"Disembodied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and joy and never dying love: Day that shall never cease, No night there threatening, No winter there to chill joy's ever-during spring. Ye fields of changeless green Covered with living streams and fadeless flowers; Thou paradise serene, Eternal joyful hours Thy disembodied soul ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... while, falling in showers of twinkling steps, her fleet feet seemed to weave their way on air. What ailed the girl? all asked;—such a play of emotion of mingled sorrow and ecstasy, never before had been interpreted by measure; so a disembodied spirit might have danced, and her dusky hue, the strange glancing lights thrown upon her here and there by the torch, going and coming and glittering at pleasure, made her appear like a shadow disporting before them. At length and slowly, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... composed in sleep, comes nearer than any other existing poem to that ideal of lyric poetry which has only lately been systematized by theorists like Mallarme. It has just enough meaning to give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied music. It seems to hover in the air, like one of the island enchantments of Prospero. It is music not made with hands, and the words seem, as they literally were, remembered. "All the images," said Coleridge, "rose up before me as things, ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... sensitives may again be divided. Some are weak characters, dominated by the will of others in a negative manner, as mediums, who are the prey of disembodied spirits desirous of obtaining a physical body when they have lost their own ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... personality persisted. Was this other person dead, and striving mutely for expression? No, surely not, for this other mind was on the same plane as hers, subject to the same conditions. Not disembodied entirely, but only relaxed, as she was, this other personality had wakened and found ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... probably true in essentials for all parts of China. These rites unite in incongruous confusion several orders of ideas. Pre-Buddhist Chinese notions of the life after death seem not to have included the idea of hell. The disembodied soul is honoured and comforted but without any clear definition of its status. Some representative—a person, figure, or tablet—is thought capable of giving it a temporary residence and at funeral ceremonies ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... Lizard knew that there was no danger of detection, yet from long habit he moved through the plant of the International Machine Company with the noiselessness of a disembodied spirit. Occasionally, and just for the briefest instant, he flashed his lamp ahead of him, but though he had never been in the place before he found it scarcely necessary, so minute had been his instructions for reaching the office from the fifth ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... produced a still greater revolution, and he had hosts of scholars and followers and imitators. But they were nothing more, or at the most it may be said that they developed his idea to the furthest with varying success. It was realism—sometimes a kind of mystic evocation of nature, disembodied and divinely pure, as in Beato Angelico; often exquisitely fresh and youthful, as in his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, whose vast series of frescoes half fills the Camposanto of Pisa—sometimes tentative and experimental, or gravely ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... working out difficult speculations, and averting from us the danger of injuring ourselves by falls in the dark. The Lord delivered and the evangelist recorded this parable for the purpose of teaching, warning, directing, not spirits disembodied in the other world, but men in the body here. "All things are for your sakes;" the great Teacher determined all his words and acts by a regard to the benefit of his people. Even when Lazarus died at Bethany, he said to his followers, "I am glad ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... than one collector of these lyrics has bemoaned the fact that in later times there has been such a divorce between the two arts. Who will say that Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" are not disembodied music? Lamb said that Coleridge repeated the latter poem "so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into any parlor when he says or sings it to me." Mr. Arthur Symons has recently said: "'Christabel' is composed like music; you ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... veteran warriors who were uselessly wearing out their lives in Korea. In his last moments he opened his eyes and exclaimed earnestly: "Let not the spirits of the hundred thousand troops I have sent to Korea become disembodied in a foreign land."(186) Ieyasu, on whom devolved the military responsibility after the Taiko's death, and who had never sympathized with his wishes and aims regarding Korea, did not delay the complete withdrawal of the troops which ...
— Japan • David Murray
... it were a disembodied spirit talking, it was no other than the spirit of Overland Red. The accent was unmistakable. The Easterner glanced round and observed a peculiar something behind the brush edging the rise ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... recovery otherwise was not apparent. As she stood there her beauty had signally the distinction of fragility, the delicacy of shattered nerves in which there was yet no visible return to strength. A feeling, which had intimated itself before, a sense as of being in the presence of a disembodied spirit, possessed him, and brought, in its contradiction of an accepted theory, a suggestion that was destined to become conviction. He had always said to himself that there could be no persistence of personality, ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... straggling tiles of gable and loggia the cupolas and belfries of many churches. I know they are all dead; for I have wound a devious way through the close inhospitable streets and met them or their ghosts at every corner. The ghost of a dead church is the worst of all disembodied sighs: he wails and chatters at you. Here I have seen churches whose towers were fallen and their tribunes laid bare to the insults of the work-a-day world. There were churches with ugly gashes in them, fresh and smarting still; some had sightless ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... that bourne whence no traveller returns,' and we fervently trust and hope that the disembodied spirits of the tens of thousands whom he has treated in this sphere will treat him with the same science with which he treated them while in ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... first I have felt in our relationship a curious sensation of magic in one opposed to mystery in the other. I have felt the abandon and madness of a happy dancer, whirling around the dim edge of your shadow-land in the wild expectation of beholding the disembodied spirit of you come forth to join me. It is not that I wished to work a charm, but the shadow of your mysterious life draws me into the opposition of a counter-influence. The gift of power is not in me to set foot across the magic ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... looked up with a curse. There was nobody in the room, but the voice had been louder than ever he had heard it before. It seemed as though it emanated from a disembodied spirit that was floating through the air. There was a knock at the ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... was requisite of determination to conquer that alarm, and to conquer more, should more be created by what he should behold. He opened the door, but did not immediately enter the room: he paused where he stood, for he felt as if he was about to intrude into the retreat of a disembodied spirit, and that that spirit might reappear. He waited a minute, for the effort of opening the door had taken away his breath, and, as he recovered ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At any rate, the disembodied shadow is nearest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... and women together—for the light in the eyes, the touch of the lips, the clinging of the hands. Once she had idealized these things into love itself; now the very memory of them filled her with repulsion. She still wanted love, but a love so pure, so disembodied, so ethereal that it was liberated from the dominion of flesh. In the beginning, as a girl, she had accepted love as the supreme good, as the essential reality; now, utterly disillusioned, she asked herself: "What is there left in life? What is the thing that really counts, after all? What ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... long after they are dead. It is no good getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... seemed to her an angel choir—fresh young voices, throbbing and proclaiming through the summer night some joyous, ever-ascending message. Lydia felt her pulses loud at her temples. Almost a faintness of pleasure came over her. There was something ineffably sweet about the disembodied voices sending their triumphant ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... face hidden in her hands, striving as surely few human beings have ever had to strive in the difficult paths of life. At first she had felt almost calm. When she had spoken to Androvsky there had even been a strange sensation that was not unlike triumph in her heart. In this triumph she had felt disembodied, as if she were a spirit standing there, removed from earthly suffering, but able to contemplate, to understand, to pity it, removed from earthly sin, but able to commit an action that might help ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... intellectual movements have this as an end in complete reversal of the case with man. With the brute the intellect seems incidental to the body. With man the body is incidental to the intellect. One feels for this reason that man might live a purely spiritual and disembodied life. No one from this standpoint thinks so ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... Norval, Swift, Brissot, Malmonides, the Chevalier D'O, Socrates, Fenelon, Job, Stow. The inventor of Elixir pro, Euripides, Spinoza, Poe, 710 Confucius, Hiram Smith, and Fo, Came (as it seemed, somewhat de trop) With a disembodied Esquimaux, To say that it was so and so, With Franklin's expedition; One testified to ice and snow, One that the mercury was low, One that his progress was quite slow, One that he much desired to go, One that the cook had frozen his toe, 720 (Dissented from by Dandolo, Wordsworth, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... want you to come to-morrow. I will be very quiet," she added; and her agitation had by this time become so great that the assurance was not becoming. A sudden fear had come over her; it was like the solid conjunction of a dozen disembodied doubts, and her imagination, at a single bound, had traversed an enormous distance. All her being, for the moment, centred in the wish to ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... not saddle or mount the animals there, but instead walked quietly in the shadows of the buildings toward an unfrequented avenue which led toward the point I had arranged to meet Dejah Thoris and Sola. With the noiselessness of disembodied spirits we moved stealthily along the deserted streets, but not until we were within sight of the plain beyond the city did I commence to breathe freely. I was sure that Sola and Dejah Thoris would find no difficulty in reaching our rendezvous undetected, but with my great ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... me, or rather I went to her, for, after all, I am living in the same world with the rest of them. I have not passed over to the other side yet, and while I stay I am not going to be treated as if I were a disembodied spirit. I have eyes of my own, and ears too, and I can see as well as the next man when ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... that spirits, both embodied and disembodied, incarnate and excarnate, considered as a mass, may act as the terrurgic spiritual body and brain of the planet; subjective and responsive to the inspiration and guidance of the universal cosmic mind, acting from the ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... ever-active intellect testified to the paternal impress. This blending of two diverse strains produced in him a singular tenacity of fiber. Man's tenement of clay has rarely lodged a spirit so passionless, so fine, so nearly disembodied. Of extreme physical tenuity, but gifted with inexhaustible mental energy, indefatigable in study, limitless in capacity for acquiring and retaining knowledge, he accentuated the type which nature gave him by the sustained habits of a lifetime. In diet ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Zoellner and Crookes and going over my notes and those of Dr. Randall, I'm a little shaken, I confess. So far as human evidence goes these men prove that there is a world of phenomena ignored by science. I don't go so far as to say that these doings were the work of disembodied spirits, but I do admit that I am puzzled by things which I have witnessed with one sense or another. The things seem to tally in a most convincing way. This girl is repeating, substantially, the same phenomena ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... so much more difficult to write about than any other art, is because music is the one absolutely disembodied art, when it is heard, and no more than a proposition of Euclid, when it is written. It is wholly useless, to the student no less than to the general reader, to write about music in the style of the programmes ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... a louder tone, addressing himself directly to Enrica, on whom he gazed with a tender expression—he was far too much engrossed with her and with the subject to heed Trenta's feeble remonstrance—"I believe in the mystic essence of soul to soul—I believe in the reappearance of the disembodied spirit to its kindred affinity still on earth—still clothed with a fleshly garment. I believe in those magnetic influences that circle like an atmosphere about certain purified and special natures, binding them together in a closely-locked ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... frantic sound for some little time, as if wool-upped, disembodied spirits were exchanging kisses; then Rosannah said, "Excuse me just a moment, dear; I have an appointment, and am ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... from the crowded festivities of a ball-room at some lordly mansion in the country, and to have wandered into a churchyard, damp and dreary with a thick London fog. In the light dress of fashion, he throws himself on a tombstone. "Ye dead!" exclaims the hero, "where are ye? Do your disembodied spirits now float around me, and, shrouded in this horrible veil of nature, glare unseen upon vitality? Float ye upon this intolerable mist, in yourselves still more misty and intolerable? Hold ye high jubilee to-night? or ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... no supernatural," said the now disembodied voice. "What we call spirit, psychic force, hypnosis, spiritualism, the fourth dimension, is really only life on another scale of vibration. If we could see the whole scale, we would recognize it as a vast, coherent, perfectly natural and rational whole, in which ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... their dead, they conceived an immaterial existence. The spirit of a dead man, having left the body, would still go on about its business. They, therefore, set out food and drink upon his grave and sacrificed his dogs, his horses or his wives to serve him in his disembodied state. All this is familiar enough and perhaps the whole matter began as Mr. Spencer suggested, though it ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... reproach, saw that I was awake, and winked slowly. It was the second engineer. He said it was a clear morning. We had been under way an hour. He had got sixty revolutions now. He then receded into the gloom beyond; but materialized again, or, to be exact, the white stare of two disembodied eyes appeared, and the same voice said that it had won seventeen and six-pence last night, but there was something funny about the way ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... did go to sleep and dreamed a very curious dream. It seemed to me that I was disembodied, although I retained all my powers of thought and observation; in fact, dead and yet alive. In this state I hovered over the people of the Pongo who were gathered together on a great plain under an inky sky. They were going about their business as usual, and very ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... with the strength of his vision, could cry to-day, "It is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true." For poetry, to which all literature aspires, is not the shadow of reality but the image of perfection, the light of disembodied beauty toward which creation gropes. And that poetic consciousness is the key to the complex and half-concealed art ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... faces and uniforms toned down to the universal greyness of things, trundled their hand-lorries to the monotonous calling of "B' your leave, b' your leave"; and variegated specimens of humanity were looking around after their luggage as one might imagine disembodied souls looking for their bodies in the Valley of Jehoshaphat on the Last Day. There were not a few touches of cosmopolitanism suggestive of ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... as well as mind, have persisted in man. He is not, cannot be, disembodied spirit. And in his mental life reflex action and instinct, appetite and prudence, are still of great importance. But the higher and supreme development of these powers could never have resulted in man. They might alone have produced a superior animal, never man. His mammalian structure found its ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... he descried a vague form leaning up against one of the walls, as if listening to something through it! As he gazed it grew plainer to him, and he saw a face, its eyes staring wide, which yet seemed not to see him. It was the face of the earl. Donal felt as if in the presence of the disembodied; he stood fascinated, nor made attempt to retire or conceal himself. The figure turned its face to the wall, put the palms of its hands against it, and moved them up and down, and this way and that; then looked at them, and began to rub ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... pain Chains of disembodied ones, Thou didst lead whom thou didst gather Upward in ascent again, With a great hymn to the Father, Upward to ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... I tried to bring my sense and reason to bear on the matter. 'This being,' I said to myself, 'whoever and whatever she is, cannot harm me. I am under God's protection as much at this moment as at any moment of my life. All creatures, even disembodied spirits, if there be such, and this among them, if it be one, are under His control. Why should I be afraid? I am being tried; my courage and trust are being tried to the utmost: let me prove them, let me keep my own self-respect, ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... regret to say!"—and retire into the fields to cultivate onion-beds, and live frugally on vegetables. It is very notable. Old godlike Calvinism declares that its old body is now fallen to tatters, and done; and its mournful ghost, disembodied, seeking new embodiment, pipes again in the winds;—a ghost and spirit as yet, but heralding new Spirit-worlds, and better Dynasties ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... back, for he had resolutely kept away from even the dress rehearsal, and the entire creative force of his lines was about to come to him. "In a few moments my characters will step forth from the world of the disembodied into the mellow glow of the foot-lights," he thought, and the anticipated joy of welcoming them warmed his brain and the chill clutch of fear fell away from his throat. The dignity and the glow, the possibilities of the theatre as a temple of literature ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... afternoon, we wandered over the island, visiting the old, old temples, listening to the mysterious wailing of the wind bells, feeding the deer and crane, and drinking in the beauty of it all. I felt like a disembodied spirit, traveling back, back over the centuries, into dim forgotten ages. The dead seemed close about me, yet they brought no gloom, for I too was dead. All afternoon I had the impression of trying to keep my consciousness from ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... that association in thought must involve similar connection in reality. He thus attempted to discover, to foretell, and to cause events, by means of processes which we now see to have only an ideal significance."(1) Secondly, man endeavoured to make disembodied spirits of the dead, or any other spirits, obedient to his will. Savage philosophy presumes that the beliefs are correct, and that their practical application is successful. Examples of the first of the two chief magical ideas are as common in unscientific ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... astonishment, the manufacturer, who sat the farthest from me in the same line with Mrs. Makely, the professor, and the banker, rose and asked, tremulously: "And have—have you had any direct communication with the other world? Has any disembodied spirit returned to testify of the ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... he was, rooted to the spot, and listened. An awful silence seemed to fall upon the place. Had he hit on the Templeton ghost?—on the disembodied spirit of some luckless martyr to the ferocity of a last century bully? Or, was it an ambuscade prepared for himself? or, was ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... a man drink rapture of rest, or delight above wonder, Beholding, a soul disembodied, the days and the nights that fled, With splendour and sound of the tempest around and above him and under, ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... from all she had expected as a beginning. It was lowness and quiet accentuated: an emphasis of deep meanings, their form, at the same time, being scarcely expressed. Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech. In the same way, to say a little is often to tell more than to say a great deal. Boldwood ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... discerned beauty in order and proportion; while another declared that he found there the evidence of Plato's doctrine of the identity of the good and the beautiful—for this face was so lovely because it was the mirror of a soul which had been disembodied in the plenitude of maiden purity and virtue, unjarred by any discord; and this gave rise to a vehement discussion as to the essential nature of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... shore and islet of the bay. The mist was thick around her, but she knew that above it hung the sleepless stars, and the fancy came over her that perhaps the whole vast interval, from ocean up to sky, might be densely filled with the disembodied souls of her departed human kindred, waiting to see how she would endure that path of grief in which their steps had gone before. "It may be from this influence," she vaguely mused within herself, "that the ocean derives its endless song of sorrow. Perhaps we shall know ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... multiply to weariness quotations from a book that is wholly composed of the doings and sayings of the disembodied man, let it suffice to give the final judgment on ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... that was absolutely painful all these pleasant fancies passed away, and I imagined myself to be a disembodied spirit floating helplessly in the midst of immeasurable space, enveloped in murky clouds and thick darkness, and whirled hither and thither at the ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... different characteristics, different methods, different capacities, and different view-points of life. Each supplements the other. Doubtless the woman has the choicer lot. Surely this is true abstractly speaking. Suppose we should all stand disembodied souls, or rather unembodied souls, on the edge of the forming universe; and suppose that, to these abstract intelligences, the ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... take much more seriously the seemingly more sober statement that thought is a "function" of the brain. There is, of course, a sense in which we all admit the statement; minds are not disembodied, and we have reason to believe that mind and brain are most intimately related. But the word "function" is used in a very broad and loose sense when it serves to indicate this relation; and one may employ it ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... altogether! Nor am I in love with a future state in which there is so much dancing up and down lofty flights of stairs with terpsichorean energy, and manoeuvring in companies and circles with members of the softer sex. As a philosophical conception of disembodied existence, it is undeniably deficient in repose, though perhaps good ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... most unquestionably have brought him and the sharpest particles of a birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I say I would become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in such an address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd Girl's suddenly stiffening from ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... tones. The effect was curious, and had a peculiarly melancholy sound; indeed we might easily have supposed them to be the cries of captive slaves, or perhaps a more fanciful person might describe them as disembodied spirits in some haunted island. Meanwhile the night wind, sighing through the lofty trees, came moaning down towards us. At length darkness compelled us to give up our sport, and, with an abundant supply of fish, we pulled ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... was being interrogated and dishonored. His soul shook and thundered within him to repel these attacks upon his Lord and Master. As those unexpected random questions had poured in upon him thick and fast, all emerging, as it seemed to him, like disembodied evil spirits from the black pit of Satan and the damned, it was joy to him to deal to each that same straight, God-directed spear-thrust of a reply—killing them as they rose. His soul exulted in that ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... wrecked the Roman world. In 476, the pretense of a Western Empire was abandoned.—So now to follow the great march of the cycles eastward; with this warning: that next week we shall glance at a little backwash in the other direction, and see the disembodied soul of this now closed phase of human culture ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... [FN362] These disembodied "voices" speaking either naturally or through instruments are a recognized phenomenon of the so-called "Spiritualism," See p. 115 of "Supra-mundane Facts," &c., edited by T.J. Nichols, M.D., &c., London, Pitman, 1865. I venture to remark that the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... responded Worth, taking the proffered hand with dancing eyes. "You actually frightened me when you came around that corner. For a moment I had an uncanny feeling that I was a disembodied spirit looking at my own outward shape. I know now what it feels like ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... loose board roof Philo Gubb raised his head suddenly. For an instant he imagined he was a disembodied spirit, his body having been dissolved in benzine, but as he became wider awake he was conscious of a noise beneath him. Wixy was shifting twenty or thirty bricks that had fallen from the kiln upon a ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... that the unknown person had been considerably in advance of the other, and on reaching the door, had turned back as if to communicate something to his companion—it was then a mystery. Was the dream verified?—whither had the disembodied spirit sped?—who can say? We know not. But I left the house of death that day in a state of horror which I could not describe. It seemed to me that I was scarce awake. I heard and saw everything as if under the spell of a nightmare. The coincidence ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... spiritualist. V. disembody, spiritualize. Adj. immaterial, immateriate[obs3]; incorporeal, incorporal[obs3]; incorporate, unfleshly[obs3]; supersensible[obs3]; asomatous[obs3], unextended[obs3]; unembodied[obs3], disembodied; extramundane, unearthly; pneumatoscopic[obs3]; spiritual &c. (psychical) 450[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... to the sheer intellectuality of Monsieur Dumeny, was not convinced that he had reached that condition of moral serenity and purification in which a rare woman can be happily regarded as a sort of disembodied spirit. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... right! That is the thing for you to say, and Edith would like you the better for your words, for women nowadays are jealous for one another's honor, as I judge they were not in your day. But, on the other hand, if there were present in this room disembodied shades of those women of your day, they would rejoice more than any others could at the fairer, ampler temples liberty has built for their daughters' souls to ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... ceased to be so. The doctrine of transmigration which they had adopted was in harmony with such views, and, if it does not imply the absolute immortality of the soul, at least asserts its existence after the death of the body, for the disembodied spirit becomes incarnate again as soon as it finds a tenement which fits it. To their life after death the Pythagoreans added a doctrine of retributive rewards and punishments, and, in this respect, what has been said of animals forming a penitential ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... are supposed to be consigned to the abodes of the disembodied spirits, who are punished according to the nature of their crimes. For instance, saki merchants who have sold bad spirit are believed to be confined in stagnant pools; and murderers are supposed to haunt ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... fascination of the sea, the consummation of such might in such infantine delicacy. You may notice it again in the summer, when our bay is thronged for miles on miles with inch-long jelly-fishes,—lovely creatures, in shape like disembodied gooseberries, and shot through and through in the sunlight with all manner of blue and golden glistenings, and bearing tiny rows of fringing oars that tremble like a baby's eyelids. There is less of gross substance in ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... touched her hand save as it met his, gloved or formal, or as it rested on his arm; and yet, as one walking through the dusk and stillness of a summer night feels a flower or falling leaf brush his check, and starts, shivering as from the touch of a disembodied soul, so this slight outward touch thrilled his inmost being; this hand, meeting his for an ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... the fact of the continued existence of the dead; yet not merely this, but to prove the resurrection of the dead. The latter was the question at issue. The word "living," as used by our Lord, indicates those who are enjoying a normal life, not that of disembodied spirits, but of immortal spirits clothed with deathless bodies. Therefore Jesus added, "for all live unto him." In the mind and purpose of God all are to be raised from the dead and to enjoy that complete and blessed existence which resurrection implies. The confident expectation ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... In nothing had their amity been more fatally broken than in this careful homage to its forms; and now, as they walked up and down in the moonlight, they were of the saddest kind of apparitions,—not mere disembodied spirits, which, however, are bad enough, but disanimated bodies, which are far worse, and of which people are not more afraid only because they go about in society so commonly. As on many and many another night of summers past, the moon came up and stood over the Lido, ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... functions in this respect to a goddess, Maritsakro, for whom the poorer inhabitants of the left bank entertained a persistent devotion. She was a kind of Isis or hospitable Hathor, whose subjects in the other world adapted themselves to the nebulous and dreary existence provided for their disembodied "doubles." The Osirian and solar doctrines were afterwards blended together in this local mythology, and from the XIth dynasty onwards the Theban nobility had adopted, along with the ceremonies in use in the Memphite period, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Nathan's eulogium on the excellence of the animal's nose for scenting Indians, and who was somewhat alarmed at what appeared to him the evident uneasiness of little Peter, "he is more like to wind another party of cursed Shawnees than any harmless, disembodied spirits." ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... the floor of the gulch. Silent as a disembodied spirit he advanced toward the tree. He was half way there and no sign of Numa. He reached the scarred bole from which the famished lion had devoured the bark and even torn pieces of the wood itself and yet Numa had not ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... they were, the same even to the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty which satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At any rate the disembodied shadow is nearest ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... of the above disembodied Corps will be held on Friday the 26th March, in the Common Room of the Law Society in Chancery Lane (by kind permission of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... of, but he thought he had never known what music was till now. His heart throbbed in sympathy with every inflection of the voice of Amelie, which went through him like a sweet spell of enchantment. It was the voice of a disembodied spirit singing in the language of earth, which changed at last into a benediction and good-night for the parting guests, who, at an earlier hour than usual, out of consideration for the fatigue of their hosts, took their leave of the Manor House and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... lived. In his dramatic writings this language took on a kind of rhythm which had the effect of producing a certain remoteness of the highest possible artistic value. The people of his imagination appear a little disembodied. They talk with that straightforward and simple kind of innocency which makes strange and impressive the dialogue of Maeterlinck's earlier plays. Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw the subject-matter of his art "with wise, clear-seeing, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... with me to oppose bullying. We are here for a definite purpose—his duty plain to any man who wills to read it. There may be disembodied spirits who seek to distress or annoy where they can no longer control. If there are, mine, which is not yet divorced from its means to material action, declines to be influenced by any irresponsible whimsey, emanating from a place whose denizens appear to be actuated by ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... I know thee in the sphere which keeps The disembodied spirits of the dead, When all of thee that time could wither sleeps And perishes among ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... life, when seen hereafter from heaven, will seem like an hour passed long ago, and dimly remembered;—that long, laborious, full of joys and sorrows as it is, it will then have dwindled down to a mere point, hardly visible to the far-reaching ken of the disembodied spirit. But the spirit itself soars onward. And thus death is neither an end nor a beginning. It is a transition not from one existence to another, but from one state of existence to another. No link ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of order in sound. They had a twin birth in song, and although they have grown far apart, they come together again in song. In many ways, music is the standard for verse. Yet, despite these resemblances, the differences between the arts are striking. In place of music's disembodied feelings, poetry offers us concrete intuitions of life,—the rehearsal of emotions attached to real things and clean-cut ideas. Poetry is a music with a definite meaning, and that is no music at all. Much of poetry, gnomic and narrative, probably grew out of speech by regularizing its ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... feel that in all the world there was not one human being that knew of his fate; and to fear that the eye of Providence only saw him with indifference. With bitterness he thought of the last words of his father's letter: "If in that other world to which I am going the disembodied spirit can assist man, then be sure, O my son, I will assist you, and in the crisis of your fate I will be near, if it is only to communicate to your spirit what you ought ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... the apostles received them with the news that Peter had seen the Lord. That same evening Jesus appeared suddenly among the disciples in their well-guarded upper room. His coming was such that he had to convince the disciples that he was not simply a disembodied spirit. Luke says that he did this by bidding them handle him, and by eating part of a fish before them. According to John, Thomas was not with the others at this first meeting with the disciples. A week later, presumably in Jerusalem, Jesus again manifested himself ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... to this, nor did he ask a question then about the return of Ezra. He was satisfied that what he had supposed was the boy's wraith—the disembodied spirit of the lad he had thrown into the Hoghole—was the living Ezra Longman. On his way home from the Skinner hut, Ben had planned a terrible revenge upon the student and Tessibel, but the advent of this unforeseen discovery had placed his enemies beyond his reach. ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... divinity. The Japanese term might be more closely rendered by some such expression as "the Superiors," "the Higher Ones"; and it was formerly applied to living rulers as well as to deities and ghosts. But it implies considerably more than the idea of a disembodied spirit; for, according to old Shinto teaching the dead became world-rulers. They were the cause of all natural events,—of winds, rains, and tides, of buddings and ripenings, of growth and decay, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... to notice the absence of that rancour which had formerly been Allen's most prominent characteristic, and feeling that any information given to a disembodied spirit was safe as far as the world was concerned, launched out on the subject that possessed ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... his delicate critical perception that the true business of literature is with narrative; in reasoned narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys all its advantages, and suffers least from its defects. Dry precept and disembodied disquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction, can never convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural impression. Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it cannot tell its whole story to the reader. Hence ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... look back at those young figures groping through cloud as at disembodied and blessed spirits. The man's intensest tenderness, restrained by his virginhood and his awe of the supple delicate shape at his side, was put forth only in her service. They walked against bushes. He broke a stick, and with it probed every yard of the ascent ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... organ. The pleasures and pains of cerebration, the delight and the fatigue of it, are felt exactly like bodily impressions; they have the same directness, although not the same localization. Their seat is not open to our daily observation, and therefore we leave them disembodied, and fancy they are peculiarly spiritual and intimate to the soul. Or we try to think that they flow by some logical necessity from the essences of objects simultaneously in our mind. We involve ourselves in endless perplexities in trying to deduce excellence and beauty, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... a stone is thought to harbour the spirit. As shown by Sir E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture, [123] the breath, the shadow and the pupil of the eye were sometimes held to be or to represent the soul or spirit. Disembodied spirits are imprisoned in a tree or hole by driving nails into the tree or ground to confine them and prevent their exit. When a man died accidentally or a woman in childbirth and fear was felt that their spirits might annoy or injure the living, a stake might be ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... irreverence we might hazard the conjecture,—as a finite creature, having no centre in himself on which to revolve, may it not be that his true correlative will there be revealed (if, indeed, it be not before) to the disembodied man, in the Being that made him? And may it not also follow, that the Principle we speak of will cease to be potential, and flow out, as it were, and harmonize with the eternal form of Hope,—even that Hope whose living end is in the ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... There was no rhetoric, no declamation or display. Yet the soul of the hearer seemed to be fused in a spiritual eloquence which, like a white flame, burned all the personality of the speaker away. The people sat as if they were listening to a disembodied soul. ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... storm. Dense shadows hung all round the room, making the objects in it seem weird and ghost-like in the gloom. Sudden gusts of wind swept angrily round, causing the withered leaves and dying flowers in the vases to murmur with unearthly sounds, as of the sighing of disembodied souls. Only through the aperture above a streak of greyish light struck full upon the Caesar, as, with glowing eyes and cruel grasp, he compelled ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... by men with any number of capital letters after their names: cool-headed scientists, university professors, psychologists, grave students all, who were constantly finding new and wonderful mediums, and achieving communication with the disembodied. He could tell them a few things; only, of course, he wouldn't make a fool of himself. He could show them something, too, when the secret agents of Professor Balthasar came ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... plane of comparatively small extent. At the time of the Exodus, it seems clear that, even among a people so far advanced as the Egyptians, all that lay beyond the mountains which bounded their land on the west was believed to belong not to living men, but to disembodied spirits. It was the terrible country through which the souls of the departed made their arduous way to the Hall of Judgment [Footnote: "The Nations Around," pp. 49, 50.] Accordingly, we find that the Egyptians made no attempt to extend the limits of ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... already said That these things are, that they are quick with life,— Such life as disembodied spirits have,— That they are deathless? Thou need'st not inquire Of me whence they are come, for thou hast seen One of their number on its journey hither. The period may not be far remote When thine own planet, starting from its sphere, Shall fright ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... most likely have had for the regret; and, upon the whole, it is my opinion, 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... which the people lived upon each other to one in which they lived for each other. There is a famous passage in the inaugural message of our first Altrurian president which compares the new civic consciousness with that of a disembodied spirit released to the life beyond this and freed from all the selfish cares and greeds of the flesh. But perhaps I shall give a sufficiently clear notion of the triumph of the change among us when I say that within half ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells |
