"Wraith" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the stairs; and following silent, noiseless like a wraith was Janet, expectant, eager; for she felt she was to see the opening of a great battle. Constance led the way, carrying a taper. As they traversed some passage, their ears caught the sound of music. They listened a moment, ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... moment I was in the vestibule—locked in—was in the gallery, and there found Fausta, just awake, as she declared, from a comfortable night, reading her morning lesson in the Bible, and sure, she said, that I should soon appear. Nor ghost, nor wraith, had visited her. I spread for her a brown paper tablecloth on the table in the vestibule. I laid out her breakfast for her, called her, and wondered at her toilet. How is it that women always make themselves appear as neat and finished as if there were no conflict, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... get you out of this." In the darkness his face glowed wraith-like. Then she felt his hand ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... Puna was I, in Ku-ki'i, in Ha'e-ha'e, I saw a wraith of lehua, a burning bush, A fire-tree beneath the lava plate. Magnificent Puna, fertile from rain, 5 At all times weaving its mantle. Aye Puna's a land of splendor, Proudly bedight with palm and lehua; Beauteous above, but horrid ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... for the run to Havre, and except for feeling at twilight the wistfulness that comes out of the Norman landscape—the melancholy of things forgotten but not gone, dead but still brooding wraith-like over the valley of the Seine, haunting the hoary churches, and the turreted chateaux, and the windings of the river, and the long lines of poplar, and the villages and forests and orchards and corn-fields—except for this, his spirits were good. If ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... a long breath. At first he thought that this must be Scraggy's wraith come to haunt him after some horrible lonely death. He had far rather deal with a living Scraggy than a dead one, and at once recovered ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... clothes-line, was flapping in the breezes. Maddened by this obstruction which hung, veil-like, over her bovine lineaments, she gave a twist of her Texas horns, a tug, and the surplice was released, but from the line only; it twined itself like a white wraith about the horns. ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... far minaret of faithful cloud A wraith-muezzin of the sunset cried Over the sea that swung with sultan pride, "Allah is Beauty, there is none beside! Allah is Beauty, not to be denied By Death or any ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... to appeal to you. His letter was written in deep dejection of spirit, and mentioned that he feared a judgment had come upon him for wishing to appear as a Scotchman on Scottish soil, as he had one moonlight night shortly after his arrival seen his 'wraith'. He evidently alluded to the fact that before his departure he had procured for himself a Highland costume similar to that which we had the honour to supply to you, with which, as perhaps you will remember, he was much struck. He may, however, ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... sticks; and in the morning darkness, without a word, they arose, slipped on their packs, adjusted head-straps, and hit the trail. The last miles into Selkirk, Daylight drove the Indian before him, a hollow-cheeked, gaunt-eyed wraith of a man who else would have lain down and slept or abandoned his burden ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... to break some spell of lethargy, but she only succeeded in swaying a little as she stood pallid and wraith-like in the moonlight. Her lips moved, but ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... she said, "because I want all the spirits I am capable of to carry it through. It has to be done with a light heart, else it will deceive nobody. And so, my dear, to-morrow you will say 'good-bye' to me, and have a sort of wraith of me instead for a little while. Oh, Alice, I hope ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... figure of the senachie staggered forward. The men, hardly awake, stood staring and trembling, and looking from the senachie to Wallace; at last one, extricating his terror-struck tongue, and falling on his knees, exclaimed: "Blessed St. Andrew! here is the senachie and his wraith." Bruce perceived the mistake of his servants, and explaining to them that a traveling minstrel had obliged the senachie by performing his duty, he bade them retire to rest, and think no more of their alarm. The intoxicated ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... the canty auld wife cam till her braith, And she thocht the Bible micht ward aif scaith; Be it benshee, bogle, ghaist, or wraith— ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... bending over him, and vague multitudes crowding the banks, distant, dreamlike beneath the yellow storm-light. Of Tintoret's Christ before Pilate, of that figure of the Saviour, long, straight, wrapped in white and luminous like his own wraith, I have spoken already. But I must speak of the S. Rocco Christ in the Garden, as imaginative as anything by Rembrandt, and infinitely more beautiful. The moonlight tips the draperies of the three sleeping ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... "So, he not only forged the words for her but words for me, made letters he called mine: what I sent, he retained, gave these in place, all by the mistress messenger! As I recognized her, at potency of truth, so she, by the crystalline soul, knew me, never mistook the signs. Enough of this—let the wraith go to nothingness again, here is the orb, have only thought for her!" What follows admits us to the very HEART of Browning's poetry—admits us to the great Idea which is almost, in these days, strange to say, peculiarly his— which no other poet, certainly, of ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... many campaigns, was riding his hobby of the Civil War and descanting on Lee's tactics in the last Wilderness struggle. I said something about the stark romance of it—of Jeb Stuart flitting like a wraith through the forests; of Sheridan's attack at Chattanooga, when the charging troops on the ridge were silhouetted against a harvest moon; of Leonidas Polk, last of the warrior Bishops, baptizing his fellow ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... calling to her, staring at her, frowning on her. The pictures in her mind were so obtrusive and exact that, as the twilight deepened, she dreaded to raise her head and look at the dark corners of the room, lest his wraith, the offspring of her excited imagination, should be waiting there, to startle her. Once she had such a fancy of his being in the next room, hiding—though she knew quite well what a distempered fancy it was, and had no belief in it—that she forced herself to go ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... "The wraith of my departed priestly calling forbids me to phrase my answer just as I'd like best to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... in my body's house, And you have both the house and her— But sometimes she is less your own Than a wild, gay adventurer; A restless and an eager wraith, How can I tell what she will do— Oh, I am sure of my body's faith, But what if my soul ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... management of the supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in Faustus. Shakspere's age believed in witches, elves, and apparitions; and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical in his use of such machinery. The ghost in Hamlet is merely an embodied suspicion. Banquo's wraith, which is invisible to all but Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience. The witches in the same play are but the promptings of ambition, thrown into a human shape, so as to become actors in the drama. In the same way, the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream are the personified caprices of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the corner. Then the wheels of memory slipped ahead through four years of time, and he was aware of the present, of the books he had opened and the universe he had won from their pages, of his dreams and ambitions, and of his love for a pale wraith of a girl, sensitive and sheltered and ethereal, who would die of horror did she witness but one moment of what he had just lived through—one moment of all the muck of life ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... took you for a wraith—I took you for a vision," said the Baron plaintively. He put his hand upon his guest's arm. "Oh, man!" said he, "if you were Gaelic, if you were Gaelic, if you could understand! I came through the dark from a place of pomp, from a crowded street, from things new and thriving, and above ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... Duncan, the oldest, and the kindest woman in the village, was the first to come to her senses. "He may be a ghost, or a bogle, or a wraith," she said; "or he may only be a harmless Brownie. It is beyond me to say; but this I know, that if he be an evil spirit, he will not dare to look on the Holy Book." And with that she ran into her cottage, and brought out the great leather-bound ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... he lived, but I saw nothing more than at the first. I wanted to cross the threshold over which he walked so often, to see the noise-proof room in which he used to write, to look at the chimney-place down which the soot came, to sit where he used to sit and smoke his pipe, and to conjure up his wraith to look in once more upon his old deserted dwelling. That ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to the Indian musicians, fiddles and guitars fairly leaped to position, and in a moment Rezanov enjoyed the novel delusion of encircling a girl's floating wraith. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... 'wraith' of a small box whose image was out at the right, appeared above the other image off at the left and it was turned with a corner to the front. Again, at the central position each image was duplicated, the true pair being of full size, bright and distinct, ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Duke of Orleans going out into the dark, where hired assassins were waiting to hack him in pieces. Then a court of justice trying and acquitting this confessed murderer of the king's brother, upon the ground that tyrannicide is a duty; the sad, crazed wraith of a king saying the words he had been taught: "Fair cousin, we pardon you all." And the tragedy ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... on the shoulders and skirt of his greatcoat, so he looked as though he was performing some evil incantatory dance of the body, while his face and hands and feet remained black and still. There was no sound of his breath. "Good mercy on us!" she said to herself. "Is it his wraith, and has he come to harm in London?" But the dark patch of his face moved, and he began his long demonstration to her that a man need not be dead to be dreadful. "Is there anything you want of me, Miss Melville?" the clipped voice had asked. It was, so plainly the cold ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... marveled, and smiled to think that, had one stayed at home, one might never know these things. Forgotten was the wraith of Leung Kai Chu, the jungle trail of Hallman, and even the trepidation with which we had awaited the sailing ship's boat. I was soon to be in those enchanted archipelagoes, and to see for myself those mighty swimmers and those sleepers upon the sea. I might ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... a terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminous, as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of greater pride, holding himself, in military self-command, even more erect than before. He did not omit to come in his very best black coat to the dinner-table, where ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... if the sight of Leopold, so triumphantly alive, had shown him fully his own change and his weakness had demonstrated to him clearly that he was but the wraith ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... seen a figure, slight and beautiful, clad in robe of skin, with moccasoned feet, and long, white hair, nearly reaching to the ground, hovering sorrowfully around the falls; and this strange figure they believe to be the wraith of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... for a shadow or a cleft beneath his notice—perhaps for a fallen branch or heap of fern and withered leaf—I know not. But I let him go, unstirring, my eyes riveted upon the other shape, seated there like some grey wraith upon a giant's ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... storm grew loud apace, The water-wraith was shrieking; And in the scowl of heaven each face Grew dark ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... was in him also a vein of sentiment, shown in his poem on the death of Clidna—"Clidna the fair-haired, long to be remembered," who was tragically drowned at Glandore harbor in the south, and whose sad wraith still moans upon the bar, in hours of fate for ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... up to the giant impudently, then announced his master. "Know, fellow, that this is none other than a dead man—a wraith, indeed! At least, so saith Master Monceux, the lord Sheriff of Nottingham. ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... when last we met; My passion I as freely told him; Clasp'd in his arms, I little thought That I should never more behold him! Scarce was he gone, I saw his ghost; It vanish'd with a shriek of sorrow; Thrice did the water-wraith ascend, And gave a doleful groan ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... For the solemn and powerful interview of Hercules and Ulysses, see close of Odyssey XI. Wraith (Icel. vordhr, guardian) is here used for SHADE. In Scottish superstition it signifies the shadow of a person seen before death, as in 'Guy Mannering,' chap. x: 'she was uncertain if it were the gipsy, or her WRAITH.' The most notable use ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... like dead leaves on the long swells. The stars came out, the gulls went shoreward for the night, and we were as alone as if on the sea. The woman's slender figure, wrapped in her white cloak, became a silent, shining wraith. She was within touch of my hand, yet unreachably remote. I lost my glib speech. The gray loneliness that one feels in a crowd came over me. If I had been alone with my men, I should have felt well accompanied, master of my craft, and in tune with ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... home before eleven o'clock, brushed the wraith of a kiss half an inch from her lips, and asked was there anything nice for supper? The supper things were already on the table, and, after tasting ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... of kindness So easily out of mind, Those chances to be angels Which we poor mortals find— They come in night and silence, Each sad, reproachful wraith, When hope is faint and flagging And a ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... alone, privately. slo adv. only; tan —— only. soltar let go, loosen, utter; —— una carcajada burst out laughing. sollozante adj. sobbing. sombra f. shadow, shade, darkness, trace, vestige, wraith, spirit. sombrero m. hat. sombro, -a somber, dark, overcast, cloudy, gloomy, melancholy, sullen. sn m. sound, noise, manner. sonar sound, resound. soneto m. sonnet. sonido m. sound, peal. sonoro, -a sonorous, resounding, loud, ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... Was it a wraith or woman seen, A thing of dreams, or blood and flesh, The flame that burst from out the sheen Of ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... climb the mountain goats, On stormy cape and crag, The refuge of the wanderer floats— Our hospitable flag; While alien banners only mock With glory's fleeting wraith, It stands on the eternal rock Of our eternal faith; And handed on from sire and son, It furls not day nor night; So England holds what England won, ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... fairy, brownie, pixy, elf, dwarf, urchin; Puck, Robin Goodfellow; leprechaun, Cluricaune^, troll, dwerger^, sprite, ouphe^, bad fairy, nix, nixie, pigwidgeon^, will-o'-the wisp. [Supernatural appearance] ghost, revenant, specter, apparition, spirit, shade, shadow, vision; hobglobin, goblin, orc; wraith, spook, boggart^, banshee, loup-garou [Fr.], lemures^; evil eye. merman, mermaid, merfolk^; siren; satyr, faun; manito^, manitou, manitu. possession, demonic possession, diabolic possession; insanity &c 503. [in jest, in science] Maxwell's demon. [person possessed by a demon] demoniac. Adj. demonic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to relate—was still holding her hand in his. There stirred in his pulses the thrill Kathleen Eppes had always wakened—a thrill of memory now, a mere wraith of emotion. He was thinking of a certain pink-cheeked girl with crinkly black-brown hair and eyes that he had likened to chrysoberyls—and he wondered whimsically what had become of her. This was not she. This was assuredly not Kathleen, for this woman had a large mouth—a ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... "Where none attends, what boots it to complain? Men's froward hearts are moved with women's tears As marble stones are pierced with drops of rain, No plaints find passage through unwilling ears: The tyrant, haply, would his wraith restrain Heard he these prayers ruthless Godfrey hears, Yet not thy fault is this, my chance, I see, Hath made even ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... things discern me, name me, praise me— I walk in a world of silent voices, praising; And in this world you see me like a wraith Blown softly here and there, on silent winds. 'Praise me'—I say; and look, not in a glass, But in your eyes, to see my image there— Or in your mind; you smile, I am contented; You look at me, with interest unfeigned, And listen—I am pleased; or else, alone, I watch thin bubbles veering brightly ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... She avoided further reference to the subject broached by Le Gardeur by saying,—"It was I whom Heloise saw pass into the church. I never explained the mystery to her, and she is not sure yet whether it was my wraith or myself who gave her that fright on St. John's eve. But I claimed her heart as one authorized to take it, and if I could not marry her myself I claimed the right to give her to whomsoever I pleased, and I gave her to you, Le Gardeur, but you would ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... is truth, though he might lie with hands clinched across his brow to shut out the wraith of it that haunted him; though he might set his course by the faith that was in him, and put away the hope of the world—whose hope is love—the truth was there, staring, staring at him out of Eileen Erroll's ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... eyes; then opened them again—wide. The figures were still there, and they had grown clearer, more definite, especially the countenance of each of the two wraith-like women who stood, like sentinels, one on either side of the ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... title-page, together with quotations at the heads of chapters, belongs to a past fashion. Fanshawe and Butler are powerful conceptions, but they are so purely embodiments of passion as to assume an air of unreality. Butler is like an evil wraith, and Fanshawe is as evanescent as a sad cloud in the sky, touched with the first pale light of morning. Fanshawe, with his pure heart and high resolves, represents that constant aspiration toward lofty moral truth which marked Hawthorne's own mind, and ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... not hear her voice. . . . It was that way while she stood beside me—I could not hear her, Celia. I could not hear what she was saying. It was no spirit I saw—no phantom from the dead there by my bed, no ghost—no restless wraith, grave-driven through the night. I believe she is living. She knows I believe it. . . . As you sat here, a moment ago, reading to me, I saw her reflected for a moment in the mirror behind you, ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... of an eerie and mysterious Presence has forced itself upon our mind, and we have been able to understand the emotions in which originated the visions of wraith and phantom of the bards of old. Our travellers, however, passed through the gale unhurt. A tremendous outburst of rain, the final effort of the tempest, cleared the sky, which towards the west was gradually lighted up with gleams of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... reason though it destroyed her coiffure. "Enough of this!" I cried to her. "Take your place by the boat, and do as you are told." And I saw Helena pass forward, also, as we all reached the deck, herself pale as a wraith, but with no outcry and no spoken word. So, at last, I ranged them all near the boat that swung ready ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... off on his perceiving that real flesh and blood is before him—Charles Clancy himself, and not his wraith. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... skin would have matched the Hyperborean snows tidily enough. As for her eyes, the customary similes of the court poets were gigantic onyxes or ebony highly polished and wet with May dew. These eyes were too big for her little face: they made of her a tiny and desirous wraith which nervously endured each incident of life, like a foreigner uneasily acquiescent to the custom ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... intended him to open the battle, and he was —as he had expected—finding it difficult to marshal the regiments of his arguments. In vain he thought of the tragedy of Garvin . . . . The thing was more complicated. And behind this redoubtable and sinister Eldon Parr he saw, as it were, the wraith of that: other who had once confessed the misery of his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... said. "Were you ever so much mine what could I do with you without your consent? No. You don't conquer a wraith, cold mist, stuff of dreams, illusion. It must come to you and cling to your breast. And ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... dream or vision, his ideal as well as his fate. She turns out to be an actual girl whom he has never seen, but whom both his father and her father—old friends—earnestly desire that he should marry. He travels to her home, is enthusiastically greeted, and finds her even more bewitching than her wraith or whatever it is to be called. But she is evidently in bad health, and dies the same night of aneurism. Not guested in the house, but trysted in the morning, he goes there, and seeing preparations in the street for a funeral, asks of some one, being only half alarmed, "Qui est ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... lest some barque be borne In wake of the wraith (ah, hearts that mourn!) Through the power of its fatal spell Into the yawn of the gulfs ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... his master's wraith; and because the earl signed his will this morning, he is sure to die, especially as Lord Cairnforth saw the same thing himself. Will you say, my lord, ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the cottage and the light which she always placed in the window. Then the moon shone full upon his face, and Jessie Bain looked at him with eyes that fairly bulged from their sockets. His features were now clearly visible in the bright moonlight. It was Hubert Varrick in the flesh, surely, or his wraith! ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... windy word or two. Now it takes more than that to produce a panic. The up-to-date ghost keeps his skeleton in a garage or some place where it is cleaned and oiled and kept in good working order. The modern wraith has sold his sheet to the old clo'es man, and dresses as in life. Now the ghost has learned to have a variety of good times, and he can make the living squirm far more satisfyingly than in the past. The spook of to-day enjoys making his haunted laugh even while he groans in terror. He knows ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... this partial insight into his past, which seemed to him stranger than complete oblivion. But he soon convinced himself that a slight hazy vision he conjured up of a wedding years and years ago was only a reflex image—an automatic reaction—from his recent marriage. For did not the wraith of his present wife quietly take its place before the altar where by rights he should have been able to recall her predecessor? It was all confusion; no doubt ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... swiftly down the steps, leaving Mr. Magee staring wonderingly after him. Like a wraith he merged with the shadows below. Magee turned slowly, and entered number seven. A fantastic film of frost was on the windows; the inner room was drear and chill. Partially undressing, he lay down on the brass bed and pulled the covers ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... emanations of themselves into the slumbers of sportsmen who have not treated them as they deserved. I have suffered from it myself. It was only last week that, having said something derogatory to the dignity of my second gun, I woke with a start at two o'clock in the morning, and found its wraith going through the most horrible antics in a patch of moonlight on my bed-room floor. I shot with that gun on the following day, and missed nearly everything I shot at. Could there be a more convincing proof? Take my advice, therefore, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... house to water the plants there, and then he stole into the house and up stairs, and threw himself upon the bed. And outside he still heard Sheila singing lightly to herself as she went about her ordinary duties, little thinking in how strange and wild a drama her wraith ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... Olaf crossed himself and said— 'I know that Odin the Great is dead; Sure is the triumph of our Faith, This one-eyed stranger was his wraith.' Dead rides Sir Morten ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... at last. One of the most popular modern books of travel—Eothen—is a poem which gives us the very atmosphere and odor of the Orient, but nothing more; and the author floats before our vision in so dim and wraith-like a manner, that many readers have doubted whether the work was founded on actual experience. On the other hand, those old narratives, of which Robinson Crusoe is the ideal type, bear unmistakable stains of the ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... be hers had already displaced my black stuff Lowood frock and straw bonnet: for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment; the pearl-coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped portmanteau. I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o'clock—gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment. "I will leave you by yourself, white dream," I said. "I am feverish: I hear the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the city, whereon all present vowed they saw it too, though, as I think, it was but a cross of stars. Another tells how that he met the very spirit of Issachar stalking through the market-place, and that peering into the eyes of the wraith, as in a mirror, he saw a great flame wrapping the temple walls, and by the light of it his own dead body. This man was the priest who first struck down the holy Levite yonder in the place ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... am I so frightful then? I live; though they call it death; I am only cold—say dear again"— But scarce could he heave a breath; The air felt dank, like a frozen fen, And he a half-conscious wraith. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... sunrise, assuring her it would not be safe for her to wander in the mountain by night. Little White Aster, therefore slept at Buddha's feet, shivering with cold, for her garments were far too thin to protect her from the keen mountain air. As she slept she dreamt of her father, whose wraith appeared to her, explaining that a false step had hurled him down into a ravine, whence he has vainly been trying to escape for ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... care what other people may think about us, or whether the 'hollow wraith of dying fame' that comes like a nimbus round some men may fade wholly or no, so long as we may be sure of acknowledgment and praise from Him from whom acknowledgment and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... again very soon, unless I get married, or commit a murder or some such enormity," rejoined Helwyse, his long mustache curling to, his smile. They shook hands,—the vigorous young god of the sun and the faded old wraith of Brahmanism,—with a friendly look ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... of passionate music, A hush and a silence then; The dancers rest in their pleasure quest, And lo! I am old again. Old and alone in my chamber, While the night wears wearily on, And the pallid wraith of a broken faith— Keeps watch with me till ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... author, a sardonic wraith, snickering somewhat sadly over the fact. His shade, wherever it suffers, is favoured in these days by many such consolations, some of them of much greater horsepower. Think of the facts and arguments, even the underlying theories and attitudes, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... dead brother. The spectre tells him that he will die at a place called Ticonderoga, but such a word is known to no man, and yet, when Pitt sends a Highland regiment, in which Captain Cameron is an officer, to the East, the doomed man sees his own wraith look at him from the water, and knows, when he hears the place is Ticonderoga, he will be the first to fall in ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... came, appearing like a materializing wraith from the shadow, and with an undulating movement of incredible grace she was again seated upon her perch, the fallen forked ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... that I have ever met. He is fat, and unbelievably nimble, and keen-eyed, and untiring. He says, "Hell!" when things go wrong; he smokes innumerable cigarettes, inhaling the fumes and sending out the thin wraith of smoke with little explosive sounds between tongue and lips; he wears blue shirts, and no collar to speak of, and his trousers are kept in place only by a miracle and an inefficient looking ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... He was not a wraith, no grisly spectre, no half-nebulous Shape. He was Peter Grimm, rugged, homespun, the man whose iron individuality had undergone and could ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... homeward along the misty ways of the park. The sun had been swallowed up by rising fog; all colour had been sucked out of the leaves and the heather, even from the golden glades of fern. Only Hester's hair, and her white dress as she passed along, uplifted, made of her a kind of luminous wraith, and beside her, like the supports of an altar-piece, moved the two pensive figures of ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Hiawassee Lake of the Dismal Swamp The Barge of Defeat Natural Bridge The Silence Broken Siren of the French Broad The Hunter of Calawassee Revenge of the Accabee Toccoa Falls Two Lives for One A Ghostly Avenger The Wraith Ringer of Atlanta The Swallowing Earthquake The Last Stand of the Biloxi The Sacred Fire of Natchez ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... sky and mountains alike. It drove into my eyes, and half blinded me. It was so thick that objects a few yards away would have been concealed even without a violent wind to confuse the vision. At times Couttet, close ahead of me, was visible only in a kind of gray outline, like a wraith. On an open plain such a storm in such a temperature would have had its dangers for a traveller seeking his way. We were seeking our way, not on an open plain, but two miles and a half above sea level, in a desert of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... the eye of faith! Ah, I have heard that wail far, far away In distant lands, by many a sheltered bay, When slumbered in his cave the water-wraith And the waves gently kissed the classic shore Of France or Italy, beneath the moon, When earth lay tranced in a dreamless swoon: And every time the music rose,—before Mine inner vision rose a form sublime, Thy form, O Tree, as in my happy ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... sheet, Wraith of long-perished wrong and time, Forbear! the spirit starts to meet The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... we knew how it happened. Indeed, I suppose we have never known it all. How she glided down, a little red wraith, through the dusk and damp to her boat; how she tossed about, with some dim, delirious idea of finding Myron on the ebbing waves; that she found herself stranded and tangled at last in the long, matted grass of that muddy-cove, started to wade home, ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... individual now resident in this part of the country; but the lateness of the hour forbade. Next morning I returned by the Conon road, as far as the noble old bridge which strides across the stream at the village, and which has done so much to banish the water-wraith from the fords; and then striking off to the right, I crossed, by a path comparatively little frequented, the insulated group of hills which separates the valley of the Conon from that of the Peffer. The day was mild and pleasant, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... which are always in the remote country, untouched by the advantages of civilisation, one is conscious of an enwrapping web or mist of spirit—is it, perhaps the glamourous and wistful wraith of all the vanished shapes once dwelling ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... on the Scribner scale," admitted Baker, "but I know what happens when you try to bump him. Bet you a thousand dollars I do," he shot at Welton. "It isn't the wraith-like Plant you run ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... figure in the middle of the gravel-walk. This figure, too, was reading; but not from a book: the words which engrossed it being the inscription on Mrs. Henchard's tombstone. The personage was in mourning like herself, was about her age and size, and might have been her wraith or double, but for the fact that it was a lady much more beautifully dressed than she. Indeed, comparatively indifferent as Elizabeth-Jane was to dress, unless for some temporary whim or purpose, her eyes were arrested ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... height, then suddenly fall, and rise again, just like a juggler's balls. Sometimes the breathing from below sucked the whole swarm right down, but it rose up again, veering hither and thither like a dancing wraith in the draught from the tunnel-like entry. The little girls would gaze at it, lift their petticoats, and take a few graceful steps. Olsen's Elvira had learned her first dance-steps here, and now she was dancing respectable citizens into the poor-house. And the furniture broker's ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... passed in pursuit of her—an elderly man in a black alpaca jacket that billowed. I saw that she had left a trail of little white things on the asphalt. I watched the efforts of the agonised short fat man to overtake her as she swept wraith-like away to the distant end of the terrace. What was the matter? What had made her so spectacularly angry with him? The three or four waiters of the cafe' were exchanging cynical smiles and shrugs, ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... direction of the billiard-room. It was light and warm there, though the place was empty, and he decided upon a cigar as a proximate or immediate solution. He sat smoking before the fire till the tobacco's substance had half turned into a wraith of ash, and not really thinking of anything very definitely, except the question whether he should be able to sleep after he went to bed, when he heard a creeping step on the floor. He turned quickly, with ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... by the way, as if instinctively, took note of this one. His nerves crisped at the noiseless slide of that form, as it stalked on from lamp to lamp, keeping pace with his own. He felt a sort of awe, as if he had beheld the wraith of himself; and even as he glanced suspiciously at the stranger, the stranger glanced at him. He was inexpressibly relieved when the figure turned ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the man who, selling his patrimony, had labored against wind and tide to the end that he might carry forth with him such an armament as scarce had been the Cygnet's own. Tier on tier rose the Sea Wraith's ordnance; she carried warlike stores of all sorts that might serve for battle by sea or land. If his money could not buy such men as stood ready to ship with Drake and Hawkins, yet in his wild, sin-stained crew he ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... storm grew loud apace, The water—wraith was shrieking; And in the scowl of heaven eachface, Grew dark ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... desire. The cold Griselda that would none of him! The fair Griselda! Not alone by day, With this most solid earth beneath his feet, But in the weird and unsubstantial sphere Of slumber did her beauty hold him thrall. Herself of late he saw not; 't was a wraith He worshipped, a vain shadow. Thus he pined From dawn to dusk, and then from dusk to dawn, Of that miraculous infection caught From any-colored eyes, so they be sweet. Strange that a man should let a maid's slim foot Stamp on his happiness ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... declined to make positive oath, that she had seen Meg Merrilies—at least a woman of her remarkable size and appearance—start suddenly out of a thicket; she said she had called to her by name, but, as the figure turned from her and made no answer, she was uncertain if it were the gipsy or her wraith, and was afraid to go nearer to one who was always reckoned, in the vulgar phrase, 'no canny.' This vague story received some corroboration from the circumstance of a fire being that evening found in the gipsy's ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Edward Stuart), who was conspiring with Louis XV., as his father had done with Louis XIV., to get to the English throne. We see him flitting about Europe from time to time, landing here and there on the British Coast—until when finally defeated at "Culloden Moor," 1746, this wraith of the House of Stuart disappears—dying obscurely in Rome; and "Wha'll be King but Charlie," and "Over the Water to Charlie," linger only as the ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... against my ribs from the exertion of my efforts to release myself from the anaesthesis which had held me. My breath was coming in quick, short gasps, cold sweat stood out from every pore of my body, and the ancient experiment of pinching revealed the fact that I was anything other than a wraith. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... began there grew up within her a sort of courage. A girl whose material embodiment has melted away until she has worn the aspect of a wraith is not restored to normal bloom in a week. But what Dowie seemed to see was the lamp of life relighted and the first flickering flame strengthening to a glow. The hands which fitted together on the table in the Tower ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... arm about her, and herself willingly nestling against him, trembling now and again; looking out at the sheeny surface of the slow flowing stream from which, in the imperceptible night breeze, stole away wraith after wraith of water mist to float and lose ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... had come into Mr. Challoner's cheek under the effort he had made to sustain with unflinching heroism this interview with the man he looked upon as his mortal enemy, slowly faded out till he looked the wraith of himself even to the unsympathetic eyes of Orlando Brotherson. A duty lay before him which would tax to its utmost extent his already greatly weakened self-control. Nothing which had yet passed showed that this man realised the fact that Oswald ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... period of his youth and adolescence, he can trace the psychological effect of what was going on secretly, in his relations to girls and women. In a word, these relations were sentimental only. He often imagined himself in love; but it was imagination only. He was in love with a wraith, not a girl of flesh and blood. He hesitated to regard in any sexual way any girl of whom he had a high opinion; sexual desire and 'love' seemed for him to inhabit different worlds and that it would ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... on a bench in the garden. And suddenly before me there was a white ghost. A shape. A wraith of something which a moment before had not been there. I sat too frightened to move. I could not call out. I tried to, but the ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... yon woman away—if she be a woman and not a wraith (spirit)," he added, as he turned his ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... intent eyes. Teether was busily engaged in drawing by degrees his own pink toes up to his rosy lips in an effort to get his foot into his mouth, an ambition that sways most mortals from their seventh to tenth month. A thin wraith of Miss Alford's personality had been drifting through the singer lady's consciousness for some days, but she was positively stunned at this sudden materialization. There come moments in the lives of most women when they get glimpses into the undiscovered land of their ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... tale the "double" or "wraith" of a living man was seen by three different people, one of whom, our correspondent, saw it through a telescope. She writes: "In May 1883 the parish of A—— was vacant, so Mr. D——, the Diocesan Curate, used to come out to take service on Sundays. One day there were two funerals to ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... corridor, as I groped my way back, something blew toward me like a wraith from the sea. It wore a gray, woolly bathrobe, a tiny wisp of white hair fastened precariously with one hair-pin, and a pair of knitted bedroom slippers. It was Aunt Nancy, and we executed then and there an intricate pas de deux in our ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... doors were wide, the story saith, Out of the night came the patient wraith, He might not speak, and he could not stir A hair of the Baron's minniver—- Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin, He roved the castle to seek his kin. And oh,'twas a piteous thing to see The dumb ghost follow ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... every trace In deepest crevice and highest place On mesa, butte and mountain-face; From the Grand Canyon's somber shade The sun-scorched desert, the dripping glade And sunken crater of Stoneman's Lake. The "Casa Grande," a home of ancient race— A ruin now—is haunted by Montezuma's wraith. In Montezuma's castle, crumbling from roof to base The winds and rain of heaven ghosts of the ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... old Nelson he saw, and yet only the wraith of the old Nelson. There was a grey and ghastly darkness about him that made the Parson afraid. It was the grey of snow at dusk, the darkness of a pool ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... Saxham's carries conviction. The pale ghost of a laugh is in the dying eyes. The wraith of Beauvayse's old voice comes back again ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the night. Anxiety came, wraith-like at first, drifting into her busy brain. She had hardly had time to be anxious in the rush of preparation and departure. But restlessness paved the way. She began to ask herself with growing uneasiness what could be awaiting her at the end of the journey. The summons ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... to give a character of vague mystery to simple details of prosaic events and objects, to be found in no other works of fiction. The terrible conception of the Doppelgaenger, which exists in a modified form as the wraith of Scottish legendary superstition, is rendered infinitely more appalling by being taken out of its misty highland half-light of visionary indefiniteness, and produced in frock-coat and trousers, in ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... birds fluttering and chirping, the squirrels chattering and playing. He envied them their health and spirits, their happy, care-free existence. That he should contrast their condition with his was inevitable; and that he should question why they were splendidly vigorous while he was a feeble, dying wraith of a man, was likewise inevitable. His conclusion was the very obvious one, namely, that they lived naturally, while he lived most unnaturally therefore, if he intended to live, he must ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... swell of the North Pacific to that mythical realm of mist like a blanket, and strange, unearthly rumblings smoking up from the cold Arctic sea, with the red light of a flame through the gray haze, and weird voices, as if the fog wraith were luring seamen to destruction. These were mere details. Peter took no heed of impossibles. Neither did Bering; for he was in the prime of his honor, forty-four years of age. "You will go," commanded the ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... a great sigh of doubt she recognised him. Was it a vision? Was he dead? She dragged herself to him upon her hands and knees and listened for his breathing, if perchance he still breathed and was not a wraith. Then it came, strong and slow, the breath of a man ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... though I were a wraith," the girl accused him. "Am I so pale after a few weeks of ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... cautiously out of the big, deep chair, Molly came walking hesitatingly towards him. Like a little wraith miraculously tinted with bronze and blue she stopped and faced him piteously for ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... one, "she's the wraith of a ship. When I was a lad I saw such a craft in the Indian seas, and afterward we foundered, and I and the cook's ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... might have been a wraith in verity, for she was clothed throughout in white, save for the ponderous gold girdle about her middle. A white gorget framed the face which was so pinched and shrewd and strange; and she peered into the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... Binnenleben is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... not see with the physical eye; but with the mental orb he saw a dark vista of ruined character, blighted hopes, and dismal prospects. The vision sufficed to fix his decision. Quietly, like a warrior's wraith, he sheathed his sword and betook himself to the covert of the peat-morass ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... loath. Either he was not the bravest in the party, or else he had the keenest appreciation of the odds against an exposed position. In a very few minutes the dory was a mere gray wraith on the water, but there it hung. Evidently the rower was overruled by others less cautious, or of the certain conviction that at the distance the yacht was a better mark than ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple |
