"Spectral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to-morrow was Christmas Day, and he had forgotten it. This was remarkable. He had never forgotten it before, but this year he had been working so hard and had been so engrossed he had not thought of it. Even this reflection brought the spectral figures back sharply outlined before his eyes. They stayed longer now. He must think ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... ebbs fast. All the country teems with entertainment, and the river, cool in the dusk, and black, reflects the dead mangroves, white and spectral, on its brink. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... element that first began to conspicuously assert the white supremacy. There grew up an organization called "the Ku-Klux Klan," designed at first partly as a rough sport and masquerade, partly to overawe the negroes. There were midnight ridings in spectral disguises, warnings, alarms and presently whippings and even murders. The society, or imitations of it, spread over most of the South. It was at its height in 1868-70, and in the latter year it gradually gave way, partly owing to vigorous measures ordered from Washington, and partly perhaps as ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... another German, Stolz was far more adept at causing pain than at enduring it. Also, from birth, he had had an unconquerable fear of dogs. His nerves, too, were not yet recovered from Bruce's attack earlier in the day. All this, and the spectral suddenness of the onslaught, robbed him of every atom of his ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... time she had ever watched with the sick, and she found it a very solemn thing. Yet with all the solemnity and gloom brooding over her, she felt inexpressible gratitude that she was not haunted by the spectral illusions of her childhood. Reason was no longer the vassal, but the monarch of imagination, and though the latter often proved a restless and wayward subject, it acknowledged the ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... time, money, energies, &c., is ridiculously out of place in the United States. As if our proper man and woman, (far, far greater words than "gentleman" and "lady,") could still fail to see, and presently achieve, not this spectral business, but something truly noble, active, sane, American—by modes, perfections of character, manners, costumes, social relations, &c., adjusted to standards, far, far ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... shingle lies the fisher's boat to-night; From his roof-beam dankly drooping, raying phosphorescent light, Spectral in its pale-blue splendour, hangs his heap of scaly nets, And the fisher, lapt in slumber, surge ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... duty fast asleep in their cloaks, and the captain reading an English novel. He, too, had grown weary of the night, and was thinking of stretching himself on the floor of his hut, when he saw, and not without some perturbation, a tall spectral figure, in armour, enter the works, stride over the sleeping men without exciting the smallest movement amongst them, and advance towards him. He drew his breath hard, and attempted to call out, but his voice was choked, and he began to think ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... know," said Mitchell, "I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... lid and all. Raising the lid you would find the jug half filled with water. Sometimes in the tangle up above, between two trees, you would see a thing like a bird come to ruin. Orchids grew here as in a hothouse. All the trees—the few there were—had a spectral and miserable appearance. They were half starved by the voluptuous ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Cavor, and very carefully stepped nearer the edge of the gallery. I followed his example, and craned forward and looked down, but I was dazzled by that gleam of light above, and I could see only a bottomless darkness with spectral patches of crimson and purple floating therein. Yet if I could not see, I could hear. Out of this darkness came a sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if one puts one's ear outside a hive of bees, a sound out of that enormous ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... phantoms, spectres of the dead—" "Aye, verily," quoth Lob, "and what is worse, 'Tis here my grand-dam oft doth come to curse, And haunteth it with spiteful toads and bats, With serpents fell, with ewts and clawful cats. Here doth she revel hold o' moony nights, With grave-rank ghouls and moaning spectral sprites; And ... Saints! what's that? A hook-winged bat? Not so; perchance, within its hairy body fell Is man or maid transformed by magic spell. O, brothers, heedful be, and careful tread Lest magic gin should catch and strike us dead! O would my grannam might go with us here. ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... getting brighter, and accordingly I knew little fear, though I did think of the ghosts of other parties, flitting in spectral form over the ice-clad wastes, especially of that small detachment of the Italian expedition of the Duke D'Abruzzi, of which to this day neither track, trace, nor remembrance has ever been found. We crossed lead after lead, sometimes like a bare-back rider in the circus, balancing on cake after ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... what might be termed direct experimental evidence for the hypothesis of Prout. Unfortunately, however, it is evidence of a kind which only a few experts are competent to discuss—so very delicate a matter is the spectral analysis of the stars. What is still more unfortunate, the experts do not agree among themselves as to the validity of Professor Lockyer's conclusions. Some, like Professor Crookes, have accepted them with acclaim, hailing Lockyer ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife's face, and recognized the symbol of imperfection; and when they sat together at the evening hearth, his eyes wandered stealthily to her cheek, and beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood fire, the spectral Hand that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped. Georgiana soon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a glance, with the peculiar expression that his face often wore, to change the roses of her cheek into a death-like paleness, amid which the Crimson Hand was brought ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... of a moon was in the sky, hanging low down and half-inverted as if spilling a spectral glamour over the ghostly mists which lay deep in Lost ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... the light Of household fires gleam warm and bright; Above, the spectral glaciers shone, And from his lips escaped a ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... to say, such is the phenomenon asserted: and all who rationally refer it to casualty, affirm that B is happening very often as well as A, but that it is not thought worthy of being recorded except when A is simultaneous. Of course A is here a death, and B the spectral appearance of the person who dies. In talking of this subject it is necessary to put out of the question all who play fast and loose with their secret convictions: these had better give us a reason, when they feel internal pressure for explanation, that there is ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Mr. Grigsby stood long at the rail, as did the other passengers, gazing at the dim shore and its multitude of spectral lights, and talking. The whole ship seemed to be athrill with great expectations; row-boats approached, circled and mysteriously lingered, as if awaiting; and the little waves murmured low and invitingly, as they slapped ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... his tongue to whisper, derisively, "Nothin' doin'!" But he remembered the Boy's injunction, as well as his doubts, and checked himself. A moment later a faint, swirling gurgle of water caught his ear, and he was glad he had kept silence. An instant more, and the form of a beaver, spectral-gray in the moonlight, took shape all at once on the brink of the canal. For several minutes it stood there motionless, erect upon its hind quarters, questioning the stillness with eyes and ear and nose. Then, satisfied that there was no danger near, it dropped on all fours and crept up toward ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... indeed, magnificently ornamented, but without occupants, made one think of the misunderstanding which had gradually arisen for centuries between them and the head of the empire. Their ambassadors had already withdrawn to eat in a side-chamber; and if the greater part of the hall assumed a sort of spectral appearance, by so many invisible guests being so magnificently attended, a large unfurnished table in the middle was still more sad to look upon; for there also many covers stood empty, because all those who had certainly ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... no one sat, and wandered among brown and purple congregations of bare trees, at its base were scattered wooden chalets and bungalows, which offered to take the passer-by's photograph or to sell ice-cream. The sea-salt in the air had licked off the surface of the paint, so that they had a greyish, spectral appearance. The photographs in the cracked show-cases were brown and vaporous, and the announcements of vanilla ice-cream were but breaths of lettering, blown on stained walls. It seemed a place for the pleasuring of mild, unexigent phantoms, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... ablution of tea which she had received. Petrea felt herself quite confidential with this excellent person, and inquired from her what was her opinion of Swedenborg, beginning also to give her own thoughts on spectral visions, ghosts, etc. The lady looked at her, as if she thought she might be a little deranged, and then hastened to change ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... failure, except for the sake of those excited children. Really I hate to think how the ghost will feel when we get through rattling his bones." A sudden dash at a pair of ceiling rings set the whole line dangling along the gym and served to illustrate a possible way of rattling spectral dry bones, although Jane's graceful figure, as she swung to and fro, did much ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... terrible event occurred several people had seen a creature upon the moor which corresponds with this Baskerville demon, and which could not possibly be any animal known to science. They all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... an impostor. Many, however, had full faith in his supernatural power, and often he seemed to believe in his own spectral account of himself. ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Neckar was soft and low, and nightingales were singing among the brown shadows of the woods. The large red moon shone, like a ruby, in the horizon's ample ring; and golden threads of light seemed braided together with the rippling current of the river. Tall and spectral stood the white statues on the bridge. The outline of thehills, the castle, the arches of the bridge, and the spires and roofs of the town were as strongly marked as if cut out of pasteboard. Amid this fairy scene, a little boat was floating silently down the stream. Emma ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... no farther there are parts of the bush in which thousands of trees, being ring-barked, have died and become ghosts of trees. Seen in the light of a half moon, when the sky is broken by wind-riven cloud, these spectral inhabitants of the bush, with their tattered winding sheets of corpse-white bark, are distinctly more eerie than anything the dawn had to ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... night shadows are beginning to gather over the forest, throwing a sort of spectral gloom among the old woods, giving a distorted look to the trunks of the trees, the low bushes, the turned up roots, and the boulders scattered over the ground. See what ogre shapes these things assume as the darkness ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... hundred yards. We hastened onwards; the night scenery being almost more beautiful than the day. The heavens seemed more deep, the water more glittering, the trees more graceful and feathery; and here and there a tall palm reared its thin and spectral form above the dense foliage through which the moonlight broke at intervals, and fell, as it were, in showers of ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... never noticing that her pony's feet were shod with felt. She looked neither to the right nor the left, and she saw nothing of the strange restlessness which seemed to pervade the camp. Everywhere the shadows of men were moving noiselessly about. Spectral guns were surrounded by little groups of whispering soldiers. There was no bivouacing, the camp-fires burned low. Every now and then, when challenged, she mechanically repeated the countersign. All the while her lips were moving in one ceaseless, ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... than in what you see lies half the charm of Andalusia, in the suggestion of all manner of delicate antique things, in the vivid memory of past grandeur. The Moors have gone, but still they inhabit the land in spirit and not seldom in a spectral way seem to regain their old dominion. Often towards evening, as I rode through the desolate country, I thought I saw an half-naked Moor ploughing his field, urging the lazy oxen with a long goad. ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... heard a sound behind him and turned his head. The cat had jumped from Zeena's chair to dart at a mouse in the wainscot, and as a result of the sudden movement the empty chair had set up a spectral rocking. ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... third mate, "he does wear one, any how, and night before last I sat on the hatch, as he says, reading Shakspeare in the moonlight, and when the second mate's night-capped head rose through the slide, he looked so very spectral that I couldn't forbear hailing him with—'Art thou a ghost or goblin damned?' which he persists in rendering his own fashion. I'm sure I didn't intend to liken him to a barn-yard fowl of any kind; I should rather have gone into the ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... in Mrs. Travers' experience been less spectral than then. He displayed a weakness of the flesh. He was impatient at her intrusion. He divided his attention between the threads of smoke and the face of the watch with such interest that the sudden reports of several guns breaking for the first time for ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... weird was the spectral scene— The tombstones white, with low mounds between, The awful stillness, eerie and dread, Brooding above that home of the dead, While Christmas fires lit up each hearth And shed their glow upon ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... in curls around her pale countenance, to which they added an expression almost corpse-like and unearthly. To make matters still worse, she had chosen a vest or cymar of a pale green silk, which gave her, on the whole, a ghastly and even spectral appearance. ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... rotting log, Smith could see them all now,—spectral shapes against the light. There were five of them at ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... a single lantern at the prow, Jabaster watched with some anxiety the slight bark buffeting the waves. A flash of lightning illumined the whole river, and tipped with a spectral light even the distant piles of building. The boat and the toiling figure of the single rower were distinctly perceptible. Now all again was darkness; the wind suddenly subsided; in a few minutes the plash of the oars was audible, and the boat apparently ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... Once we saw a moving figure above us, barely visible against the sky-line, and halted breathlessly, every eye uplifted, until the apparition vanished; and once, warned by the cracking of a twig, we lay flat on our faces while a spectral company went past us on foot, heading at right-angles across our path. I counted twenty men in the party, but could distinguish nothing as to uniform or equipment. We waited motionless until the last straggler had disappeared. By this time we were well behind ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... least, they knew that she herself had slipped by a night station unseen. Oftener, with blanched faces they would hear of her dashing like an apparition past a frightened operator, huddled over his lonely stove, a spectral flame shot across the fury of the sky—as if the dread night breathing on the scrap-pile and the grave had called from other nights and other storms a wraith of riven engines and slaughtered men to one last phantom race with ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... spray-swept leagues of water, showing only her reefed topsails and courses. The two pirate sloops vanished beyond the curtain of mist. When last seen, one of them was dismasted and the other was laboring in grave peril. The Revenge loomed as a spectral shape while Blackbeard was endeavoring to get her running free in pursuit of the Plymouth Adventure. But slovenly, reckless seamanship had caught him unready. His sails were blowing to ribbons, ropes flying at loose ends, and it was with great difficulty that ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... of bodies also concerns our subject: the special sensitisers used by the photographer to modify the spectral distribution of sensibility of the haloid salts, e.g. eosine, fuchsine, cyanine. These again are electron-producers under light stimulus. Now it has been shown by Stoletow, Hallwachs, and Elster and Geitel that there is an intimate connection between photo-electric activity and the absorption ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... from the Bucentaur to Adria, the queen of the seas. Adria! shroud thyself in mists; let the veil of thy widowhood shroud thy form, and clothe in the weeds of woe the mausoleum of thy bridegroom—the marble, spectral Venice." ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... against the rocks. It was a muscular instinct that sustained her rather than a conscious impulse of self-preservation. Motionless, horrified, amazed, she could only gaze at the empty fissure of the tree on the slope. She could not then discriminate the wild, spectral imaginations that assailed her untutored mind. She could not remember these fantasies later. It was a relief so great that the anguish of the physical reaction was scarcely less poignant than the original shock when she realized that this face was not the grisly skeleton lineaments that ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... would, when compared with the system of Sirius, make the latter seem like an atom of dust imbedded in the great Shamo desert. The eye of the astronomer, who thinks he also knows of the existence of such systems, has never rested upon them, has never caught of them, even that spectral glimpse, fanciful and hazy as the incoherent vision in a slumbering mind that he has occasionally had of other systems, and yet he verily believes he has gauged INFINITUDE! And yet these immeasurably distant worlds are brought as clear and near to the spiritual ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... inventions of gunpowder, printing, spectacles, engraving, and that latest discovery of all—the daguerreotype. If any man had come to Napoleon to tell him that a building or a figure is at all times and in all places represented by an image in the atmosphere, that every existing object has a spectral intangible double which may become visible, the Emperor would have sent his informant to Charenton for a lunatic, just as Richelieu before his day sent that Norman martyr, Salomon de Caux, to the Bicetre for announcing his immense ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... 1863. Achromatic object-glasses are placed on both sides of the prism, so that each pencil of light through the prism consists of parallel rays; and breadth is given to the spectrum by a cylindrical lens. The spectral lines are seen straighter than before, and generally it is believed that their definition is improved."—"For observation of the small planets, a convention has been made with M. Le Verrier. From new moon to full moon, all the small planets visible to 13h ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... elaborate work, in which the writer goes into the investigation of all the phenomena of mind in the erratic operations and phantasies of ghost seeing and spectral hallucinations, and aims to give the true philosophy of all such delusions. He is a medical man of considerable eminence, and has spared no pains in his researches, giving a great number of facts and cases to illustrate his philosophy. The volume will be much sought for, as it is really ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... covering-board as it filled the foresail with a jar and a report like that of a nine-pounder. This blast was only momentary, however, it was upon us and gone again in an instant, but it was quickly succeeded by others; and then, away in the gloom, right abeam of us, appeared a white, spectral glimmer swooping down upon the schooner with the speed of a race-horse, and spreading momentarily wider athwart the blackness as it came. It was a line of white foam churned up on the surface of the sea ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... rare with her, weighing on her spirits. The undulating movement of the boat, the splash of the oars, the faint breeze playing over the watery mirror, the sighing of the reeds, the long flight of the birds, the fitful twinkling of the first stars—there was something spectral about it all in the universal stillness. She fancied her friend was bearing her away to set her on some far-off shore, and leave her there alone; strange emotions were passing through her, and she could not give ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... like a spectral curtain over the little demesne of Martinhoe Manor, had almost entirely disappeared when, at a few minutes before eight, with all traces of his long journey obliterated, Andrew Tallente stepped out on to the stone-flagged ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... be seen from the bastions of the castle of the Holy Trinity, to the right or to the left, in front or in the rear, but dense, motionless, snowy mist; a spectral image of that deluge-wrath which, as it rose to sweep o'er earth, once broke against these stern, steep cliffs and beetling peaks of rock: no trace is to be seen of the buried valley, for the ghostly waves of the cold, white sea of foam shroud it closely in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was behind us and we had entered on that great sea that stretched northward to the Arctic barrens. Misty and wet was the wind, and cold with the kiss of many icebergs. Under a grey sky, glooming to purple, the gelid water writhed nakedly. Spectral islands elbowed each other, to peer at us as we flitted past. Still more wraithlike the mainland, fringed to the sea foam with saturnine pine, faded away into fastnesses of impregnable desolation. There was a sense of deathlike ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... subject, partly to his skill in handling it. In his handling, he presents his spiritual existences with just so much relief as to endow them with life and personality, and not with, that visual distinctness which would at once reveal their spectral immateriality, and so give a shock to the illusion. We might almost say of his personages that they are shapes, "if shape it might be called, that shape had none." By his art of suggestion by association, he does all he can to aid us to realise his agents, and at the ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... those nights? Did he, too, see that black shadow of his victim in the belfry sounding an alarm to the sleeping town and appealing to be avenged? It may be. At all events, the apparition boded ill to others, for, whenever the chimes were rung by spectral hands, mourners gathered at some bedside within hearing of them and lamented that the friend they had loved would never ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... were there, Amy Ferat at the head of them, a bold young woman who had already had her teeth in the gold of several crowns. There were two or three well-known men whose pale faces made the same kind of chalky and spectral spots amid the green of the trees as the plaster of the statues. All these people, enlivened by the journey, the surprise of the country, the overflowing hospitality, as well as the hope of making something out ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... brand which I kept alive by frequent blowing, and constant waving to and fro, at a late hour in the afternoon, faint and exhausted, I kindled a fire for the night on the only vacant spot I could find amid a dense wilderness of pines. The deep gloom of the forest, in the spectral light which revealed on all sides of me a compact and unending growth of trunks, and an impervious canopy of somber foliage; the shrieking of night-birds; the supernaturally human scream of the Mountain lion; the prolonged howl of the wolf, made me insensible to all ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... Shad only entrapped themselves to no good end? To the right of him the fire roared and with his back to the glare his eyes eagerly sought the shadows down the wind. Vague shapes of gnarled branches and pallid tree trunks, spectral bushes quivering before the advancing demon, some of them already alight. Safety lay only in this one direction—for Beth, if she had been there, for Shad——Peter suddenly remembered the lumberman and turned to his left to look, when suddenly he espied a figure moving away ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... darkness—being by that time well into Christmas morning, and the moon gone down. But when we had left behind us the black streets of the little town, and were come out into the open country, the star-haze sufficed to light us as we went onward by the windings of the spectral white road: for the stars shine very gloriously ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... where the wide floating nets were spread, lights were scattered like constellations. The foreland was clearly visible, with the high woods which clothed its summit. But the farther end of the beach faded into an uneven string of lights, soft and spectral as will-o'-the-wisps. Warmth rose from the sleeping earth; and a breeze blew in from the sea, making a strange metallic rustling, which to Japanese ears is the sweetest natural music, in the gaunt sloping pine-trees, whose height in the semi-darkness ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... midst of a desolation and a silence that was profound. There was nothing there that lived, except a few fire-blacked trees that stuck up here and there in the shelter of broken walls. Now I understood the meaning of the spectral shapes. They were nothing but the broken walls of the other houses that were. They were all that ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... superstition, she saw a premonition. The little peaceful church became all at once a place of terror, a grisly charnel house of vanished hopes and lives. The spirits of countless Cravens seemed all about her, hostile, malign, triumphing in her weakness, rejoicing in her fear—spectral figures of the dead crowding, hurrying, threatening. She seemed to see them, a dense and awful concourse, closing round her, to hear them whispering, muttering, jibing—at her, a thing apart, an alien soul whose presence they resented. The clamorous ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... had risen, flooding the world with spectral light, before the two adventurers had finished their meal. All during it they had kept an unusual silence. The presence of that terrible gulf, there not two hundred feet away to westward of them, imposed its awe ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... dark, lonely gorges, the depths of which even a brilliant sunshine could not penetrate. What this region may be like in summer-time I know not, but in winter the surface of the moon itself could scarcely present a more silent, spectral appearance. ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... fell down to gazing at the corresponding window to her own, on the opposite side of the court. It was lighted, but the blind was drawn down: upon the blind she saw, first unconsciously, the constant weary motion of a little spectral shadow, a child's hand and arm—no more; long, thin fingers hanging down from the wrist, while the arm moved up and down, as if keeping time to the heavy pulses of dull pain. She could not help hoping that sleep ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... prolonged and excessive that his companions supposed beyond a doubt his reason had deserted him. Again and again he struggled to compose himself, and again and again laughter overwhelmed him like a tide. In all this maddening interview there had been no more spectral feature than this of Michael's merriment; and Pitman and Morris, drawn together by the common fear, ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... composure rapidly. The first uncanny shock was wearing off and he was confessing to himself that there was nothing to fear in the spectral bit of loveliness. ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... a religion of humanity, and that meant, to him, a religion for humanity, a religion which, unlike the spectral Christianity about him, should permeate and regulate the whole organisation of men. And the feeling is one with which a Catholic must sympathise, in an age when—if we may say so without irreverence—the Almighty has been ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... Russian peasants, so that the flames, creeping out at the four corners, soon made great headway, and, fanned by the wind, spread rapidly to all parts of the building. Vaninka followed the progress of the fire with blazing eyes, fearing to see some half-burnt spectral shape rush out of the flames. At last the roof fell in, and Vaninka, relieved of all fear, then at last made her way to the general's house, into which the two women entered without being seen, thanks ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Spectral shadows lay all about her, flitting here and there across her trail as she sped onward and onward through the dark forests that intervened between the lakes. In the distance she heard the voices of the evil spirits ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... helpless servitude left me in a new return of manhood and responsibility. It was a scene of exhilaration, the sun, still partially obscured by misty clouds already well down in the western sky, with the tossing waves of the Bay foam-crested. The distant headlands appeared spectral and gray through the vapor, while the waters beyond took on the tint of purple shadows. The Adele responded to the helm gallantly, the spreading canvas above standing out like a board, a broad wake of white foam spreading far astern. Not another sail appeared across that troubled surface of ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... middle of the table. Let every one approach to the distance of about a yard. Then ignite the spirit with a match. It will burn with a peculiar yellowish-blue flame, and in the light of this the human countenances, and all objects of similar color, lose their natural tint, and look spectral. The contrast of the wan and ghostly hue with the smiling lips and white teeth of those who look on, is most amusing. The effect of this experiment is heightened by dissolving some common table-salt in the spirit, and still further by putting into it a small ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... sombre hues. What was bitterness and almost spite in Mrs. Hunter was a deep, abiding sorrow in his heart, a great dream unfulfilled, a cause lofty because so idealized, in support of which he often saw in fancy, when alone, spectral thousands in gray, marching as he once had seen them in actual life. That all had been in vain, was to him one of those mysterious providences to which he could only bow his head in mournful resignation, in patient ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... villagers relate Strange tales of horror of the Druid tree; Mysterious voices of unearthly sound From its unhallowed shade oft meet the ear. Myself, when in the gloomy twilight hour My path once chanced to lead me near this tree, Beheld a spectral figure sitting there, Which slowly from its long and ample robe Stretched forth its withered hand, and beckoned me. But on I went with speed, nor looked behind, And to the care of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... weird procession, scarcely a word being spoken, and no sound heard, other than the dull reverberation of unshod hoofs on the soft turf. To me, glancing back from where I held position beside Farrell, they seemed like spectral figures, with no rattle of accoutrements, no glimmer of steel, no semblance of uniform. Yet my heart warmed to the knowledge that these were no holiday warriors, but grim fighting men. I had seen the faces, some boyish, others graybeards, and had read in them all sternness ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... his head and looked at the spectral forest where dead pines towered, ghastly in the moon's beams. That morning he had cut the last wood on his own land; he had nothing left to sell but a patch of brambles and a hut which no one ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... paddle wheels, and the next moment a huge steamer dashes past you in the mist. You can hear her, but the fog hides her. Then the boat goes ahead again, and gradually the fog bells on the shore grow louder and clearer, and in a little while the dock bursts suddenly upon you, so spectral and unearthly in its appearance that you hardly recognize it. The boat now glides swiftly into her "slip," and a sigh of relief breaks from the throng on board. The danger ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... silent and more ordinary; but somehow he alarmed me much more than poor little Smythe. He was very tall and slight, and light-haired; his nose had a high bridge, and he might almost have been handsome in a spectral sort of way; but he had one of the most appalling squints I have ever seen or heard of. When he looked straight at you, you didn't know where you were yourself, let alone what he was looking at. I fancy this sort of disfigurement embittered the poor chap a little; for while Smythe was ready ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... is pushed in, will be formed of a great number of minute rings of light. If the glass is good, these rings will be round, unbroken, and equally bright. We present several figures showing how these spectral images, as they are sometimes called, will appear; first, when the eye-piece is pushed in, and secondly, when it is drawn out, with ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... that Stodger and I had left the old house; but as I approached it that night, it bore every appearance of having been abandoned for years instead of only a few hours. No smoke curled from the chimneys; no light gleamed at any of the windows. In its white setting of snow, it loomed silent and spectral. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own and my friends'—yours, dear Arthur Lemon, along the dim twilit tracks, among the high growing bracken and the spectral pines, of the south country; and yours, amidst the mist of moonbeams and olive-branches, dear Flora Priestley, while the moonlit sea moaned and rattled against the moldering walls of the house whence ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... the heads of the players and onlookers, flared like votive braziers above the open-air gambling games; there were even smoked-chimney lamps, and candles, set on pedestals, signalizing other centers. The walls of the tent store-buildings glowed spectral from the lights to be glimpsed through doorways and windows, and grotesque, gigantic figures flitted in silhouette. While through the interstices between the buildings I might see other structures, ranging from those of tolerable size to simple wall tents and makeshift ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... psychic's hands, a bell was carried tinkling through the air and a small table moved as if it were alive. Many other mysterious movements took place. Lombroso was very much disturbed by these inexplicable phenomena, and could not rest till he sat again. At the second seance spectral hands developed, profoundly mystifying every sitter, and Lombroso went away, promising to carry forward a study of spiritism. In a letter written the following June he manfully said: 'I am filled with confusion, and regret that I combated ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... there was sweetness, and a vernal touch that thrilled the listeners as with the breath of flowers and the fragrance of earth after rain, but always, behind all fancy and grace and tenderness, and even passion, lurked that spectral loneliness. The performer would cease for some minutes, and presently begin again in a new mood. The music was always characteristic, often wild and strange, yet ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... to relate some of these spectral apparitions upon which the reader will pronounce judgment for himself. Pliny[310] the younger says that there was a very handsome mansion at Athens which was forsaken on account of a spectre which haunted it. The philosopher Athenodorus, having arrived in the city, and seeing a board which ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... subterranean hall which was to be his grave and judgment hall alike, while Amneris was left alone, both grief-stricken and revengeful. Her jealousy was certain to bring fearful retribution upon her. As more white-robed priests passed below, looking spectral and ominous, she hid ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... the morning drill of the marines and the bluejackets on the iron decks, with the lively music that went with it. The bugle calls and the bells were charming; the week's wash hung out to dry had its picturesqueness by day, and by night the spectral play of the search-lights along the waves and shores, and against the startled skies, was even more impressive. There was a band which gave us every evening the airs of the latest coon- songs, and the national anthems which we have borrowed from various nations; and yes, I remember the white ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... upon his limbs, every external object in the apartment became visible to him as by the light of a magic lantern. He heard his watch ticking, like a living creature, upon the dressing-table where he had left it. His black morocco pocketbook was distinctly visible, beside the looking-glass, and two spectral boots stood up amidst the varied shadows of the night. Grobey was very uncomfortable. He began to entertain the horrid idea that a fiend was hovering, through ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... those weights, blow up the infernal machine with gunpowder? What a passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest!—that this dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time, embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off from beams in hempen lassos?—that they jump off from parapets into the swift and gurgling waters beneath?—that they take counsel ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of stately revels, abandoned to owl and bat. And the homely old house beside it, which that lordly hall was doubtless designed to replace, looking so safe and tranquil at the baffled presumption of its spectral neighbour. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by a fierce wind, by the wrath of Heaven, their spectral forms would be whirled eddying all day long in the dust of the roads. The night on the contrary was somewhat less hostile to them. Night is not wholly the Galilean God's; He shares its dominion with the ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... dreaming of dead men and women and dead children in the earth, far down beneath the snow-drifts, six feet deep. And then I lift my face, awaking, from my pillow; the pallid moon is on the valley, and the room is filled with spectral light. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... dead men were risen And stood before me there With a terrible fame about them blown In beams of spectral air, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... met. "I know thou com'st for me," Lee's spirit to the Spectre said; "I know that I must go with thee— Take me not to the dead. It was not I alone that did the deed!" Dreadful the eye of that still, spectral Steed! ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the lake were spectral in the whirl of the elements, and the island was the one fixed spot. It was as brilliant as an emerald in a setting of lead. A beach of yellow sand encircled it, with a border of willows, and taller trees ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... hours he used to write his wild, fantastic tales. To his excited fancy everything around him had a spectral look. The shadows of fevered thought stalked like ghosts ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... gazed on the landscape far and near, Then impetuous stamped the earth, And turned and tightened his saddle-girth; But mostly he watched with eager search The belfry-tower of the old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely, and spectral, and ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... gentle sound of Thamis— Who vindicates a moment, too, his stream— Though hardly heard through multifarious "damme's:" The lamps of Westminster's more regular gleam, The breadth of pavement, and yon shrine where Fame is A spectral resident—whose pallid beam In shape of moonshine hovers o'er the pile— Make this a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... the gloom. Then I heard myself exclaiming, "No, no, no!" The nameless dread was strong upon me. I listened intently for Hubbard's breathing. Had it ceased? I crawled over and peered long and anxiously at his face—his face which was so spectral and wan in the uncertain firelight. Twice I did this. A confused sense of things evil and malicious, a confused sense of sighing wind and pattering rain, a confused sense of starts and jerks and struggles with wood, and the night ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... to form a scene of peculiar interest. High overhead, dimly visible through the tops of the trees, the sky wears an almost supernatural aspect during these long summer nights. A soft golden glow flushes upward from the horizon, and, lying outspread over the firmament, gives a spectral effect to the gentler and more delicate sheen of the moon; the stars seem to shrink back into the dim infinity, as if unable to contend with the grosser effulgence of the great orbs that rule the day and the night. Unconscious ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like poetry. That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-existent fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longer moved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely dark masses in the dusk; and when Bea came home Carol was singing at the piano which she had not touched for ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... useless, and in the solemn stillness of midnight only Beulah sat by the pillow, where a head now rested motionless as that of a corpse. Mrs. Williams was asleep on a couch at the opposite end of the room, and, in the dim, spectral light of the shaded lamp, the watcher and her charge looked unearthly. Faint from constant vigils, Beulah threw her arm on the bed and leaned her head upon it, keeping her eyes on the colorless face before her. Who that ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... grapes added fragrance and beauty to the scene. Flies, snakes and frogs were very numerous, but gave us little trouble, nevertheless, I was not sorry when at dawn on the third day after passing the strange natural phenomenon we saw across the level pasture-like plain, high up, spectral and half hidden in the grey haze, the gigantic walls and high embattlements of the ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... song and story, with laugh and jest and shout, We heed not dropping mercury nor storms that rage without, But pile the huge logs higher till the chimney roars with glee, And banish spectral visions with La ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... of the Ashtons, and in the feuds of the times. When Love intervenes we discover in an instant that he is not sent by the gods to bring peace, but that he is the awful instrument of destruction. The spectral appearance of Alice at the hour of her departure, on the very spot "on which Lucy Ashton had reclined listening to the fatal tale of woe . . . holding up her shrivelled hand as if to prevent his coming more near," ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... philosopher, Carnot, whose speculations have led to the theory that the sun will finally expend all its heat, and constellated life cease, as the solar system hangs, like a dead orrery, ashy and spectral, the ghost of what it was. So the extravagant author ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... modified in color or spectral character to meet many requirements. Daylight has been reproduced in spectral quality so that certain processes requiring accurate discrimination of color are now prosecuted twenty-four hours a day under artificial daylight. Colored light is made of the correct quality which does not affect photographic ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... narrow that at times John could easily touch the walls of the spectral houses on either ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... lifted ordinary motives into our sympathy; but where the subject is the grandest landscape affluence of the world, effect, in the ordinary sense, ceases to be of value. We need the thing, and no human ennobling of it. In this picture we have it; no spectral cloud-pile, but a real Chimborazo, with the hoar of eternity upon its scalp, looks down upon the happy New-Yorker in his first May perspiration. And as the wind sets east, no yellow hint at something warming, but whole dales and plains still in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the mother-moon's self, full in face. It rose, distinctly at the base With its seven proper colors chorded, Which still, in the rising, were compressed, Until at last they coalesced, And supreme the spectral creature lorded In a triumph of whitest white,— Above which intervened the night. But above night too, like only the next, The second of a wondrous sequence, Reaching in rare and rarer frequence, Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed, Another rainbow rose, a mightier, Fainter, flushier ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... nerved by the tankards within to their fearsome journey adown that eldrich avenue lined with the bloodstained weapons of the fighting dead. What street could live inclosed by these mortuary relics, and trod by these spectral citizens in whose sunken hearts scarce one ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... as deserted as the church. But for a Sister who stood by the convent gate like a statue of Eternal Silence, and a man who was killing a wretched calf in the middle of the road, I might have asked myself if this fantastic Bozouls was not some spectral village, reproducing the past in all except the living beings who had gone down into their graves. When I recrossed the Dourdou, the light was several tones lower than it was when I first descended to the bottom of the ravine, and the vegetation was of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... from the North May scarce avert. The scales of Justice tilt Something askew. The curse of high-placed guilt Is on you, if the warning tocsin's knell, Clanging forth fiercely, hath not force to tell The hearer that Fate's hourglass fast runs out. That spectral Comet flames, beset about With miasmatic mist, and lurid fume, Conquering Corruption threatens hideous doom. Yet, yet the Bow of Promise gleams above, Herald of Hope to her whom ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... soon after their arrival on the spot, the silvery moon rising at the full, passing through occasional strata of dark cloud that veiled her light at intervals, illumined the sky with her weird beams, making it bright as day, but with a ghostly radiance that lent a mystic spectral ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson |
