessary to appeal to the northern states to unite again against this evil, not so open and arrogant as slavery, but more dangerous ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... I must wed him, In spite of yea or nay, Though uglier than the Scaramouch, The spectre in the play; But I will sooner die a maid Than wear a gilded chain, For all the ancient noblemen And gentlemen ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... glancing over his shoulder with hollow eyes, "was just a year ago. Six or seven months passed, and I had recovered from the surprise and shock, when one morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at that door, looked towards the red light, and saw the spectre again." He stopped, with a ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... corridors from which the chambers open are suitable to ghosts fond of walking exercise; the superb dining-room is round, and the floor is so old that it would shake under the foot of the lightest spectre. The repertoire of family traditions is almost inexhaustible, and doubtless one might have the use of them for a little additional money. One of the latest is of the seventeenth century, when the daughter of the house was "the beautiful Nicolaide de Blonay, before ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... said, a panic-terror pervaded the halls, and like an evil-announcing night-spectre passed over the heads of the stiffened, lifeless crowd the dismal rumor—"The regent and the princess are at variance; the regent is speaking to her with ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... thy honor'd bier! What sighs re-echo'd to thy parting breath, While thou wast struggling in the pangs of death! Could tears retard the tyrant in his course; Could sighs avert his dart's relentless force; Could youth and virtue claim a short delay, Or beauty charm the spectre from his prey; Thou still hadst lived to bless my aching sight, Thy comrade's honor and thy friend's delight. If yet thy gentle spirit hover nigh The spot where now thy mouldering ashes lie, Here wilt thou read, recorded on my heart, A grief too deep to trust ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Debreczin, and which a young Prussian Baron, a great traveller, whom he met at Constantinople in '44, told him he always carried in his valise. And, in conclusion, he will say, in order to show the opinion which he entertains of the power of Scott as a writer, that he did for the spectre of the wretched Pretender what all the kings of Europe could not do for his body—placed it on the throne of these realms; and for Popery, what Popes and Cardinals strove in vain to do for three centuries—brought back its ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... December weather has come and is causing widespread distress among the mining population of Pennsylvania. Forty per cent of the operatives of the Paradise Coal Company have been laid off, as Purdy declared they would be. This means that starvation is the grim spectre ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... Life-in-Death won, and the Mariner was hers. If Death had won, his life would soon have ended; as it was, existence for him was to mean—for a time at least—life in the midst of the dead. No sooner had the spectre bark shot by than his comrades, four times fifty living men, dropped lifeless one by one. For seven days and seven nights he suffered agonies from the curse in their stony eyes; but he could not die, and he could ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... upright grandeur. It makes him so much higher in his neighbouring collier's eyes. He sees himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist, several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied. He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the human opinion. You do the same. If you are of high importance to humanity you are of high importance to yourself. That is why you work so hard at the mines. If you can produce coal to cook five thousand ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... deans deceased, to sleep beneath the stone." As tearful thus, and half convulsed with spite, He lengthen'd out with plaints the livelong night, At that still hour of night, when dreams are oft'nest true, A well-known spectre rose before his view, As in some lake, when hush'd in every breeze, The bending ape his form reflected sees,[46] Such and so like the Doctor's angel shone, And by his gait the guardian sprite was known, Benignly bending o'er his aching head— ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... line for the tilt where Bob had left his silver fox. The moon was full, and the frost that clung to the trees and bushes sparkled like flakes of silver. The aurora faintly searched the northern sky. A rabbit, white and spectre-like, scurried across the half-breed's path, but he did not notice it. Hour after hour his never tiring feet swung the wide snow-shoes in and out with a rhythmic chug-chug ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... I shall return To dare the weeds of death, And plunge through the coned pink bloom, And cry on that spectre set In its silent ring of gloom, And stay my youth to learn The thing that my old ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... his gold-colored robe vanish into the gold of the sun through the copper color of the columns. And I was quite alone in the "thinking-place" of Rameses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark sapphire blue, without even the spectre of a cloud, or any airy, vaporous veil; the heat already intense in the full sunshine, but delicious if one slid into a shadow. I slid into a shadow, and sat down on a warm block of stone. And the silence flowed upon me—the ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... indicative of his descent from a tailor, is borrowed from a German romance, by the celebrated Tieck, called Das Peter Manchem, i. e. The Dwarf Peter. The being who gives name to the tale, is the Burg-geist, or castle spectre, of a German family, whom he aids with his counsel, as he defends their castle by his supernatural power. But the Dwarf Peter is so unfortunate an adviser, that all his counsels, though producing success in the immediate ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... and tell her how slight the accident was; and while he was gone she abandoned herself to an impassioned dramatization of her own death from blood-poisoning, and her husband's early marriage with the actress, who then appeared in all his plays, though they were not happy together. Her own spectre was always rising between them, and she got some fearful joy out of that. She counted his absence by her heart-beats, but he came back so soon that she was ashamed, and was afraid that he had behaved so as to give the woman a notion that he was not ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... opposite arms, he hugged himself in evident comfort. The fire had by this time so far dwindled away as to be only a handful of smouldering embers, which cast but an exceedingly feeble and uncertain light, sufficient only to reveal the general outline of the pigmy spectre. The old gentleman, with strained eyes, attentively observed his motions, till from very weariness, caused by looking through a light so dim, he began to doubt whether he saw truly: he reasoned with himself, but with no satisfactory result; till at last, desirous of 'making assurance doubly sure,' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... leave Mount Music on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Larry was to be married to Tishy Mangan. What room was there for phantom fears when these things were certainties? What spectre from the other world has power to break ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the audience, shocked, as the officer had been seen but the night previously among them in lusty life, and death is a spectre most terrible in a saloon of ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... arisen. I woke in the middle of the night, and there was a spectre sitting by my bedside to frighten me; he succeeded at first, but I managed finally to get rid of him, and to find some peace. Many of your sentences came to me, and I was able to get behind the words, and I saw plainly ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... were very anxious to hear all the details of Pierre's ghostly encounter, and questioned him very closely. The former vowed he would have challenged the spectre; he did not fear Wilfred living, nor would he fear ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... it?" ejaculated Sir Edmund, gazing with something very like fear, as the spectre ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... guardian-angel over you, As your Dame Fortune, too, and endless things Of such-like pretty tenour—yes, you have! Then how can you so gird against me now? You had not pricked upon it much of late, And so I hoped and hoped the ugly spectre Had ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... stout, stumpy fellow, about four feet ten, with a head somewhat too large for his body, and extremely long arms. Ever since the plague had broken out in Drury-lane, it haunted him like a spectre, and scattered the few faculties he possessed. In vain he tried to combat his alarm—in vain his mother endeavoured to laugh him out of it. Nothing would do. He read the bills of mortality daily; ascertained the particulars of every case; dilated upon the agonies ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Extending his long lean hands from his wide sleeves, the old man began unrolling the packets. There was a gleam of gold. Great as Tchartkoff's terror was, he could not help staring covetously at the coin, and looked on with profound attention as it streamed rapidly through the spectre's bony hands, glittering and clinking with a dull thin metallic sound, and was then rolled up anew. Suddenly he remarked one packet which had rolled a little farther than the rest, and stopped at the leg ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... to south and from south to north. In public he still played the part of chorus to the wild speeches of his friends: but he would have taken in petto the first dictator who came along and swept away the red spectre. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... she was persuaded that the real national complexion was black, and that the innumerable white Americans she saw at our house were merely a multitude of exceptions. But with all her ignorance, she had no superstitions of a gloomy kind: the only ghost she seemed ever to have heard of was the spectre of an American ship captain which a friend of Piero's had seen at the Lido. She was perfectly kind and obedient, and was deeply attached in an inarticulate way to the baby, which was indeed the pet of the whole palace. This young lady ruled ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... right hand the old man seized his goddaughter and obliged her to walk at the pace of death and follow Minoret to his own house. Ursula crossed the town, entered the post house and went into Zelie's old room, where the spectre showed her Minoret unfolding the letters, reading them ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... bid him the last farewell, and to follow him with my eyes as far as possible. I know not what effect the sight of me may have produced, but when I now reflect upon it myself; I imagine that the people must have believed it was a spectre welcoming a corpse to ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... splendor—of such power as wealth gives—of equipages and luxury, which swept away, like ocean-tides, the thoughts which her angel-guardian had written on her conscience. Hesitating no longer, a smile of triumph lit her face, and crowning the spectre with roses, and wrapping a drapery of pale illusions around it, she offered herself to a martyrdom of sin, ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... long way from being the haughty spectre Alice had conjured up, and like many excellent mothers was simply interested to see that her only and impetuous son did not make a mesalliance. While she had wisely made no comment regarding her son's apparent disappointment, what Blanch had said, together with that fact, had won for Alice a respect ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... Duke of Maddaloni haunted him like a spectre. He ordered his beautiful villa at Posilipo to be destroyed, and made his people ransack once more his pillaged palace at Santa Maria della Stella. The barber of the Duke and a Moorish slave bought their lives, the first by giving ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... that hollows the rocks where ye dwell A shadowy land has appeared, as they tell; Men thought it a region of sunshine and rest, And they called it Hy-Brasail, the isle of the blest. From year unto year on the ocean's blue rim, The beautiful spectre showed lovely and dim; The golden clouds curtained the deep where it lay, And it looked like ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... novel; it always has and always must have the incurable illogicalities of life about it, the fathoms of slack and the miles of tedium. Still, that's where the fun comes in; and when you have at last managed to shut up the castle spectre (dulness), the very outside of his door looks beautiful by contrast. There are pages in these books that may seem nothing to the reader; but you remember what they were, you know what they might have been, and they seem to you witty beyond comparison. In my Grandfather I've had (for instance) to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cash,—to pay the voyager's freight? or passage? No,—LODGINGS. They all lodged, at this time, at No. 48, College-Street. Never did I lend money with such unmingled pleasure, for now I ceased to be haunted day and night with the spectre of the ship! the ship! which was to effect such incalculable mischief! The form of the request was ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... 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 his heart or rouse ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... and death, under a press of canvas. He saw her outsail the vessel to which he belonged, but, when a few shots a-head she gave a sudden lurch, and disappeared from the surface instantaneously as a vanishing spectre, and neither sloop nor crew were ever ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... side with art and progress creeps the haggard spectre, Want— Creeps the frightful phantom, Hunger, with its bloodless body gaunt. Wider, wider spreads the chasm 'twixt the wealthy and the poor, Social discontent declaring that such wrongs ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... innocence; her girlhood in its purity; her womanhood, her motherhood in its degradation! All the holier part of what was once herself; all that was true and noble, womanly and pure, from the deep waters of oblivion to which that damning appetite has consigned them, rise to haunt her now, pale, wan, and spectre-like. Oh! to sit down, side by side with her former self; to see herself as she used to be before the tempter crept into the Eden of her heart; to look despairingly up to the height whence she had fallen, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I had not, during this visit at Cedarville, stood face to face with her before. Oh! what a wreck she presented, with her pale, shrunken countenance, hollow, lustreless eyes, and bent, feeble body. I almost shuddered as I looked at her. What a haunting and sternly rebuking spectre she must have moved, daily, before the eyes of ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... unyielding soil. A single figure is joyous and alert in that scene of sweat and toil. It is a fantastic personage, a skeleton armed with a whip, who runs in the furrow beside the terrified horses and belabors them, thus serving the old husbandman as ploughboy. This spectre, which Holbein has introduced allegorically in the succession of philosophical and religious subjects, at once lugubrious and burlesque, entitled the Dance of ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... time. My banishment expires to-morrow; but I shall never recross the sea. This is my country. Since I set my foot upon its shore I have never had a moment to yawn. In this land of real and substantial life, the spectre that haunted my joyless days dares not be seen—the "hour too many" ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... telephone, she set down the lantern and pressed the spring that opened the panel door. Another moment and she would be embarked on her great adventure in the finality of action. That little ear-piece became a spectre of conscience. She drew back convulsively and her hands flew to her face; she was a rocking shadow in the thin, ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... mysteries of the future from our vision. Faith and the inner consciousness are the basis of our belief that there is a future. One cannot be at the Front very long before he is compelled to examine his thoughts in regard to immortality. Death is brought home very closely. The grim spectre points his finger at a man—perhaps in the first flush of manhood—who has just commenced to appreciate the joy of living. Death challenges, and with no shadow of faltering, but perhaps with a smile, the challenge is accepted, ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... it?—why, my Gabriel? Was she a thief? Was she really a man in disguise? Was she some malicious old hag who had seen that I was afraid of her? Was she a spectre conjured up by my very cowardice? Was she a mocking ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... solemnities at the nuptial ceremony, which took place in the town of Jedburgh, were very great and remarkable, and particularly when, amidst the display of a pageant which was exhibited on the occasion, a ghastly spectre made its appearance in the form of a skeleton, as the King of Terrors is said to be represented.—Your worship is free to laugh at this, if you think it a proper subject for mirth; but men are alive who viewed it with their own eyes, and the event showed ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... only the Roman blood in her, the blood of victorious Augustus which would not allow her to yield to the spectre ... not just yet ... not until the last battle had been fought—the last ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... care, because I wouldn't visit Bordeaux a second time for any earthly consideration. I've seen a good many poisonous places in my time, but for inducing the concentrated essence of depression, that moth-eaten spectre of bustling commerce has them, as the immortal B-B-B-Wordsworth says, beat ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... the detective; and then, if all proved vain, I could but perish! For I would have walked cheerfully over the burning ploughshares of old, lived again through the hideous nightmare of the burning ship and raft, nay, clasped hands with the spectre of La Vigne himself, had it offered to lead me to purgatory, rather than have married the knave, the ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... it had been the wreck of weeks instead of minutes, and the level rays of the setting sun flashed and blazed into its windows as though fire had been added to the ruin. But even this presently faded, leaving the abandoned coach a rigid, lifeless spectre on the ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... half-playful lunge with his bayonet at a gaunt, yellow-faced spectre of a man who staggered on to the boat with a child in his arms wrapped in a tattered blue quilt. A gust of the chilly wind picked his shapeless, loose-fitting hat off as he leaped to avoid the bayonet-point, and his head ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... other Indians, a demon appeared unto a Prince of the Eastern Indians in a shape that had some resemblance of Mr. Eliot or of an English minister, pretending to be the Englishman's God. The spectre commanded him 'to forbear the drinking of rum and to observe the Sabbath- day, and to deal justly with his neighbours;' all which things had been inculcated in Mr. Eliot's ministry, promising therewithal unto him that, if ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... stood apart from the rest, with his tall, straight form standing out like a spectre against the dim sky, and the illusion was fully sustained by the light-gray military cloak which he folded around him. His face was pale, but wore a determined expression, and at times he drew nearer the centre ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... idea of limit was lost, so that there seemed no boundary save the darkness of space. Some tall piece of furniture, with its white cover, would reveal itself in the dim light; an indistinct form, raising itself like a spectre to listen to the sounds which had evoked it. The light, concentrated round the piano and falling on the floor, glided on like a spreading wave until it mingled with the broken flashes from the fire, from which orange colored plumes rose and fell, like fitful gnomes, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... broussaille, L'arbre a fait un long bruit de taillis qui tressaille, Comme si quelque bete en passant l'eut trouble, Et l'ombre du rocher tenebreux a semble Plus noire, et l'on dirait qu'un morceau de cette ombre A pris forme et s'en est alle dans le bois sombre, Et maintenant on voit comme un spectre marchant La-bas dans la clarte sinistre ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... shoulders or in their hands protruded their weapons—pitchforks, scythes, flails, knives, clubs, and rusty guns. All must have been several thousand, collected from every hamlet in his territory. They seemed like a legion of some spectre army of Hunger and Ignorance. In the commander ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... fiercely for bare life, but he was powerless to loosen that awful, merciless pressure. The barbaric face that glared into his own wore a devilish grin, inexpressibly malignant. It danced before his starting eyes like some hideous spectre seen in delirium, intermittent, terrible, with blinding flashes of light breaking between. He felt as if his head were bursting. The agony of suffocation possessed him to the exclusion of all else. There came a sudden glaze in his brain that was like the shattering of every faculty, and then, in ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... blow revived the sick man's energies. He got up, found his family collected in the drawing-room, all in black, and suddenly silent as he came in. In a fortnight, Hulot, as lean as a spectre, looked to his family the mere ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... bed dost beckoning glide, 8 Spectre of Death, to the damp charnel hie! Thy dim pale hand, thy festering visage hide; Thou com'st to say, I ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... invalided from his ship the Topaze, and on his way home. He was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone has painted," Dickens then wrote to me, "the Ocean ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... down under a glass, all its own history and legends preserved forever as in a crystal casket; the story of saintly King David who built it, and of the French friars who left their own Abbey at Beauvais to people it; better still, of the wedding with the spectre guest—the marriage of little French Jolette to Alexander, the last of the Celtic kings. Perhaps, too, the window-eyes peering into the crystal could see the figure of Sir Walter Scott, seeking and finding inspiration in the ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... can do?" demanded Glaudot, whose dreams of galactic conquest were fading before the spectre of ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... thoughts; it was the atmosphere of our feelings; a something as all-pervading and impalpable as the air we drew into our lungs. And suddenly this danger, this breath of our life, had taken this material form. It was material and expected, and yet it had the effect of an evil spectre, inasmuch as one did not know where and how it was vulnerable, what precisely it would do, how one ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... long labor at the window had cramped my limbs to such a degree it pained me to move. I clambered down and took a few turns about the room as if I had naught to do but exercise. But at every turn the hideous face and whitened eyes of Broussard dogged my footsteps as a spectre. Look where I would, it was only that I saw. Hour after hour crawled by. Jerome would wait ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... son!" cried the old woman, springing up with her hands outstretched, as if to repel a spectre. "Oh! hide that streaming blood! Look not so angry on me! Blood shall have blood, thou say'st; so be it. Vengeance is the Lord's! and He shall avenge ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... morning of the next day, the Doctor, a mere spectre of himself, was brought back in the custody of Casimir. They found Anastasie and the boy sitting together by the fire; and Desprez, who had exchanged his toilette for a ready-made rig-out of poor materials, waved his hand as he entered, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... uniform, haggard but eager, was standing like a gaunt spectre in the sunlight that flooded the terrace. The vagabond, with the eyes of all upon him, raised and lowered his arms thrice, and the ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... classes speak of a woman's plainness with brutality, with a manner almost of personal offence. They often shrink from personal ugliness as Englishmen seldom do, like children shrinking from something abnormal—a frightening dwarf, a spectre. ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... coldly and calmly, indeed he was surprised that he could face it like that, but his one thought was for peace, to put this spectre that had haunted him these ten days behind him and watch the world again with a straight gaze—he must ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... hideous images of Death. Its name was Contagion—it rushed forward with an indescribable movement. Dismay and confusion overwhelmed all that quarter of the crowded scene, that was particularly threatened by its first advance. The affrighted multitude rolled back like a tumultuous sea. The horrid spectre stopt; and left a wide interval between itself and the retiring host. A ray of heavenly light illumined the vacant space. I fixed my eye on the brilliant spot, and soon beheld the meek and gentle form of HOWARD advancing, without fear or arrogance, towards ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... Bridge, our Bridge of Sighs. How many of these my brethren have sought refuge in the cold grey arms of the river from something worse than death? What drove them to this dreadful resting-place? What spectre hurried them to the leap? These things, too, are ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... sexton thought: "He can't mean that in earnest," so gave forth no sound, and stood as though he were made of stone. Then the youth shouted out to him the third time, and as that too had no effect, he made a dash at the spectre and knocked it down the stairs, so that it fell about ten steps and remained lying in a corner. Thereupon he tolled the bell, went home to bed without saying a word, and fell asleep. The sexton's wife waited a long time for her ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... of minutes. I only need name them—famine and plague. At this moment, when you have thought and argued out all these political things, the Government of India still remains a grim business. If there are no rains this month, the spectre of famine seems to be approaching, and nobody can blame us for that. Nobody expects the Viceroy and the Secretary of State to play the part of Elijah on Mount Carmel, who prayed and saw a little cloud like a man's hand, until the heavens became ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... coming as it were from that merry and populous chamber of life and health, once again I met the Spectre I derided, a red-headed, red-visaged Thing that chose me out to stop and grin at. Somehow I was not minded to ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... chosen as a garden of domestic sedition, and of foreign conspiracy against powers with which we were at peace. To keep us busy with troubles of our own, German propaganda and German money in Mexico raised on our southern border a threatening spectre of war. We were to have been rushed into conflict with Mexico and kept employed there while being terrorized by wholesale arson and sabotage at home, so that by no chance could any friendly European power look to us for help. The scheme came near to succeeding, ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... which we left him tormenting himself, Partridge came stumbling into the room with his face paler than ashes, his eyes fixed in his head, his hair standing an end, and every limb trembling. In short, he looked as he would have done had he seen a spectre, or had he, indeed, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... breathing grew irritating to him; it drew so marked a contrast 'twixt Crispin's frame of mind and his own. Whilst Crispin had related his story, the interest it awakened had served to banish the spectre of fear which the thought of the morrow conjured up. Now that Crispin was silent and asleep, that spectre returned, and the lad grew numb and sick with ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... excited by what he had been doing, for it was inevitable that there should be a certain emotion in calling up the spectre of dishonor before a family a thousand years old. But he went back to the inn and contrived to wait there, deliberately, for the next two hours. He thought it more than probable that Urbain de ...
— The American • Henry James
... voice was that of the porter of the monastery, Father Seraphim, a strapping Vetlugan) "a spectre ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... of the pine, Making their summer lives one ceaseless song, Were the sole echoes, save my steed's and mine, And Vesper bell's that rose the boughs along; The spectre huntsman of Onesti's line, His hell-dogs, and their chase, and the fair throng Which learned from this example not to fly From a true lover,—shadowed my ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... might have regarded as their own supporters were estranged from them or had actually turned {112} against them. The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel probably thought that their wisest course would be to let Lord Grey and Brougham and their friends try what they could do with the monstrous spectre of reform which they had conjured up, and wait till the country had recovered its senses before again undertaking to act as ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... as soon after as I conveniently could. The one spectre superseded the other, until all vanished. They never trouble me now, though sometimes, in my waking moments, I have met them on the roadside, glaring at me from bush or tree, until I shouted at them fiercely, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... object of pity or insult, according to the disposition of the circumjacent powers, than to be the scourge and terror of them all: but out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel in his heart by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... wish; Upon Erin the death-mark he brands, the Party and Cause to secure; Not bloodthirsty by birth; just, liquor 'twas needful to pour; Only the wine of man's blood! . . . But the horrible sacrament thrill'd Right through the heart of a nation; nor yet is the memory still'd; E'en yet the dim spectre returns, the ghost of the murderous years, Blood flushing out in hatred; or blood transmuted to tears! —Ah strange drama of Fate! what motley pageantries rise On the stage of this make-shift world! what irony silenced in sighs! For ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... hands from their mittens, and raising them in an imploring gesture, Mookoomahn looked, as he stood there in the dim candlelight under the low log ceiling, more a spectre—a ghostly phantom visitor—than ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
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