"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the poor women, should be the lot of all, sat upon me like a nightmare. More than this, the secret I had discovered seemed to pall every sense and sicken me to the heart, and throughout the silent hours of the dismal darkness I passed in review the ghostly pageant of the fight and all its horrors, the escape of the unhappy survivors, the finding of the murdered boy and starving women, and more than all—the secret I had rather even now draw a veil over, and leave to ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... fire. Lightning was very destructive, sinking the temple of a god or a nut-tree by the roadside indifferently. An ox spoke in Sicily. A precocious baby cried out "Io triumphe" before it was born. At Spoletum a woman became a man. An altar was seen in the heavens. A ghostly band of armed men appeared in the Janiculum (Livy, xxiv., 10). On such occasions the "aruspices" always ordered a vast slaughter of victims, and no doubt feasted as did ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... wheeling moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of a charm. And verily, this is enchantment; I am bewitched, by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flittering of the marvellous sleeves—apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this. And with the consciousness of the ancient ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... blackness and wreathing vapour, which gleamed in a grey ghostly way some distance in front, and to try and see better some ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... beech tree with a white mark some way up the trunk stood in the mound by a gate which opened into a lane. Strangers coming down the lane in the dusk often hesitated before they approached this beech. The white mark looked like a ghostly figure emerging from the dark hedge and the shadow of the tree. The trunk itself was of the same hue at that hour as the bushes, so that the whiteness seemed to stand out unsupported. So perfect was the ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... next morning was heralded by only a thin line of red parting the masses of black-grey snow clouds which still hung low down in the east. The wind had dropped, and there was something ghostly about the still twilight as Dominey issued from the back regions and made his way through the untrodden snow round to the side of the house underneath Rosamund's window. A little exclamation broke from his lips as he stood there. From the ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... glittering foam into the upper darkness, while we held our breath at the unique sight of a whale breaching at night. But when he fell again the effect was marvellous. Green columns of water arose on either side of the descending mass as if from the bowels of the deep, while their ghostly glare lit up the encircling gloom with a strange, weird radiance, which reflected in our anxious faces, made us look like an expedition from the FLYING DUTCHMAN. A short spell of gradually quieting struggle ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... fall deep upon the quiet fields where the dead rest. Squadrons of white clouds drift down the valley, as if to cover the sleeping heroes with a shroud of white. Above Sedan's heights appears the shining crescent of the moon and sheds a ghostly light over the wide field of death—the battlefield ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... wind, rougher than the others, swirled the fog about him in great ghostly sheets, turning and twisting it like the clouds of greasy smoke from a fire of wet leaves. The dory rolled heavily, and Code, losing his balance, sprawled forward on the fish, the horn flying from his hand overboard as he ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... commission, and who was therefore illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike alas the hangdog look of a republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels himself less than the least, and below the lowest of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him—who might reasonably regard ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was. At that I did feel more or less ghostly. I seemed to have lost some of my confidence. I expected to "go west" on the next time in. And that's a bad way ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... had to be properly lugubrious, to tally up to his impressions of what I ought to be. He had been here just a week, then, and he had me down pat. Somebody must have coached him grandly, and he's the sort who revels in woe and in consequent and ghostly consolation." ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... as the ghostly procession drew near. The song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Mother Teresa of Jesus, Foundresse of the Monasteries of the Discalced or Bare-footed Carmelite Nunnes and Fryers of the First Rule. "Written by herself at the commaundement of her ghostly father, and now translated into English out of Spanish. By W.M., of the Society of Jesus. "Imprinted in Antwerp by ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... possession of him; but all the while he did not know where his foot stepped; his head swam, and his pulse beat feverishly. About midway between the forest and the mansion, where the field sloped more steeply, grew a clump of birch-trees, whose slender stems glimmered ghostly white in the moonlight. Something drove Truls to leave the beaten road, and, obeying the impulse, he steered toward the birches. A strange sound fell upon his ear, like the moan of one in distress. It did not startle him; indeed, he was in a mood when nothing ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... carriage proved him to be not of German but foreign birth. He appeared to come from the land of Bohemia. He cast a contemptuous smile on Froda, who, as usual, had opened the ancient book of Aslauga's history, and was attentively reading in it. "You must be a ghostly knight?" he said, inquiringly; and it appeared as if a whole train of unseemly jests were ready to follow. But Froda answered so firmly and seriously with a negative that the Bohemian stopped short suddenly; as when the beasts, after venturing to mock their king, the ...
— Aslauga's Knight • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... unthickened by innumerable shapes of awe and terror; or that the wind, as it sung in the trees, or whistled round an empty building, was not pregnant with sounds of wailing and despair. Sometimes realities took ghostly shapes; and it was impossible for one's blood not to curdle at the perception of an evident mixture of what we knew to be true, with the visionary semblance of ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... wind long to drive us back on our cable, stern foremost, on to the wreck, which now loomed out huge and ghostly on the wild water. As we drifted down under her stern we were conscious, amidst the smoke of the burning tar-barrels and the spray of the waves which broke over her, of a crowd of faces looking over her sides, and fancied we heard a faint ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... had on Midsummer Eve of this year, and as the hour grew later, and nine o'clock drew on, the irradiation of the daytime became broken up by weird shadows and ghostly nooks of indistinctness. Imagination could trace upon the trunks and boughs strange faces and figures shaped by the dying lights; the surfaces of the holly-leaves would here and there shine like peeping eyes, while such ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... world whom she would have chosen had such choice been vouchsafed her by kind Heaven, o'ermastering love will sweep her through all the heavens a sensuous fancy ever feigned; but the chances are that her idol lives only in the ghostly realm of dreams, else goes elsewhere to wive, and she marries not whom she would but whom she must— wedlock, thanks to her mistaken training, being the end and aim of her existence. Instead of an idol to adore, she secures some foolish eidolon whom she can scarce ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... felt the Gallic, traveller, When far in Arab desert, drear, He found within the catacomb, Alive, the terrors of a tomb? While many a mummy, through the shade, In hieroglyphic stole arrayed, Seem'd to uprear the mystic head, And trace the gloom with ghostly tread; Thou heard'st him pour the stifled groan, Horror! his soul was all thy ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... cruelly, and led me to the deeper shadow and seclusion of a great rock, rising from the path to the flake. 'Twas very still and awesome, there in the dark of that black rock, with the light of the moon lying ghostly white on all the barren world, and the long, low howl of some forsaken dog from time to ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... told at last how, today and yesterday, arising in the dim dawn to build his fire before the camp was stirring, he had seen lurking at the edge of the clearing a white four-footed shape. It was a pig, yet not a pig; its ghostly hue, its noiseless movements, divided it from all proper mundane porkers by the dreadful gulf which divides the living from the dead. The first morning Cookie, doubtful of his senses, had flung a stone and the spectral Thing had vanished like ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... had taken, and on the bed with the high, carved walnut back lay the night-dress borrowed from Mary. Through torn clouds a few stars glittered like coins in a gashed purse, and very far away to the west, at the end of all things visible, was a faint, ghostly gleam which meant the dazzling lights of the Casino and its terrace, at ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... they looked, at the terrific scene below. From that point, Njedegorze was as a huge boiling caldron, from which arose twisted wreaths and coiling lengths of white vapor, faintly colored with gold and silvery blue. Dispersing in air, these mists took all manner of fantastic forms,—ghostly arms seemed to wave and beckon, ghostly hands to unite in prayer,—and fluttering creatures in gossamer draperies of green and crimson, appeared to rise and float, and retire and shrink, to nothingness again in the rainbow ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... description of this ruin in the twenty-seventh chapter of this narrative, as the vault in which young Bertram, under the auspices of Meg Merrilies, witnessed the death of Hatteraick's lieutenant. The tradition of the country added ghostly terrors to the natural awe inspired by the situation of this place, which terrors the gipsies, who so long inhabited the vicinity, had probably invented, or at least propagated, for their own advantage. It was said that, during ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... also, by the triumph that such men make over all their enemies, both bodily and ghostly: "Now thanks be unto God," said Paul, "which always causeth us to triumph in Christ." And, "who shall separate us from the love of Christ" our Lord? and again, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... full of such wonders. Here, again, we have giants and dwarfs and kobolds; and birds and beasts and fishes who can talk; and good fairies, who come in and help their friends just when they are wanted; and evil fairies, and witches; and the wild huntsman, who sweeps across the sky with his ghostly train; and men and women who turn themselves into wolves, and go about in the night devouring sheep and killing human beings, In Russian tales we find many creatures of the same kind, and also in those of Italy, and Spain, and France. And in our own islands we ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... for the fate of La Touche nor sorrow for the fate of Bompard, all that seemed unreal, just as the darkness and terror of the night before seemed unreal. The real thing that touched her through everything was Expectancy. Expectancy, ghostly ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... they ere death— Flirt wanly, dance in ghostly-wise, With ghosts of tunes for melodies, And vanish at the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Spring, a greeting fond from me! Rejoicing thrills within the breast of Mother Earth anew— From her once more the flowers push forth 'mid gleaming drops of dew, And like the Swans, across my soul my dreams will lightly sweep, And my heart blissful throbbing, ghostly tears of rapture weep. O Spring I feel thy coming! ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one'? To this 'mystic or secondary impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august soul-exalting echo.' Has anything that has been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is breaking. Faint, wan, and pallid is the feeble gleam that comes peeping over the low hills far over at the east. Bare and desolate look the barren slopes on every hand. Not a tree, not a shrub of any kind can eye discover in this dim and ghostly light. All is silence, too. Even the coyotes who have set up their unearthly yelping at odd intervals during the night seem to have slunk away before the coming of the morning's sun and sought the shelter of their lurking-spots. Here on the bleak ridge, where three men, wrapped in cavalry ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... the blue darkness of the lake, trying to see with his eyes, to catch the same ghostly signals from the past. The romance of the story and the moment, Manisty's low, rushing speech, the sparkle of his poet's look—the girl's fancy yielded to the spell of them; her breath came quick and soft. Through all their outer difference, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the shops and cafes of France on the other. So late as six o'clock in the evening those cafes and shops preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly, but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia overnight ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... insurance laws, banking laws, franchise laws, etc. Yet no sooner were the lights turned down than the phenomena began. John Smith, on the right of the medium, suddenly felt a sharp blow on the neck. As he turned around instinctively a ghostly hand snatched away his pocket-book and the sound of mocking laughter could be plainly heard from the dark cabinet. Another weird hand pulled Thomas Jones's insurance policy out of his breastpocket, dangled it in the ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... us may leave this chamber alive with Thuvia of Ptarth." Then, seeing that the man wore no sword, he exclaimed: "Bring on your bowmen, then, or come with us as my prisoner until we have safely passed the outer portals of thy ghostly city." ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... scene in "L'Aiglon," with scarcely a gruesome detail omitted. The vast plain glimmering in phantasmal light; the ghostly squadrons hurling themselves against one another (seen only through the eyes of the poor little Duke of Reichstadt); the mangled shapes lying motionless in various postures of death upon the blood-stained sward; the moans of the wounded rising up and sweeping by like vague ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to a Craft or Science. And for Fayries, and walking Ghosts, the opinion of them has I think been on purpose, either taught, or not confuted, to keep in credit the use of Exorcisme, of Crosses, of holy Water, and other such inventions of Ghostly men. Neverthelesse, there is no doubt, but God can make unnaturall Apparitions. But that he does it so often, as men need to feare such things, more than they feare the stay, or change, of the course of Nature, which he also can stay, and ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... to bother his head about her, and Biddy dragged her up in the kitchen of Roscarna where she had suckled her half-brothers before her, Mr. Considine exercising a general supervision, pending the day when her soul should be fit for salvation and ghostly admonition. ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... English traveller in America the language which he hears spoken about him is at once a puzzle and a surprise. It is his own, yet not his own. It seems to him a caricature of English, a phantom speech, ghostly but familiar, such as he might hear in a land of dreams. He recognises its broad lineaments; its lesser details evade, or confuse, him. He acknowledges that the two tongues have a common basis. Their ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... trot this earth before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the Parliament of ghosts! Perhaps the Pre-Adamites would constitute one wing in such a ghostly army. My brother, dying in his sixteenth year, was far enough from seeing or foreseeing Waterloo; else he might have illustrated this dreadful duel of the living human race with its ghostly predecessors, by the awful apparition which at three ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... certainty, purity, warmth, and precision than they had been capable of while they still were in the midst of life. Yea, the most graceful, most humorous creations were given to the light from that ghostly refuge. By the side of this marvellously significant phenomenon, all other national literatures appear to me without importance. If nature produced such an individual as Shakespeare amongst the English, we can easily see that ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... are enchanting little rooms reached by unexpected staircases, by secret doors in the wall, by dark passages where one hears the rustle of ghostly brocade dresses. Those are the most lovable rooms, for, once safely in them, one is at home and warm, while in the state rooms one feels, as the dear old squire who died here thirty years ago said, "like a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... church This Ghost would search, And whenever it would see The passers-by Take wings and fly It would laugh in ghostly glee, Hee, hee!—it would ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... sought shelter in a thick spruce. It rained and hailed. By and bye the air grew bitterly cold, and Teague suggested we give up, and ride back. So we did. The mountains were dim and obscure through the gray gloom, and the black spear-tipped spruces looked ghostly against the background. The lightning was vivid, and the thunder rolled and crashed in magnificent ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... all so grand When pipes and tabors had their sway Stood leafless now, a ghostly band Of skeletons in cold array. A lonely surge of ancient spray Told of an unforgetful sea, But iron blows had hushed for aye ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... not noticing the light ripple in the quiet of the evening; but not long after—when my friend read the Mosses from an Old Manse, she found that the incident had made an impression upon him and that he interpreted the sound as a ghostly happening. She told me another story which she said she had directly from Hawthorne. During a sojourn in Boston he often went to the reading-room of the Athenaeum and was particularly interested to see a certain newspaper. This paper he often found ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... corpses! How mothers weep over them! how wives kneel, and beat their hearts out on the rocky barriers that separate them from their hearts' love, their hearts' desire! How little starvin', naked children cower in their ghostly shadows through dark midnights! How fathers weep for their children, dead to them, dead to honor, to shame, to humanity! How the cries of the mourners ascend to the ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... mainly hinge. Semper eadem—"Always the same"—has been the proud motto of the mightiest hierarchy that has controlled human action and shaped the destinies of mankind, no less in material than in ghostly concerns. Yet is a vast and very beneficial change, due to the imperious spirit of the times, manifest in the Roman Church. No longer do the stake, the sword, and the dismal horrors of the interdict figure as instruments for assuring conformity and submission to ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... and unimaginative spirit somewhat daunted by the ghostly silence of the house. Sylvia tiptoed to the swinging-door and pushed it open. Yes, there was the pantry, like the kitchen, in chaotic disorder, tissue paper and excelsior thick on the floor, and entangled with it the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... road had been bordered by fields on both sides, but now on the left there was a forest of oaks, madronos, and gigantic spruces whose lower parts only could be seen, dim and ghostly in the fog. The undergrowth was, in places, thick, but nowhere impenetrable. For some moments Holker saw nothing of the building, but as they turned into the woods it revealed itself in faint gray outline ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... space before I'll snicker again. My laugher has gone unused for so long that it's atrophied and won't work. I've tried warming it up by going home at night and guffawing before the mirror, but the result is only a mirthless giggle—a ghostly chortle! Of course, I wouldn't dare attempt ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... different animals. There are twelve of us who are taking parts in the charade, and dear Hollyhock is to be the ghost. She 'll stalk in, in her ghostly garments, and create a great sensation amongst the animals. We would not have done it if we had known that you were coming back, Leuchy, being but too well aware of your terrible nervousness about ghosts, even when ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... the atmosphere and hour, the talk of the little circle fell upon things ghostly and mysterious—strange happenings and prophetic dreams. Dorothea, who had a love of horrors, lent a suddenly attentive ear; but Jennie, though plainly fascinated, uttered a protesting plaint. "Oh, please stop! You don't know how you frighten me! Dorothea has had some ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... little manual of piety, composed, in 1712, for the young ladies who were then pensioners at the monastery of St. Augustin, at Bruges, we have been surprised into frequent smiles by the scrupulous watchfulness with which the ghostly writer followed the lady-pensioners (though with pious fancy only) to the very sacred of sacreds! He was not contented with directing them concerning the prayers which he believed proper to be used ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... a brave man, as respected all bodily enemies or the dangers of human warfare, but was as sensitive and timid as the most superstitious of old women in facing the frowns of a priest or under the vague anticipations 10 of ghostly retributions. But had it been otherwise, and had there been any reason to apprehend an unsteady demeanor on the part of this prince at the approach of the critical moment, such were the changes already effected in the state of their domestic politics amongst ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... stay here," she said. "I never loved the rooms—and now I hate them. It seems to me it was another woman who lived in them—in another world. 'Tis so long ago that 'tis ghostly. Make ready the old red chambers for me," to her woman; "I will live there. They have been long closed, and are worm-eaten and mouldy perchance; but a great fire will warm them. And I will have furnishings from London to make them ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... best; but he was no match for the fawn-footed gentleman, who led him. Lumps of ghostly clay, inherited from a long line of furrow-following ancestors, clung to his ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... tall abbey, a Gothic nave and apse with beautifully traced windows, with the ruin of a very ancient chapel on one side, and crossing the back, a well-proportioned Renaissance building that had been a dormitory. The first time that Martin saw the abbey, it towered in ghostly perfection above a low veil of mist that made the valley seem a lake in the shining moonlight. The lines were perfectly quiet, and when he stopped the motor of his ambulance, he could hear the wind rustling among the beech-woods. Except for the dirty smell of huddled soldiers that ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... if a theory were never so active as when the reality behind it has disappeared. The empty name, the ghostly phrase, exercise an authority that is appalling. When you think of the blood that has been shed in the name of Jesus, when you think of the Holy Roman Empire, "neither holy nor Roman nor imperial," of the constitutional ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... into the tent, and covered her head up in the bed-clothes; but in about ten minutes she came back, feeling a little ashamed of her timidity, and sat down by Gypsy before the fire. It was a strange picture—the ghostly white tents and tangled brushwood gilded with the light; the great forest stretching away darkly beyond; the fitful shadows and glares from the flickering fire that chased each other in strange, uncouth shapes, among the leaves, and the two ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... the Italian lakes, the Fishers found themselves at the Hotel Splendide in Paris, surrounded by people from the States. It was a relief to Fisher, after his somewhat bewildering experience at Baden, followed by a surfeit of stupendous and ghostly snow peaks, to be once more among those who discriminated between a straight flush and a crooked straight, and whose bosoms thrilled responsive to his own at the sight of the star-spangled banner. It was particularly agreeable ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... the face that looks into the night Over the stretch of sands; A sullen rock in the sea of white— A ghostly shadow in ghostly light, Peering and moaning it stands. "Oh, is it the king that rides this way— Oh, is it the king that rides so free? I have looked for the king this many a day, But the years that mock me will not ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... warning, when the evil star of Boabdil shall withhold its influence, and he may strike, without resistance from the Powers above, for his glory and his throne.' 'The sign and the warning are bequeathed thee,' answered the ghostly image. It vanished,—thick darkness fell around; and, when once more the light of the lamps we bore became visible, behold there stood before me a skeleton, in the regal robe of the kings of Granada, and on its grisly head was the imperial diadem. With one hand raised, it pointed to the opposite ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less lost—not to my consciousness, for that is nothing, but to its own—by my stopping however idly ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... word that on my lips could render the effect of the headlong and vehement whisper, of the soft, passionate tones, of the sudden breathless pause and the appealing movement of the white arms extended swiftly. They fell; the ghostly figure swayed like a slender tree in the wind, the pale oval of the face drooped; it was impossible to distinguish her features, the darkness of the eyes was unfathomable; two wide sleeves uprose in the dark like unfolding ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... up the dock of the French harbour. The dusk had fallen, but Bridget was conscious of a misty town dimly sprinkled with lights, and crowned with a domed church; of chalk downs, white and ghostly, to right and left; and close by, of quays crowded with soldiers, motors, and officials. Carrying her small suit-case, she emerged upon the quay, and almost immediately was accosted by the official of the Red Cross who had been told off ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cooked against a hot rock. It was smoked black and cooked so hard it nearly broke my teeth, besides, it had a granite finish from association with the rock oven. But I ate it with boyish relish in spite of its flaws. My imagination expanded as I watched ghostly shadow-figures dance upon the face of the cliff. The shifting flame, the wood smoke, the silent, starry night swelled my heart to pride in my great adventure. I ignored the incident of the animal cry that had sent me scurrying to camp. ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... there alone one rainy night about a year ago," he said. "I didn't see or hear anything unusual. Such stories are ridiculous; and even if there was a little truth in them, noises can't harm you as much as sleeping out in the storm. I'm going to encroach once more upon the ghostly hospitality of the Squibbs. Better come ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... soothe the agitated woman. "We will let in a little light, and dissipate some of these shadows." And I attempted to throw back the curtains of the window, but they fell again immediately and I experienced a sensation as of something ghostly passing between us and ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... nearer, the effort to control myself grew more severe. The struggle was between my will, my identity, my very self, on the one hand, and on the other, the ten thousand ancestors who were twisted into the fibres of me and whose ghostly voices were whispering of the dark and the fear of the dark that had been theirs in the time when the world was dark and full ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... blasted its way into one corner, another had rent the roof vaulting near the crossing of transept and nave. The columns and arches were blackened by the smoke of that fire which caught in the straw on which the German wounded lay. There was something peculiarly forlorn, ghostly within the dim ruins of what was once so great, and I was glad to escape to the old hospital in the close, now turned into a hospital for the cathedral itself. Here on benches and in piles about the floor of the low-vaulted room had been gathered those fragments of statue and moulding ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... up his courage to the point of springing across a black chasm, which he was aware descended some forty or fifty feet to the causeway of the street, and the opposite parapet, on which he was expected to alight like, a bird, appeared dim and ghostly in the uncertain light. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... the sanded paths of the garden. When the first guests arrived and were welcomed at the door by the count and the countess they were positively dazzled. One had only to recall to mind the drawing room of the past, through which flitted the icy, ghostly presence of the Countess Muffat, that antique room full of an atmosphere of religious austerity with its massive First Empire mahogany furniture, its yellow velvet hangings, its moldy ceiling through which the damp had ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... terrace was facing toward the noise, staring. The white-bearded man gave an order, deliberately. Men rushed. But as they swarmed toward an exit, a green beam of light appeared near the uproar. It streaked upward, wavering from side to side and making the golden walls visible in a ghostly fashion. It shivered in a ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... reappearing afar off, as if to mock our cautious progress, and invite us to follow it. The eye, wistfully pursuing its eccentric sweep, suddenly loses it in impenetrable shadows. There is not a vestige of any other ruin near it, and the long lines it here and there shows, ghostly white in the moonlight, seem ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... whose wan features were framed, as it were, by a short, bristly, snow-white beard. In his hands he clutched a fiddle and fiddlestick. It was old Hans, the village fiddler. Some of the lads had found him at the edge of the forest, on the spot where we had caught a glimpse of him, looking like a ghostly apparition, as we rattled past with the engine. There he was found standing in his shirt, and holding his fiddle in both his hands pressed ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... overspread the canon till it lay like a ghostly sea dotted with strange islands of brush and rock; islands that seemed to waver and shift in a sort of vague restlessness, as though trying to evade the ever-brightening tide of moonlight that burned away their shrouds of dusk and fixed them in still, tangible ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... There was no other room in their house from which the sound could proceed. She was not devoid of the superstitious feelings of the age, and had heard before of ghostly tappings that were said to be a harbinger of coming ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... they held. He swung himself out into the air with nothing beneath him, caught the rung under his knee, and for a moment hung there while the crowd withheld from breathing; then a cloud of smoke, swirling that way, made him the mere ghostly nucleus of himself, blotted him out altogether, and, as it rose slowly upward, showed the ladder free and empty, so that at first there was an instant when they thought that he had fallen. But, as the smoke cleared, there was the tall figure on ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... "I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their victims in ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... limitless space. For moments, hours, ages she was propelled with the velocity of a shooting-star. The earth seemed a huge automobile. And it sped with her down an endless white track through the universe. Looming, ghostly, ghastly, spectral forms of cacti plants, large as pine-trees, stabbed her with giant spikes. She became an unstable being in a shapeless, colorless, soundless cosmos of unrelated things, but always rushing, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... mind the real risk of the cars to that old house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there alone,—how do you think he will like it? He doesn't believe one word of ghosts,—but then he knows, that, whether waking or sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghostly images. It is not what we believe, as I said before, that frightens us commonly, but what we conceive. A principle that reaches a good way if I am not mistaken. I say, then, that, if these odd sounds coming from the Little Gentleman's chamber sometimes make ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... the Pieta of M. Angelo; had he led us from beneath the iridescent capitals of Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the hues and the heaven of Perugino or Bellini, we might have been tempted to assoilzie from all staying of question or stroke of partisan the invulnerable aspect of his ghostly theory; but, if, with even partial regard to some of the circumstances which physically limited the attainments of each race, we follow their individual career, we shall find the points of superiority less salient and the connection between heart ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... begetteth first water, which is tears; air, which is sighings and groanings; and fire, which is heart-burnings and the like. Thus is love a passion elemental. But yet, and heed me, lady, love is also metaphysical, being a motition of the soul and e'en the spirit, and being of the spirit 'tis ghostly, and being ghostly 'tis—ha! Who comes hither to shatter the ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Constance as she walked beside the Master. She was thinking involuntarily of that absent word dropped by her uncle—"Oxford is a place of training"—and there was a passionate and troubled revolt in her. Other ghostly wills seemed to be threatening her—wills that meant nothing to her. No!—her own will should shape her own life! As against the austere appeal that comes from the inner heart of Oxford, the young and restless blood in her sang defiance. "I will ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... my suddenly aroused and somewhat bemused senses played tricks with me, and my startled imagination began to conjure up the gruesome stories I had heard of weird visitants, and ghostly beings, heard but seldom seen, on the East Anglian meres and broads? Then again came the remembrance of the shriek or cry I had fancied I heard earlier in the night, and with a shudder I thought: "How ghastly if it should be the drowned ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... garrisons, but by the founding of convents and cathedrals and the establishment of wealthy bishoprics. Wherefore their majesties were always surrounded in court or camp, in the cabinet or in the field, by a crowd of ghostly advisers inspiriting them to the prosecution of this most righteous war. Nay, the holy men of the Church did not scruple, at times, to buckle on the cuirass over the cassock, to exchange the crosier for the lance, and thus ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... anything to compare to riding across the desert at dawn? At dawn, when to your right and to your left march phalanxes of ghostly shapes, which maybe are the shadows of the night, or maybe, as says the legend, the ghosts of the many long-dead kingdoms buried in oblivion and the relentless sands; when the whistling of the wind is as the shouting of men and the thunder ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... had it been perfectly dark, which it was not. She arose, therefore, and, without taking a light with her, went into the parlour. A faint afterglow illumined the windows and suffused the room with an uncertain, dim, ghostly light which lent to all its objects that vague flatness from which the imagination carves what shapes it lists. As Gwen reached for the picture, a sudden conviction possessed her that her father stood just behind her ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... love,' continued Emma, 'or canst thou hope for my affection whilst that ghostly gift divides us? Never! Inhuman man, thou wilt teach me to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... them like a substance, a silence broken only by the roar of the storm and the crashing of wind-swept branches of the trees that lined the road. The car's powerful search-lights threw up in ghostly shapes the covered stumps and hedges they passed and the masses of snow that beat against them. Subconsciously the girl knew that this boy beside her, driving with the recklessness of a lost soul, was merely guessing at a road no one could have seen, but in that half-hour ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... passed. One of the friars in priest's surplice carried it in a box with the lid open, and two friars in brown habits walked before it with lifted candles. But as the painted image in its scarlet clothes and jewels entered the Countess's bedroom with its grim and ghostly procession, and was borne like a baby mummy to the foot of her bed, it ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... launched the pungy, not alone; Another vessel slipped Down in the water with their own, And ghostly sailors shipped; They heard the rigging flap and creak, And hollow orders cried. But not a living man could seek, And ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... up and down among those wrapped-up, ghostly chairs and tables and cabinets and statues many times before Joe arrived with the minister—and he was a Methodist, McCabe by name. You should have seen Mrs. Ball's look as he advanced his portly form and round face with its shaven upper lip into the drawing-room. She tried to be cordial, ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... fields toward the town in the clear distance and sighed softly as he put the pouch back in his pocket, and, resting his arm on his knee and his chin in his hand, sat blowing clouds of smoke out of the shade into the sunshine, absently watching the ghostly shadows dance on the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... strongest castle in France and the most beautiful wife, and fought the bishops of Metz and Treves together, because they did not approve of the lady; Henri VI of England riding through the walled city with his bride, Marguerite, by his side: ghostly funeral processions of dead dukes, whose strange, Oriental obsequies were famed throughout the world; younger and more splendid ghosts: Louis XIII and Richelieu entering in triumph when France had fought and won Lorraine, only to give it back by bargaining later; ghosts of stout ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... concern, but, in the watchful eyes of Hillsborough, he was the embodiment of that vague and mysterious danger that seemed to be forever lurking on the outskirts of slavery, ready to sound a shrill and ghostly signal in the impenetrable swamps, and steal forth under the midnight stars to murder, rapine, and pillage—a danger always threatening, and yet never assuming shape; intangible, and yet real; impossible, and ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... woods, until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone. No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the hour out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away in outlandish cities, and in the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which never in all these ages has heard a sound, or seen the sun, nor ever shall; therefore the water flowing from it carries to the upper air a deeper silence than the spell left by the old Quaker on the hills, or even the ghostly memory of the Indian tribes, who, ages long ago, hunted and slowly faded away in these forests on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Francis was summoned to attend her father. None of the household was stirring save Brooks, an old servitor, who stood at the foot of the steps with the horses. The statues of terrace and court gleamed ghostly white in the darkness, and the grim old keep frowned darkly upon them. The deserted aspect of the courtyard filled the girl with dismay. High purposes and noble resolves flourish in the bright light of day and grow into mightiness in the first ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... excitement, impatient of delay, and sick with repeated disappointments. The regulars were ready for service; the volunteers thought they were, but knew better a few weeks later. Time and again orders for embarkation were received, only to be revoked upon rumors of ghostly warships reported off some distant portion of the coast. Spain was playing her old game of manana at the expense of the Americans, and inducing her powerful enemy to refrain from striking a blow by means of terrifying rumors skilfully circulated through the so-called ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... of many generations of Incas had glowed in almost heavenly beauty, embosomed in green and gold and scarlet in the midst of inaccessible mountains which themselves were overtopped by the mighty peaks of eternal snow that I had so often seen glimmering white and ghostly in the moonlight, like guardian spirits round an enchanted realm, on many a night of delicious revelry now far past and lost in the swift flood of the years that had rolled ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... glanced around the room. There were no other doors, only the row of tiny windows around the ceiling of the room, pale, ghostly squares ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... the lead and they wove through ghostly rooms to what must have been the heart of the post—the transfer point. To Ross's unvoiced relief the plate was glowing. He had been nagged by the fear that when the lights blew out the transfer plate might also have been affected. He jumped for ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... a picture and leave man out. Whistler very seldom leaves man out, although I believe there is one "Nocturne" wherein only the stars and the faint rim of the silver moon keep guard. But usually we see the dim suggestion of the bridge's arch, the ghostly steeples, lights lost in the enfolding fog, vague purple barges on the river, and ships rocking solemnly in the offing—all strangely mellow with peace, and subtle thoughts of stillness, rest, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... me first know what it is all about. Not to know anything at all makes me so unhappy. I see nothing but a dreadful darkness, and shadows that are moving about—Give me light, so that I may see clearly! Perhaps I know these ghostly shallows? ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... to stand alone, and in fact did not suspect that here was a new kind of work, such that it would put an end forever to his old manner of writing. He intended to call the new volume "Old-Time Legends: together with Sketches, Experimental and Ideal,"—a title that is fairly ghostly with the transcendental nonage of his genius, pale, abstract, ineffectual, with oblivion lurking in every syllable. Fields knew better than that. But he gave him something more than advice; he cheered him with his extravagant ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... that he had lived through and travelled over, and he fancied it hardly possible that he could ever get back again. But now, with every step that he took, he found himself getting miserably back into the old enchanted land. The mist rose up about him, the pale mist-bow of ghostly promise curved before him; and he trod back again, poor boy, out of the clime of real effort, into the land of ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... boat, our silent boatman, like a spectral gondolier, rowed us silently along the labyrinthine canals of this dim and ghostly Venice. Vathek Beckford would have made them waterways to the Hall ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... he kept to the road, his horse occasionally taking fright, as a truck passed clanking slowly in the opposite direction, or a staff car turned out to pass him like a fleeting, ghostly shadow. By following the trees which lined the road at regular intervals he was fairly sure to keep the road. He was very tired and soon began to feel sleepy, but the driving storm, which by this time had assumed the proportions of a tempest, stung him to wakefulness. Once, at a ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... that it lies in the construction, though Fielding's following of the ancients, both sincere and satiric, has imposed a false air of regularity upon that. The Odyssey of Joseph, of Fanny, and of their ghostly mentor and bodily guard is, in truth, a little haphazard, and might have been longer or shorter without any discreet man approving it the more or the less therefor. The real merits lie partly in the abounding ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... as you will guess, but pleased to be on shore again. It was a melancholy neighbourhood of low islands, overgrown with rank grass and bushes, salt water encircling them, and inside sandy dunes and hummocks with shallow pools, gleaming ghostly in the retreating daylight, while beyond these rose the black bosses of what looked like a forest. Thither I made my way, plunging uncomfortably through shallows, and tripping over blackened branches which, lying just below the surface, quivered like snakes as the ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... towering there, and its crest and the crests of all its lofty neighbors were brightly silvered by the descending sun. From Pilatus on the right, away to the green banks of Weggis and Vitznau on the left, the lake spread in blue and bronze, and by the opposite shore the water's calm was such that a ghostly Lucerne of the under-world lay upside down just beneath its level, and mocked reality above by the perfection of detail. Little bright-sailed boats danced here and there, a large steamer was gliding into the landing by the Gare, and the music from ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... old brass lantern, and presently he was flashing his way up among the dark sounds of the black old wood, with that ghostly face tenderly pressed against ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... was placed beyond the glance of my eye, the touch of my hand. She was mine, aye, as a dream might be; something I possessed but could not hold. Heigho! the faces that peer at us from the firelight shadows! They troop along in a ghostly cavalcade, and the winds that creep over the window sill and under the door—who can say that they are not the echoes of voices we once heard in ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... bated breath and pounding hearts, for shadowy forms to appear. They were not unaccustomed to danger and the suspense of an ambush. But in the forest they had solid ground beneath their feet. Trees and other tangible objects were all about them. But here everything seemed unreal, almost ghostly. The darkness of the forest was no blacker than the night here in the open. And yet there was no shady covering of leaves to shut out the light—only a strange, weird, unearthly canopy of mist. In the forest innumerable tree trunks ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... she was guided to a room, very unlike that fresh white bower at Bowstead, large, eerie, ghostly-looking, bare save for a dark oak chest, and a bed of the same material, the posts apparently absolute trees, squared and richly carved, and supporting a solid wooden canopy with an immense boss as big as a cabbage, and carved something like ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sky was beginning to warm the tops of the higher among the ice-masses, thereby rendering the rest of the scene more coldly grey. The calm which had favoured the escape of our fugitives still prevailed, and the open spaces had gradually widened until the floes had assumed the form of ghostly white islets floating in a blue-black sea, in which the fantastic cliffs, lumps, and pinnacles were sharply ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... engines carrying us up the James. Dancing Point reached sharply out as if to intercept us. But the owner of those strong dark hands that happened to be at the wheel knew the story of Dancing Point—of how many an ebony Tam O'Shanter had seen ghostly revelry there; and Gadabout was held well ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... gondola, which is conveying CULCHARD and PODBURY from the Railway Station to the Hotel Dandolo, Venice. The gondola is gliding with a gentle sidelong heave under shadowy bridges of stone and cast-iron, round sharp corners, and past mysterious blank walls, and old scroll-work gateways, which look ghostly in the moonlight. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 26, 1891 • Various
... performed, and deferred the sending to Don Alonzo, though her thoughts were perpetually on him. She, by the advice of Brilliard, writes a letter to Octavio; which was not like those she had before written, but as an humble penitent would write to a ghostly Father, treating him with all the respect that was possible; and if ever she mentioned love, it was as if her heart had violently, and against her will, burst out into softness, as still she retained there; and then she would take up ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... audience consists of but one person, and that person is a young lady, it is hardly possible that he should not become personally intimate with her; hardly possible that he should not be in some measure grateful. Miss Gushing's responses came from her with such fervour, and she begged for ghostly advice with such eager longing to have her scruples satisfied, that Mr Oriel had nothing for it but to give way to a ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... to startle Jolly Robin. But the moon-faced man paid not the slightest attention to the accident. There was something ghostly in the way he stood there, all in white, never moving, never ...
— The Tale of Jolly Robin • Arthur Scott Bailey
... hill. On one side this hill was bathed by the blue waters of Tezcuco, on the other, a mile or more away, rose the temple towers of Mexico. Along the slopes of the hill, and in some directions for a mile from its base, grew huge cedar trees from the boughs of which hung a grey and ghostly-looking moss. These trees are so large that the smallest of them is bigger than the best oak in this parish of Ditchingham, while the greatest measures twenty-two paces round the base. Beyond and between these marvellous and ancient trees were ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... what effect was produced on his countenance and his mind; enough that he saw a fine thing, but not so fine as the idea cited above; which has been between the two eyes of humanity ever since women were sought in marriage. With yonder old gentleman it may have been a ghostly hair or a disease of the optic nerves; but for us it is a real growth, and humanity might profitably imitate him in his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pre-eminently rich. Aiar Urai Arang is said to be a small child whose mother is Aiar. Besides these there are other powerful spirits of the sea, the land, the up-river country, and so forth, and each is attended by innumerable slaves and attendants of ghostly kind; they have influence of many kinds over the dwellers in this world, some for good, others very much for evil. Madness is caused by various evil spirits throwing themselves into mortals, ghosts with red eyes which flash like lightning. The "amok" devil which comes from the swamp, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... the night about him began to fill with ghostly life. His shadow beckoned and grimaced ahead of him, and the stunted bush seemed to move. His eyes were alert and questing. Within himself he reasoned that he would see nothing, and yet some unusual ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... as holding the hands of companions, I fled forth to the hiding, receiving night that talks not, Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness, To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still. ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... in some remote and dreadful altitude where things might happen, indeed were about to happen, that had never before happened within the ken of man. Horror may have formed an ingredient, but it was not chiefly horror, and in no sense ghostly horror. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... understand anything. So much so that those who saw him exclaimed: "What a burden he'll be to his father!" Now when there was anything to be done, the eldest had always to do it; but if something was required later or in the night-time, and the way led through the churchyard or some such ghostly place, he always replied: "Oh! no, father: nothing will induce me to go there, it makes me shudder!" for he was afraid. Or, when they sat of an evening around the fire telling stories which made one's flesh creep, the listeners sometimes said: "Oh! it makes one shudder," the youngest ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... there, in his furs, upon the illuminated surface, and looking down in my direction. As I listen, one answers him from behind the woods in the valley. What a wild winter sound,—wild and weird, up among the ghostly hills. Since the wolf has ceased to howl upon these mountains, and the panther to scream, there is nothing to be compared with it. So wild! I get up in the middle of the night to hear it. It is refreshing to the ear, and one delights ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... and clear by now, and Chris often leaned his cheek on the sash as the priest talked, and watched that steady shining shield go up the sky, and the familiar view of lawns and water and trees, ghostly and mystical ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... friendship."[7] Grim tragedies of the high-seas, too, came within his ken.[8] Two or three moments of the voyage stand out for us with peculiar distinctness: the gorgeous sunset off Cadiz bay, when he watched the fading outlines of Gibraltar and Cape St Vincent,—ghostly mementos of England,—not as Arnold's weary Titan, but as a Herakles stretching a hand of help across the seas; the other sunset on the Mediterranean, when Etna loomed against the flaming sky;[9] and, between them, that glaring noontide on ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... was burned down, but the place has been haunted. I, myself, good gentlemen, have heard ghostly music, and I swear ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... shot through Philip, and for an instant he stood rigid. What was that he saw out in the gray gloom of Arctic desolation, creeping up, up, up, almost black at its beginning, and dying away like a ghostly winding-sheet? A gurgling cry rose in his throat, and he went on, panting now like a broken-winded beast in his excitement. It grew near, blacker, warmer. He fancied that he could feel its heat, which was the new fire of life blazing ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... flaming birds-of-paradise, of the echoing aisle ways between interwoven jungle growths, of the arching aerial roofs of verdure and the shadowy hanging-gardens from which by day parakeets chattered and monkeys screamed and by night ghostly armies of fireflies glowed. He was no longer impressed by that world of fierce appetites and fierce conflicts. He seemed to have attained to a secret inner calm, to an obsessional impassivity across which the passing calamities of existence only echoed. He merely recalled that he had ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... chill and moist, the quacking ducks were thickening on the pools, and strange noises came from ghostly swells and hidden creeks. The tired horses moved forward with soundless feet upon the sod, which had softened during the day. They quickened their steps when they saw the lantern shine from the ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... three stood there a soft whistle sounded from the bushes across the gully, and Jim Burdon pushed a ghostly ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in the furious chaos of human elements. The tortured airs of heaven howl out curses in a horrid unison, this fair free soil of ours, dishonored and befouled, moans beneath our feet in a dismal drone of hopeless woe; there is no rock or cavern or ghostly den of our mighty land but hisses back the echo of some hideous curse, and hell itself is upon earth, split ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... Lucille departed. The ghostly Jarvis closed the door without so much as a click of the latch. Hastings advanced slowly toward the bed, his eyes not yet accustomed to ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... thing I did not like about the cavern was that it had innumerable passages and windings about, and odd places, with dark holes, and ghostly-looking corners. I was not satisfied until I had explored them all, blocking up narrow little slits, and doing all I could to rout out anything that might be harbouring there. There was one passage very long and steep, the entrance to it out of the cavern was so narrow we did not notice it ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... the fog was outside—thick enough for a man to lose himself in it. The yellow mist which had crept in under the doors and through the crevices of the window-sashes gave a ghostly look to the room—a ghastly, abnormal look, he said to himself. The fire was smouldering instead of blazing. But what did it matter? He was going out. He had not bought the pistol last night—like a fool. ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the ruined grist mill and the old dam not before ten o'clock. There was a pale and watery moon, the shine of which glistened on the falling water over the old logs of the dam, but gave the searchers little light. The moon's rays merely aided in making the surroundings of the mill more ghostly. ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... darkness. The innumerable cornice lights had been extinguished. Graham saw the aperture of the ventilator with ghostly snow whirling above it and dark figures moving hastily. Three knelt on the fan. Some dim thing—a ladder was being lowered through the opening, and a hand appeared holding a ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... picture in which the little 'piou-pious' of the modern army advance, under the flag on which are inscribed the battles of the past; while the Old Guard rises from the earth to reinforce their ranks, and the ghostly figure of Jeanne d'Arc, symbolizing the spirit of France, leads on to victory. Listening as he talked, his hearers became infected with Sir Charles's spirit, and thinking of the past, looking to the future, he so kindled them that when he closed the book ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... at the sky; his eyes were fixed on a ghostly shape moving close ahead of them and on the fitful gleam of a ship's lantern that tossed and glimmered in the dark. Dropping his paddle he put his hands to his mouth and lifted his voice in a long hail. The light bobbed and swung and an ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... men see by night, Mitred, with eyes of serene command, Saint Patrick moved onward in ghostly white: The Staff of Jesus was in his hand; Twelve priests paced after him unafraid, And the boy, Benignus, more like a maid; Like a maid just wedded he walked and smiled, To Christ new plighted, that ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... is pity, is it not? Harmachis, being but a man, methinks that thou wilt need all thy ghostly strength to nerve ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... the kindness of his heart, grasped the old woman to keep her from falling to the floor, he played directly into the hands of very material agencies under her control. There was nothing ghostly or even spiritual in the incidents that followed close upon the simulated fainting spell of the fortune-teller. It has been said before that her bony fingers closed upon his arms in a far from feeble manner. He had no time for surprise ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... sweetness of her youth, had she and I realized what might have been? Would Fanchonette always have sympathized with the whims and vagaries of the restless yet loyal soul that hung enraptured on her singing in the Quartier Latin so long ago that the memory of that song is like the memory of a ghostly ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... himself a ghostly chuckle. "I'm afraid that isn't possible, Mr. Malone. I would be happy to let you have a small model of the machine if we had one available—more than happy. I would like to see such a machine myself, as a matter of fact. ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... my test.' In the Paradiso it was, that he saw in beams of crystal radiance the ideal of the unity of the religious mind, the love and admiration for the high unseen things of which the Christian church was to him the sovereign embodiment. The mediaeval spirit, it is true, wears something of a ghostly air in the light of our new day. This attempt, which has been made many a time before, 'to unify two ages,' did not carry men far in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless it were an idle dream to think that the dead hand of Dante's ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and painting ghostly shadows on the wall. It was winter, and late in winter; indeed, the season was now at length drawing near to the end of winter, and approaching that dear time of spring which, beyond doubt, will be the eventful front ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... Notwithstanding the independence exhibited by her in all secular affairs, in her own spiritual concerns she uniformly testified the deepest humility, and deferred too implicitly to what she deemed the superior sagacity, or sanctity, of her ghostly counsellors. An instance of this humility may be worth recording. When Fray Fernando de Talavera, afterwards archbishop of Granada, who had been appointed confessor to the queen, attended her for the first time in that capacity, he continued seated, after she had knelt down to make her confession, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... spectre crew an act by itself. This would separate the poetical from the domestic side of the story. But by far the most important alteration was in the interview with the spirits. In the old versions they spoke and sang. I remembered that the effect of this ghostly dialogue was dreadfully human, so I arranged that no voice but Rip's should be heard. This is the only act on the stage in which but one person speaks while all the others merely gesticulate, and I was quite sure that ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... her raptures by an exclamation. Mrs. Bazalgette looked round, and there was her niece inspecting the ghostly robe which had caused her ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... break the spell at once," he declared, and having made a trumpet with his hand, he hallooed loudly toward the west. The result was unexpected. A ghostly triple echo, which the lower tone of their earlier conversation had failed to elicit, answered him from the opposite shore. In broad daylight an echo will suggest mystery and a bodiless, impish mocker, even to an unimaginative mind, but now the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... down the slope of the bank, laying her behind the tangled roots of a great oak. Already the sky was clearer, and the trees and men were beginning to take dim shape. The river rushed by, a deeper black than sky and woods, with a few ghostly bits of white where the foam of the ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... the wide window, looking out across the snow, lighted only by the stars and a ghostly crescent of moon. The evergreens were huddled closely together as though they kept each other warm. Beyond, the mountains brooded in their eternal sleep, which riving lightnings and vast, reverberating thunders were powerless ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... lavender breath entered the room, and looked up as if at a ghostly herald. She toed out her two small morocco-shod feet more particularly upon the floor, she smoothed down her own and her doll's little petticoats, and she also made herself all ready to ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... there were delicacies that he liked more than raw potatoes, he was hungry enough to enjoy them—and not even ask for salt. And his wife, too, ate almost as heartily as he did. The pale moonlight, streaming through the cellar window, lighted their banquet hall with its ghostly gleams. They enjoyed the cool dampness of the place. They liked its musty smell. And Moses Mouse remarked—between mouthfuls—that they hadn't had such an elegant feast for weeks. "It's quite like old ...
— The Tale of Miss Kitty Cat - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... one away up on the shoulder of the mountain, and I imagined I could almost see him sitting there in his furs upon the illuminated surface and looking down in my direction. As I listened, maybe one would answer him from behind the woods in the valley, a fitting sound amid the ghostly winter hills. ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... of the large upper chamber, facing the east, was Peace." And so this old pilgrim found it, lying in his four-poster, listening to the cries and calls in the jargonelle pear-tree in the corner of the garden, and watching the ghostly oblong of the window that faced the east, glimmer and brighten into the effulgence of day. It was then, with his old hands folded on his breast, that he thought about ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland |
