"Haunting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that the Lord would take care of her." Next morning the effects of the "chill" had passed off, but there was left a more or less constant feeling of vague dread and fear of death, and with this a haunting idea born of this strongly felt hallucination of external touch that Satan was within her. The feelings of dread and fear grew steadily and became too strong for her faith in the Lord taking care of her, and very quickly her obsession ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... of a nation going into exile, Mr. JONES has always a keen eye for the picturesque and even humorous aspects of the tragedy; he has a quick sense of the effective which enables him to touch in many haunting pictures—the delusive peace of a sunny Autumn day among the Bosnian mountains; the face of KING PETER seen for a moment by lamplight amid a crowd of refugees; and countless others. More than a passing mention also is due to the many quite ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... blasphemies of art! Here, pure from finite hues the very night Conceives the mystic harmonies of light, Delicious glooms and gleams; And sorrow falls in rose-leaves on the heart, And pain that yearns upon the passing hour Is but a perfume haunting a ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... laughter has grown a sob of pain, and sorrow and death have become what the feast, the battle, and the chase are to other men. It is the black secret, the secret of the coming trouble, that makes Tohomish's voice like the voice of a pine; so that men say it has in it sweetness and mystery and haunting woe, moving the heart as no other can. And if he tells the secret, eloquence and life go with it. Shall Tohomish tell it? Will Multnomah listen while Tohomish shows what is to befall the bridge and the Willamettes in the ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... child grew up, so pallid and so slender, and with much unaccountable nervousness, and all the weaknesses of neglected infancy still haunting her, the gross and simple neighbors whispered strange things about Priscilla. The big, red, Irish matrons, whose innumerable progeny swarmed out of the adjacent doors, used to mock at the pale Western child. They fancied—or, at least, affirmed it, between ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... given out that prodigies and miracles were to be seen in certain places, as in the heathen times. The happy souls of departed Christians were invoked; it was believed that they were wandering about the world, or haunting their graves. There was a multiplication of temples, altars, and penitential garments. The festival of the purification of the Virgin was invented to remove the uneasiness of heathen converts on account of the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... the struggle between good and evil. He sat thinking of her now, contrasting the virginal figure of her with the coarseness of the thing in which he had been engaged. There was something about her ... something ... something. And the old refrain of his dream like a haunting popular ballad, started again here in the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... I had a dream I have been trying all day to forget. Through the first part of the night sleep had been impossible. The haunting memory of Lillie's eyes could not be shut out, and the sound of her voice made the stillness of the room unendurable. I tried to read, to write, to do anything but think. I fought, resisted; refused to face what I did not want to see, to listen to what I did not ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... Death happened, she was aware, to young people, but not she had thought to the people one knew. This termination came with a shock. The girl was no great personal loss to Ellen, they had belonged to different sets and classes, but the conception of her as lying very very still for ever was a haunting one. Ellen felt she did not want to be still for evermore in a confined space, with life and sunshine going on all about her and above her, and it quickened her growing appetite for living to think that she might presently have to be like that. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... of the habitual haunting of great battlefields is to be found in Philostratus's Heroica, which represents the spirits of the Homeric heroes as still closely connected with Troy and its neighbourhood. How far the stories are based on local tradition it is impossible to say; they are told by a vine-dresser, ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... strange," said Septimius, "but I fear I shall be a good deal interrupted in my thoughts and studies, if she insists on haunting my hill-top as much as she tells me. My meditations are perhaps of a little too much importance to be shoved aside for the sake of ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... What were all the riches of the earth and of the caves of the earth? Only one thought absorbed him,—the woman whom he had left waiting for him on the burning plain, and a haunting memory that would never leave ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... dead who living had loved me tenderly, I do not know. Yet I know this, that when I came to the spot and saw two eyes glowering at me and heard the crash of bushes as something broke them, I could almost have fallen with fear, although I knew well that it was but a fox or wandering hound haunting the place of death. ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... to him that he had also lightened his own. From that hour it was not torment to think of Nell. Walking with his comrade through the silent places, lying beside him under the serene luminous light of the stars, Cameron began to feel the haunting presence of invisible things that were real to him—phantoms whispering peace. In the moan of the cool wind, in the silken seep of sifting sand, in the distant rumble of a slipping ledge, in the faint rush of a shooting star he heard these phantoms ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... wild winter nights when old tales are told; in fireside visions as tender memories come and go? And who, when listening to the echoes of the chambers of the restless sea when deep calleth unto deep, does not hear amid them some weird and haunting refrain ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... all the ages Has led the world along: The wise words of the sages, The poet in his song, The prophet in his vision,— All these have caught the gleam, Have caught the light elysian, Have told the haunting dream. ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... room, from the beam of light with the motes dancing in it to the bird-patterned paper. Kilgobbin nursery was papered with a paper giving an endless repetition of one subject—a man driving a pig to market—with that exception, the two rooms were not unlike. Yet those birds were the haunting charm of this place, the things that most appealed to her, things that seemed the ghosts ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... rush ever onwards, crowding sensation on sensation, an endless train of exciting images without purpose or repose; or even worse, the straining effort to pursue some vague and shadowy conception which evades us ever as we follow, but which mingles with all around and about us, haunting us at midnight as in the noontime. Of this nature was a vision which came constantly before me, till at length, by its very recurrence, it assumed a kind of real and palpable existence; and as I watched it, my heart ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... striking contradiction. In 1834 he entirely and for ever abandoned the province of the history of development, at which for twenty years he had laboured incessantly, and where he had earned splendid laurels. To escape from the haunting and importunate ideas of the science which had so wholly absorbed him, he fled from Koenigsberg to Petersburg, and subsequently busied himself in scientific inquiries of a quite different character. Twenty-five long years passed by, and when Darwin's ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... she loved a man she would stand by him. No, it was something known only to her and himself in all those crowded rooms. As soon as he set eyes on her, the vision of Radowitz's bleeding hand and prostrate form had emerged in consciousness—a haunting presence, blurring the many-coloured movements ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the sisters she had lost, but she did not shrink from it, and was glad that her parents saw no objection to her offering to share Lily's toils. Her experience was most valuable, and relieved Lilias of the fear that was continually haunting her, lest her ignorance might lead to some fatal mistake. The next day brought Rachel, and both patients began to mend. Jane's recovery was quicker than Emily's, for her constitution was not so languid, and having ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it afford them entertainment. This being premised, I turn with great complacency to the fourth class of my readers, who are men, or, if possible, women after my own heart; grave, philosophical, and investigating; fond of analyzing characters, of taking a start from first causes, and so haunting a nation down, through all the mazes of innovation and improvement. Such will naturally be anxious to witness the first development of the newly-hatched colony, and the primitive manners and customs prevalent among ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... some good man. If women learned to read there seemed to be a possibility that some day some good man might come home and find his wife reading, and the dinner not ready—and nothing could be imagined more horrible than that! That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind—that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man's comfort. There are many people who believe that the physical needs of her family are a woman's ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... but out of season. Moreover, Wordsworth had damned "a pretty piece of heathenism" by Keats, with praise which was faint even from Wordsworth to a contemporary. In the circumstances, as Wordsworth was not yet a kind of solemn shade, whom we see haunting the hills, and hear chanting the swan song of the dying England, perhaps Reynolds's parody scarce needs excuse. Mr. Ainger calls it "insolent," meaning that it has an unkind tone of personal attack. That is, ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... novelty, and Browning was the first to express it thus whole-heartedly. There had been, of course, from all time the hymning of maiden purity and innocence, but beneath such celebrations had lurked that predatory instinct which a still more modern poet has epitomised in a haunting ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... cornered. Her attempts at evasion were useless and, little by little, Emily drew from her the story of the little back bedroom, of her own experience there the night of their first visit, of what Winnie S. had said concerning the haunting of the "Cap'n Abner place," and of Miss Timpson's "warning." She told it in a low tone, so as not to awaken Georgie, and, as she spoke, the wind shrieked and wailed and groaned, the blinds creaked, the water dripped and gurgled in the gutters, and the shadows outside ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method,—for youth and age then went a fishing together,—full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... stranded on the harbor shore. The rows of tall Lombardy poplars down its lane stood out in stately, purple silhouette against the sky. Behind it, sheltering its garden from the too keen breath of sea winds, was a cloudy fir wood, in which the winds might make all kinds of weird and haunting music. Like all woods, it seemed to be holding and enfolding secrets in its recesses,—secrets whose charm is only to be won by entering in and patiently seeking. Outwardly, dark green arms keep them inviolate from ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... play in one's life. She was face to face with it now, with the bond of blood; the consciousness of it was what she seemed most clearly to have "come into" by the death of her mother, much of that consciousness as her mother had absorbed and carried away. Her haunting, harrassing father, her menacing, uncompromising aunt, her portionless little nephews and nieces, were figures that caused the chord of natural piety superabundantly to vibrate. Her manner of putting it to herself—but more especially in respect to Marian—was ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... uncertainly, her hand uplifted. For above the beat of the rain and the shrill whine of the wind came a strain of music, mournful, yet exquisitely beautiful. Amazed, forgetful of their discomfort, the girls listened while the throbbing, haunting melody wailed itself to ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... his rootless life had brought him to: for lack of a personal stake in things his sensibility was at the mercy of such trifles.... Yes; that, and the cold and fatigue, the absence of hope and the haunting sense of starved aptitudes, all these had brought him to the perilous verge over which, once or twice before, his terrified ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... she recollected the events of the previous night—her retirement to her chamber; her talk there with the housekeeper about Rose Cameron, the "handsome hizzie," who had been haunting the premises and giving trouble all that day; the message from her father; her affecting interview with him in his bedroom; her return to her own apartment through the dimly-lighted, deserted hall, where she met the pale and spectral form of Lord Arondelle, ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... a man will depart from iniquity, he must depart from his darling sin first; for as long as that is entertained, the others, at least those that are most suiting with that darling, will always be haunting of him. There is a man that, has such and such haunt his house, and spend his substance, and would be rid of them, but cannot; but now, let him rid himself of that, for the sake of which they haunt his house, and then he shall with case be rid of them. Thus it is with sin. There is a man that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... melting pathos: "Her face! ... That girl's face! All these years I've never forgotten. ... It's lain here!" She touched her heart with an eloquent finger. "All these years—every night—I've prayed that they might meet..." She shook her head with a determined gesture, as though shaking off a haunting thought. "I couldn't forget, you see, because—it taught me ... ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... say. Her weeping ended and she vanished. But she will return. In my sleep her outline wanders like an amorous ghost haunting the grave of my senses. Ah, I must be cautious now, more cautious, always cautious. It would be too easy to yield. And if I yielded and returned again my defeat would be unbearable. I think it is easier to die. Death ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... later, Paris being empty and the recollection of my old companion haunting me, I felt a strong desire to take a peep at his conjugal felicity and to see with my own eyes this stream, this mill, this steeple, beside all which he was ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... his life through, although more particularly in the last thirty years. The relations of man with nature, the question how far he is free from the laws of necessity, how far subject to them, are always haunting him. If you read the Wahlverwandtschaften, the Wanderjahre, the second Faust, you will find those grave questions approached from all sides. I shall not, however, enter here into an exposition of Goethe's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... is haunting Europe,'' it begins, "the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre—Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Talboys. Since that day the young man had experienced an unpleasant sensation in thinking of poor Alicia. He looked at her as being in some vague manner an incumbrance upon the freedom of his thoughts; he had a haunting fear that he was in some tacit way pledged to her; that she had a species of claim upon him, which forbade to him the right of thinking of another woman. I believe it was the image of Miss Audley presented to him in this light that ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... he told it? A sudden impulse, a sudden fear, had led him into sin. A strange fancy had whispered to him, "What if that boy buried by the wall yonder should be the wonder-child, the ragamuffin who looked at the rainbow, the sea urchin, the spectre haunting your guest?" How unlikely that was! And yet ships go far, and the human fate is often mysteriously sad. It might be that the wonder-child was born to be wrecked, to be cast up, streaming with sea-water on the strand of this lonely isle. It might be that the eyes which worshipped the rainbow were ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... time I first had spoken to her, should thoughts of this strange and ragged maid have so possessed me that each day my memory of her returned, haunting me, puzzling me, plaguing my curiosity till imagination awoke, spurring my revery to the very border of an unknown land where rides ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... so many of these pigs round about inhabited places and cultivated fields, constant care is required, for they instantly discover an opening. From their habit of haunting the thickets and bush which come up to the verge of the enclosures, they have obtained the name of thorn-hogs. Some reach an immense size, and they are very prolific, so that it is impossible to destroy ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... ever-shadowy stretches of cloud upon ever-shadowy stretches of land that go their austere way to the edges of some vacant sea. They suggest, too, those less remote but perhaps even more aloof spaces of solitude which were ever Courbet's theme in his deeper hours, that haunting sense of subtle habitation, that acute invasion of either wind or soft fleck of light or bright presence in a breadth of shadow, as if a breath of living essences always somehow pervaded those mystic woodland or still lowland scenes. But highly populate as these pictures of Courbet's ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Norwood, and they had set out in their coach to go all over the country in search of him. They had come the day before to a town near to the place where the gipsies had kept Edwy all the winter, and there they had made many inquiries, particularly about any gipsies who might be in the habit of haunting that country: but people there were afraid of the gipsies, and did not like to say anything which might bring them into trouble with them. The gipsies never did much mischief in the way of stealing near their own huts, and were always ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... took the kindnesses and caresses, the congratulations and triumphs, of those full-fruited hours, pressed them together and derived merely one clear drop of bitterness—the languorous poison of one haunting desire. It followed her into her sleep and through the next day; and not until night came again and she had passed through the gateway of dreams was she happy: for in those dreams it was he who was setting out ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... What haunting lines there are, every here and there—such as those of Palma, with her golden hair like spilt sunbeams, or those on Elys, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... five months I returned to La Crosse just in time to eat Old Settlers Dinner with my mother at the County Fair, quite as I used to do in the "early days" of Iowa. It was the customary annual round-up of the pioneers, a time of haunting, sweetly-sad recollections, and all the speeches were filled with allusions to the days when deer on the hills and grouse in the meadows gave zest to ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... dark and mysterious facts of her own history shaped themselves in her imagination. Did the tragedy of La Fresnaye, the despairing lover who blew out his brains at her feet, leaving the shadow of a crime hanging over her, with haunting memories of the Bastille, recall the innocence of her own early convent days? Did she remember some long-buried love, and the child left to perish upon the steps of St. Jean le Rond, but grown up to be her secret pride in the person ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... literature. Her novel Wuthering Heights stands alone as a monument of intensity owing nothing to tradition, nothing to the achievement of earlier writers. It was a thing apart, passionate, unforgettable, haunting in its grimness, its grey melancholy. Among women writers Emily Bronte has a sure and certain place for all time. As a poet or maker of verse Charlotte Bronte is undistinguished, but there are passages of pure poetry of great magnificence in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... wealth. Although she was not counted a beautiful woman, she had, because of her wealth and the charm of her person, been much courted. Sam, who had talked briefly with her a half dozen times, had long had a haunting curiosity to know more of her personality. As she stood there before him looking so wonderfully well-kept and confident he ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... agitate his Majesty now and afterwards.—A painful thought or suspicion, rising sometimes (in that temperament of his) to the pitch of the horrible. I believe it occasionally, ever henceforth, keeps haunting the highly poetic temperament of his Majesty, nor ever quits him again at all; stalking always, now and then, through the vacant chambers of his mind, in what we may call the night-season (or time of solitude and hypochondriacal reflection),—though ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... Roman invention of good and bad demons, and guardian angels particularly assigned, is called by them an ignorant mistake, sprung only from this original. They call this reflex man a co-walker, every way like the man, as a twin brother and companion, haunting him as his shadow, as is oft seen and known among men (resembling the original), both before and after the original is dead; and was often seen of old to enter a house, by which the people knew that the person of that likeness was to visit them within a few days. This ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... drowned—six men and one woman, the wife of the skipper. They had all been buried in one grave in the little cemetery that was on the top of the headland; and it was easy to see how the superstition of the haunting came about, for as the curate watched the spray on the rock near the wreck rise up in the moonlight and fall back into the sea, he could almost make himself believe that he saw in it the supple form of a woman with uplifted ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... to compare Keats's with the wonderful 'Ode to Autumn' which Hood wrote in 1823 (each ode, by the way, belongs to its author's twenty-fourth year), less perfect, to be sure, and far less obedient to form, but with lines so haunting and images so full of beauty that they do not suffer in the comparison. Listen to the ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... unlike the British service. Neither Peter nor the Indian seemed to belong to the class with which the army was recruited. Peter appeared more like a well-trained servant, and his riding was atrocious. And the lieutenant! There came back to me the haunting memory that he had joined Delavan as a volunteer—the Dragoon uniform sufficient proof that he was neither of the original foraging party of Hessians, nor of Grant's detachment of Rangers. Yet these ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... in taking it for granted that such thoughts are today haunting many minds. Perhaps it is merely a matter of misapplied use of a large sounding word. In that case, however, it is absolutely necessary to create clear thinking. I take it for granted that I am voicing ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... she was afraid. In some ways she was very ignorant and childish for her age, notwithstanding her little womanlinesses and almost precocious good sense, and to tell the truth, a vague misty terror was haunting her brain—a terror which she would hardly have confessed to Molly, not for worlds untold to Ralph—that, being in France and not in England, she might somehow be put in prison, were the state of the case known to these same cocked-hat gentlemen! So, when at last one of these dignitaries, who ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... I think of the beautiful town That is seated by the sea; Often in thought go up and down The pleasant streets of that dear old town, And my youth comes back to me. And a verse of a Lapland song Is haunting my memory still; 'A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... was a faint, indeterminable scent, the ghost of the ghost of fragrance, so elusive that one sensed rather than smelled it, so pervasive and haunting that one could not miss it. And it certainly had nothing to do with the wholesome odor of hay and cow feed, or the smell of whitewash and ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... with luscious lavenders and faint green stripes and soft silk shirts with comfortable French cuffs, and marking out $2.00 or $3.00, as the case might be, wrote $1.50 or $2.50 below. The song of the shirt was loud in the land, its haunting melody not to be resisted. Is there any lure for a woman in all the fluffy mystery of a January "white sale" comparable to the seduction for a man of a lavender shirt marked down from $2.00 to $1.50? I doubt it. Heaven help the woman if there is! ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... bud, and what fruit it may bear I cannot tell; for this insufferable humour, of haunting the court, is so predominant, that she has hitherto broken all her assignations with me, for fear of ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... themselves about her bed, for a warning had gone forth, and they knew. The dying girl lay with closed lids, and unconscious, the drapery upon her breast faintly rising and falling as her wasting life ebbed away. At intervals a sigh or a muffled sob broke upon the stillness. The same haunting thought was in all minds there: the pity of this death, the going out into the great darkness, and the mother not here to ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... accents, as of one who tries To press some care, some haunting sadness down; His smile half shadow; and to stranger eyes The kingly forehead wore ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... let us take the island of Ceram, which is exactly the same distance from New Guinea, but separated from it by a deep sea. Cut of about seventy land-birds inhabiting Ceram, only fifteen are found in New Guinea, and none of these are terrestrial or forest-haunting species. The cassowary is distinct; the kingfishers, parrots, pigeons, flycatchers, honeysuckers, thrushes, and cuckoos, are almost always quite distinct species. More than this, at least twenty genera, which are common to New Guinea and Aru, do not extend into Ceram, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... decided that they must be terrible scoundrels. One sage had seen Wordsworth looking fixedly at the moon; another had overheard him muttering in some strange language. Some thought him a conjuror; some a smuggler, from his perpetually haunting the sea-beach; while others were sure that he was ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... cried Mary Louise. "Know them! If camping on their doorsteps, and haunting the office buildings, and cajoling, and fighting with secretaries and office boys, and assistants and things constitutes knowing ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... States had come to Montreal with the view of remaining in Canada. He studied law and made considerable proficiency. Indeed, he was a young man possessed of some talent and of great assurance. And as there was another suspicion haunting the minds of Sir James Craig and of Mr. Secretary Ryland, Mr. John Henry, late captain in the American service, and now Barrister-at-law, was introduced to Governor Craig, as a gentleman likely to inform the government ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... tourists and Civil Servants—return from the East mumbling vague catchwords—mystic, elusive, subtle, haunting, alluring. These London Chinese are neither subtle nor mystic. They are mostly materialist and straightforward; and, once you can gain their confidence, you will find yourself wonderfully at home. But it has to be gained, for, as I have said, they are shy, and were you to try to ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... were haunting me, was impossible. I passed the night in continual motion. I strode, without ceasing, across the floor of my apartment. My mind was wrought to a higher pitch than I had ever before experienced. The occasion, accurately considered, was far from justifying the ominous inquietudes which I then felt. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... and a little anxious, but with a courageous look. She had a vague sense of trouble, and she feared it might be the little cross, that haunting ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... he did, tremendously. No, a feeling in him, automatic and strange, responded—not Anette! He wanted to leave her, to leave everyone here, and go. For what? At the same time he realized that he would stay, and go out, drink, in the Lucians' car. He had a haunting impression, familiar to him in the past weeks, that he was betraying an essential quality of ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... while on his bed, a music-book on his knees. He felt as though sweet, unheard melody was haunting him; already he was all aglow and astir, already he felt the languor and sweetness of its presence.. but he could ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... it the haunting voices of prophets mourning over the city that they could not save? Their spirits surely would linger on the land where their Creator had deigned to dwell, and over whose impending fate Omnipotence had shed human tears. From this Mount! Who can but believe that, at the midnight ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... tragic figure than that of Alexander. The brilliant promise of his early years; the haunting memory of the crime by which he had obtained the power to realize his ideals; and, in the end, the terrible legacy he left to Russia: a principle of government which, under lofty pretensions, veiled a tyranny supported by spies ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... resignation; or greedy for the few physical pleasures left him; or prone to that tragic clinging to youth's skirts, which made the later years of many women and not a few men ridiculous. In each case the motive power was the same: the haunting fear that one had squeezed life dry; worse still, that it had not ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... features. It stood in a marshy-looking hollow of a heath; tall trees obscured its windows; the thatch visibly rotted on the rafters; and the walls were stained with splashes of unwholesome green. The rooms were small, the ceilings low, the furniture merely nominal; a strange chill and a haunting smell of damp pervaded the kitchen; and the bedroom boasted ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you wish to see, sir?" The girl turned slowly about in her swivel chair and regarded him respectfully but coolly. Her voice was low and gentle and distinctly feminine, yet it brought to him again that haunting sense of resemblance which the first ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... not tear his eyes away from it, and exclaimed aloud that never, never had he seen anything so lovely and so graceful. Then he began to think that it was too absurd that he, the fascinating Featherhead, should fall in love with a portrait; and, to drive away the recollections of its haunting eyes, he rushed back to the town; but somehow everything seemed changed. The beauties no longer pleased him, their witty speeches had ceased to amuse; and indeed, for their parts, they found the Prince far less amiable than of yore, and were not sorry when he declared that, after all, a ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... the Jesuit missions in Canada. Pictorial romance can scarcely go further than this. In the crisis of Chateaubriand's picturesque and passionate tale of the American wilderness, no one can escape the thrilling, haunting sound of the bell from the Jesuit chapel, as it tolls in the night and storm that were fatal to the happiness of Atala. One scarcely need say that the romance of missions has never faded from the American mind. I have known a sober New England deacon aged eighty-five, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... along the line of the coast. In one of the tiers of ships there was a sing-song. A crew had gathered on the forecastle head, to beat their pannikins to the stars. The words of their song floated out into the darkness, full of a haunting beauty which thrilled and satisfied me. There was something in the night, in the air, in the beauty of the town, and in the sweetness of the sailors' singing, which made me sorry to be leaving. I should have ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... entirely justified in what he had said. The O. C. had insulted him, and every officer at the mess, by his off-colour story, but on the whole the general result of the incident was that Barry's life became more and more one of isolation from both officers and men. For this reason and because of a haunting sense of failure the months of training preceding the battalion's departure for England were for Barry one long and almost uninterrupted misery. It seemed impossible to establish any point of contact with either the officers or the men. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... returned with the dusk. It was the silence that tormented him most. Nothing stirred but the mice behind the boards. The voice was haunting him again: 'I was a stranger and ye ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... inland shore (For earth is bared before thy solemn gaze), In orient Asia, or where milder rays Tremble on western waters, wandereth he Whom bright Alcmena bore? Ah! as some bird within a lonely nest The desolate wife puts sleep away with tears; And ever ills to be Haunting the absence with dim hosts of fears, Fond fancy shapes from air dark ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rustle of the leaves of his law-books—did nevertheless transact, during his own first four years of practice, probably less than one half as much business as seems to have been done during a somewhat shorter space of time by our poor, ignorant, indolent, slovenly, client-shunning and forest-haunting Patrick. ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... shook; and, mind you, our house IS a house, a great castle of jointed stone that would weigh up a street of English houses; so that when it quakes, as it did last night, it means something. But the quaking was not what put me about; it was the horrible howl of the wind round the corner; the audible haunting of an incarnate anger about the house; the evil spirit that was abroad; and, above all, the shuddering silent pauses when the storm's heart stands dreadfully still for a moment. O how I hate a storm at night! They have been a great influence in my life, I am sure; for I can remember them ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... National Conservatory. Dvorak was the chairman of the Committee on Award, and gave Schoenefeld hearty compliments. Later works are: "Die drei Indianer," an ode for male chorus, solo, and orchestra; a most beautiful "Air" for orchestra (the air being taken by most of the strings,—the first violins haunting the G string,—while a harp and three flutes carry the burden of the accompaniment gracefully); a pleasant "Reverie" for string orchestra, harp, and organ; and two impromptus for string orchestra, a "Meditation" representing Cordelia brooding tenderly over the slumbering ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... are sunk beyond ray of sun or stars, immersed in the selfishness naturally begotten of their incessant struggle for existence and the incessant warfare with society. It was an awful thought to me, ever present on those Sundays, and haunting me at other times, that men, women, and children were living in such brutish degradation, and that as they died others would take their place. Our civilisation seemed nothing but a thin film or crust ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... barely see Margot, although he held her hand. He could barely see Vardin although they stood hand in hand too. The music was un-Earthly, incapable of repetition, indescribably the loveliest sound he had ever heard. He wanted to sink down into the obscuring gray murk and weep and listen to the haunting, sad, lovely ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance
... One haunting, sad regret touches Colonel Joe's heart. He learns of the intention of Natalie to spend her days in retirement and in ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... sick for lost blisses In spite of its strength of control? Have you burned up the touch of warm fingers That thrilled through each pulse and each vein, Or the sound of a voice that still lingers And hurts with a haunting refrain? ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... as they had presented themselves to her imagination from her childhood, he would have prescribed change of air and gymnastics. Perhaps that was the really rational view of the matter. But what if these hygienic measures cured her of the haunting consciousness of mystery and vastness; what if she became convinced of the essential importance of the Gordon pedigree, or of the amount of social consideration due to the family who had taken Clarenoc? Would that alter ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... There was a haunting familiarity about her. She teased my memory as I strolled up the deck. Then, snapping the bag shut, she turned and straightened, and I recognized the girl to whose door my thief-chase had led ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... old Mr. Willcoxen's plans that his grandson should have met Marian Mayfield. For, on the morning of Thurston's first meeting with the charming girl, when he turned his horse's head from the arched gateway of Old Field Cottage and galloped off, "a haunting shape and image ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... to be resolved to take the lives of Navarre and Conde, unless they should instantly recant, and was only prevented by the entreaties of his young wife, may be exaggerated.[1227] But certain it is that the unhappy king was the victim of haunting memories of the past, which, while continually robbing him of peace of mind, sometimes drove him to the borders of madness. Agrippa d'Aubigne tells us, on the often repeated testimony of Henry of Navarre, that one night, a week after the massacre, Charles leaped up in affright ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... little can be said. The departed souls of mortal men, the "good" (-manes-) continued to exist as shades haunting the spot where the body reposed (-dii inferi-), and received meat and drink from the survivors. But they dwelt in the depths beneath, and there was no bridge that led from the lower world either to men ruling on ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... soothed. I forgot all the discomforts and misgivings of the voyage. It was nothing to me, as I looked at this beautiful girl, that within the last twenty-four hours I had twice been in danger of losing my life. What to me was the mysterious man with the haunting face of implacable hate? What to me were the words of the woman who had stopped me on the pier at Dover? Nothing! A thousand times less than nothing! I loved, and I was in the sympathetic presence ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... and rescue by marriage the girl Lily, whom (you remember) he loved as a boy, and who has since drifted into the underworld. About this part of the story I will only say that, though the art is still there and the same haunting melody of style, Mr. MACKENZIE has too strong a sense of atmosphere to allow him to treat squalor in a fashion that will be agreeable to the universe. Frankly, the over-nice will be prudent to take leave of Michael ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... measure we may, and shall, eradicate this haunting flavour of the country. The last elm is dead in Elm Row; and the villas and the workmen's quarters spread apace on all the borders of the city. We can cut down the trees; we can bury the grass under dead ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 1750 as the date of this conversion. It came five years too late, and he recanted his recantation. He was in England again later (1752), and held his last council in Merriworth Castle in Kent. There is a legend of his ghost haunting a house in Godalming, which probably comes from a tradition of his residence there. Since 1750 or thereabouts, a Miss Clementina Walkinshaw, of Barrowfield, had been his mistress. He is said to have ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... tables away. Among the habitues of the Ritzes of two continents there could not have been found another like her, for never had I beheld a face as exquisite—and I've seen many. It possessed a beauty that left me helpless—yet there was an indefinable sadness in it that might have suggested a haunting fear. ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... the tragedy, this is held to be a consummate stroke of art, and certainly the reader is grateful for the relief. Had Poe a similar design? Closely analyzed, this song seems the very ecstasy of fancy; as if the haunting apparition inspired the poet more than it appalled the man. We can call to mind no one who has ever played with an inexplicable horror more daintily or more impressively; and, whether premeditated or spontaneous, it is an epitome of the life of the writer, for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... only seen him twice; his family could nowhere be traced; he had never been photographed; and the few who could describe him differed widely, as common observers will. Only on one point, were they agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... stone gates as one in a dream. Something was stirring within him. It was not that during those years in New Zealand he had forgotten. He had longed again and again with a passionate, burning longing for the grey cliffs and the sea and the haunting loneliness of the moor; for the Cornwall that he had loved from the moment of his birth—no, he had never forgotten. But there was waking in him again that strange, half-inherited sense of the eternal presence of ancient days and old heathen ceremonies, and the manners of men who had lived ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... the little girls paddled off to school like a pair of young ducks, enjoying every puddle they came to, since India-rubber boots made wading a delicious possibility. They took their dinner, and at noon regaled a crowd of comrades with an account of the mysterious dog, who appeared to be haunting the neighborhood, as several of the other children had seen him examining their back yards with interest. He had begged of them, but to none had he exhibited his accomplishments except Bab and Betty; and they were therefore much set up, and called him "our dog" with an air. The cake transaction ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... drawings, and certain seductive landscapes and seascapes by painters whom he had heard called "the Norwich men," and he wished to be an artist: then reminiscences of the Homeric lines he loved, of haunting verse-melodies, moved him ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... "I had a haunting fear as we came up the river," he said at length, quietly and with an odd courtesy of manner, "that you might have gone away. That is the calamity always hanging over ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... chalk figure of the deceased, indicating the sex, is procured, and entrusted to the chief of a village, who sets it up in a funeral hut in the middle of a large taboo house adorned with plants. The survivors believe that the ghostly ogre, being so well provided for, will abstain from haunting them. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... referred to the Western trip as "one long nightmare," though in the smiling face which she turned upon the crowds from Columbus to San Diego and back to Pueblo none could have detected a trace of the anxiety that was haunting her. She met the shouting throngs with the same reposeful dignity and radiant, friendly smile with which she had captivated the people of ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... to such as are troubled with the Disease of Levee- Haunting, and are forced to seek their Bread every Morning at the Chamber Doors of great Men, I A. B. do testifie, that for many Years past I laboured under this fashionable Distemper, but was cured of it by a Remedy which I bought of Mrs. Baldwin, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... apathy. Instead of rolling themselves in their ponchos, with their feet turned to the spring sun, they were scattered throughout the country, stopping one another, exchanging private signals, and haunting the least frequented pulperias, in which they could ...
— The Pearl of Lima - A Story of True Love • Jules Verne
... the dumb little blue-eyed princess knocked at his door in vain. Only in those hours when sheer fatigue had sent him to bed had she any opportunity of visiting him. Sometimes she made white nights for him by haunting those hours, refusing to go away; sometimes, by not coming at all, she filled him with terror lest she had gone for good—would not come back even when he was ready for her. When that panic was upon him he hated Paula ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... ass's skin that you have been putting yourself in such a state about. It didn't strike me at the time that a Board of Trade certificate does not make an officer, not by a long long way. But the skippers of the ships I was haunting with demands for a job knew that very well. I don't wonder at them now, and I don't blame them either. But this 'trying to get a ship' is pretty hard on ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... early Boston days a gentle soul was often to be met with about town, furtively haunting old book-shops and dusty editorial rooms, a man of ingratiating simplicity of manner, who always spoke in a low, hesitating voice, with a note of refinement in it. He was a devout worshiper of Elia, and wrote pleasant discursive essays smacking somewhat of ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... reasoner, and sceptic; the smoothly shaven historian so ironically civil to Christianity; with others of the same incredulous temper, who knew each quad as well as the faithful, and took equal freedom in haunting its cloisters. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... daughter's room, he looked like a man from whom the bitterness of evil had passed away. To human eyes, at least, it seemed as if self had been utterly slain in him. His face had that child-like expression in its paleness, and the tearfulness without tears haunting his eyes, which reminds one of the feeling of an evening in summer between which and the sultry day preceding it has fallen the gauzy veil of a cooling shower, with a rainbow in ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... same thought that was condensed in the verse, but the quotation, unrelieved by her smile, carried a sting. He read it over until the lines marched with a nimble step through his memory. There was something oddly haunting in them, and he experimented with a variety of emphases and pauses, particularly as to the last line, which he found might be read in a great number of ways. He decided finally that it was best interpreted by a little pause after ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... A haunting, half-superstitious dread beset Gerrard as he dressed the next morning, the presentiment that he would hear that Partab Singh had died in the night. After the determination the old man had shown in laying his plans, and the ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... at the quaint, old-fashioned English inn, the peace of this land of civil and religious liberty, and she closed her eyes to shut out the haunting vision of that West Barricade, and of the mob retreating panic-stricken when the old ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the water, which half an hour before, though under the light of myriad stars, had been black and silent, was now a living sheet of phosphorescent light, caused by the passage up the creek of countless thousands of agitated fish, driven in by hundreds of porpoises and savage, grey ocean-haunting sharks, whose murderous forms we could see darting to and fro just outside the shallow bar, charging into and devouring the helpless, compact masses of salmon, whose very numbers prevented them from escaping; for serried legion after legion from the sea swam swiftly in to the narrow ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... of working. It turns navvy and shoots out grains of earth that would interfere with its continual entrances and exits. For the first time I witness a custom which no Hymenopteron had yet shown me: I see the males haunting the interior of the burrows with an assiduity equalling that of the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... had been haunting Frank ever since he had heard this man's voice was now at once made plain. The cloak being dropped and the man's face turned full upon him, he saw that it was indeed the same Highland drover who had borne unexpected testimony in his favour when he was in danger of his ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... the world, previous to descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... had asked Sir S. what we were to see next, for we trusted him to choose; but when we were ready to leave Annan and go back to the high road, he said that the thought of Galloway was haunting him. "We can spin on to Glasgow by way of Moffat and see a lot of interesting places; or we can turn west from Carlyle country, for a run through Crockett country," he explained. "Which, ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... from these towers, and die away As borne upon the passing gale; Yet none could say from whom it came, Far less divine the reason why; And Superstition, with her dream, Could only whisper mystery— Unholy spirits haunting nigh, And screaming in the midnight hour, Presage of vengeance from on high For ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... overdone about Psmith's methods. The ordinary man, having conceived the idea of haunting a fellow clubman, might have seized the first opportunity of engaging him in conversation. Not so Psmith. The first time he met Mr Bickersdyke in the club was on the stairs after dinner one night. The great man, having received practical proof of the excellence of cuisine referred to above, was ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... ears by poor music and too often maudlin voices, are as good songs and as fitted for singing as any in our time. The Sands of Dee, hacknied and vulgarised as it is by the banalities of the drawing-room, is really (to use a hacknied and vulgarised phrase) a "haunting" piece of song; and though Ruskin may pronounce "the cruel crawling foam" to be a false use of the pathetic fallacy, the song, for what it professes to be, is certainly a thing to live. I have always ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... throat. He entered the tunnel slowly, ploddingly; with lagging muscles he hauled up the bucket which told of Harry's presence below, then slowly lowered himself into the recesses of the shaft and to the drift leading to the stope, where only a few days before they had found that gaunt, whitened, haunting thing which had brought ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... Phidian breadth and the modern charm—that charm which troubles and disturbs, haunting the mind with vague, unsatisfied suggestions of something finer than is seen, something nobler than ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... with Selene, his sister, and it seemed to him that his arguments had taken root. Ever since Brazier's death there had been much talking, much visiting—and now he felt it soon would end. Oh, for the relief of a quiet house; for the relief that must follow when the newspaper men would stop haunting the neighborhood. The past two days had well-nigh worn him out, and yet he hated leaving Selene to face her troubles alone. Marsoc believed in blood ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker |
