"Spectre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I was not without secret reproaches of my own conscience for the life I led, and that even in the greatest height of the satisfaction I ever took, yet I had the terrible prospect of poverty and starving, which lay on me as a frightful spectre, so that there was no looking behind me. But as poverty brought me into it, so fear of poverty kept me in it, and I frequently resolved to leave it quite off, if I could but come to lay up money enough to maintain me. But these were thoughts of no weight, ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... Learn, for your governance, that this is not Independence. Far from it! If one of the next couriers should bring you word of unlimited freedom of commerce with all nations, take good care not to call that Independence. Nothing of the sort! Independence is a spectre of such awful mien that the mere sight of it might make a ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... himself trying to take an inventory of his own stock. And since the material question of money did not come in to cloud the horizon, he felt he could do it impartially. There are many now who, having sacrificed every prospect, find their outlook haunted by the spectre of want; there are many more, formerly engaged in skilled trades such as engineering or mining, who find that they have four years of leeway to make up in their profession—four years of increased knowledge and mechanical improvements—unknown to them, but not to their competitors, ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... spiritual, demons may also be regarded as corporeal; vampires for example are sometimes described as human heads with appended entrails, which issue from the tomb to attack the living during the night watches. The so-called Spectre Huntsman of the Malay Peninsula is said to be a man who scours the firmament with his dogs, vainly seeking for what he could not find on earth—a buck mouse-deer pregnant with male offspring; but he seems to be a living man; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... the sheeted park, four persons met to do battle for the life of Mr. Manvers, while he lay grumbling and burning in his bed, behind the curtains of it. Don Luis Ramonez was there, the first to come—tall and gaunt, with undying pride in his hollow eyes, like a spectre of rancour kept out of the grave. Behind him Tormillo came creeping, a little restless man, dogging his master's footsteps, watching for word or sign from him. These two stood by the lake in the huge empty park, still under its shroud of ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... greeting was intended, did not observe this mute courtship, for her eyes followed the travellers, and especially the young man, as if spellbound. As soon as the three were far enough off not to hear her, the girl asked with a shiver, as if some desert-spectre had passed by-and in a low voice "Grandmother, who ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... vanished as a dying spark. The trance passed from his spirit, and nature recommenced her operations like the clanking of a vast machinery. Yet his eye, as if it could not recover from its vision of terror, remained glaring upon the spot where the spectre had been; and it was not until several minutes had elapsed that the sharp agony which had contracted his features died away. He sprung forward with a wild cry, but the echo alone replied. No voice but his own awoke the awful stillness, pulseless it reigned around him. The stars glittered ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... correct outline marked off in dark paint there is but a vague, uniform mass of pale colour; the body of the hand is missing, and there remains only its ghost, visible indeed, but unsubstantial, without weight or warmth, eluding the grasp. The difference between this spectre hand of the Giottesques, and the sinewy, muscular hand which can shake and crush of Masaccio and Signorelli, or the soft hand with throbbing pulse and warm pressure of Perugino and Bellini,—this difference is typical of the difference between the art of the fourteenth ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... bundle, held it out. There were the eyes. She chilled. No imagination here. No spectre from ...
— I'll Kill You Tomorrow • Helen Huber
... What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stood for a few seconds without uttering a word. The savage shrank back and shuddered from head to foot. Then, with a noiseless step, Martin retreated slowly backward towards the door and passed out like a spectre—never for a moment taking his eyes off those of the savage until he was lost in darkness. On gaining the forest he fled with a beating heart to his former retreat; but his fears were groundless, for the Indian firmly believed that ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... New York, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities of America are aroused over the visit of a spectre called Nationalism, alias Territorialism. Like all spectres, it is doing a lot of mischief and causing much confusion in the heads of the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... her. He was dully sensible to the fact that she was beautiful, uncommonly beautiful. It did not occur to him to feel that she was out of place among them, that she belonged downstairs. Somehow she was a part of the surroundings, like the spectre at the feast. ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... able to sit up?" queried this visitor Lane took for the spectre of a dream. He advanced into the room. He grasped Lane with firm hand. And then Lane realized this was no nightmare. He began ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... gates. My lodgings were as near to them as possible. At our first entry towards the Queen's lodge we encountered Dr. Fisher and his lady: the sight of me there, in a dress announcing indisputably whither I was hieing, was such an Astonishment, that they looked at me rather as a recollected spectre than a renewed acquaintance. When we came to the iron rails poor Miss Planta, in much fidget, begged to take the books from M. d'Arblay, terrified, I imagine, lest French feet should contaminate the gravel within!—while ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... ghostly counsellor fell upon an admirable expedient to console him. This was nothing less than dispensing with the further solemnity of banns, and marrying him, without an hour's delay, to the young woman to whom he was affianced; after which no spectre ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... towards a tall monk in the Cistertian habit, standing between the bodies, with the cowl drawn over his face. As Paslew gazed at him, the monk slowly raised his hood, and partially disclosed features that smote the abbot as if he had beheld a spectre. Could it be? Could fancy cheat him thus? He looked again. The monk was still standing there, but the cowl had dropped over his face. Striving to shake off the horror that possessed him, the abbot staggered forward, and reaching the presbytery, sank ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... which has been made common property by writers of fiction in all generations; it occurs at least thrice in the Ingoldsby Legends; Sir Walter Scott gives a terrible instance in his story of the Scotch judge haunted by the spectre of the bandit he had sentenced to death {2}, which appears to be founded on fact; and indeed the present narrative was suggested by one of Washington Irving's short stories, read by the writer when a boy ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... speeches, none ever was so full of wit as Mr. Pultney's last. He said, "I have heard this committee represented as a most dreadful spectre; it has been likened to all terrible things; it has been likened to the King; to the inquisition; it will be a committee of safety; it is a committee of danger; I don't know what it is to be! One gentleman, I think, called it a cloud! (this ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... nationality and no one type of character. He is the image of humanity. Hamlet is to me not a man, but Man. The sufferings, the doubts, the vague mysteries of life are incarnate in his person. He is ever checked by the Unknown. He is tortured by the phantasm of Doubt. Is the spectre indeed his father's shade? has it spoken truth? is it well to live? is it best to die?—such are the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... disguised in male attire, robbed travellers upon the highway, and being wounded in one of these exploits, was discovered lying dead outside the walls of the house; and the malignant nature of this lady's spectre is said to have had so firm a hold upon the villagers that no local labourer could be induced to work upon that particular ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... turn'd.—His guide was gone; A broad chaotic cloud appear'd alone. His limbs no more their chilly weight sustained, A deathlike torpor o'er his bosom reign'd, His stony eyeballs fix'd in silent trance Met the terrific Spectre's withering glance. And lo! the Phantom waves, with sudden glare, His burning sceptre thro' the starless air! High o'er the bark the booming billows spread, The deafening waves were closing o'er his head; When rushing clouds the towering form involved, And all the ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... in this letter that was wounding to his vanity, and bitter to his feelings; but he had triumphed! The stately pride of this girl was humbled before him—her spirit bowed in the dust before the gaunt spectre she had thought herself capable of braving. She would be his—the fair, the pure in heart, would link herself to vice, infamy and crime, for money. Money! the world's god! See the countless millions groveling upon the earth before the great idol—the golden calf, which so ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... "A horrid spectre rises to my sight, Close by my side, and plain, and palpable In all good seeming and close circumstance As man ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... waning glory of the day, Down cool, green lanes, and through the length'ning shadows, Silent, we wandered back across the meadows. The wreath was finished, and adorned my room; Long afterward, the lilies' copied bloom Was like a horrid spectre in my sight, Staring upon me morning, noon, ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... place, such homes are being destroyed and made impossible now by the very causes against which Socialism fights, and because in this world at the present time very few homes are at all like this ideal. In reality every poor home is haunted by the spectre of irregular employment and undermined by untrustworthy insurance, it must shelter in insanitary dwellings and its children eat adulterated food because none other can be got. And that, I am sorry to say, it is only too easy ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... its champagne; such smiling, brilliant-looking impudence, that comes out fizz—bang! and that's the end of it; there's not so much as the quaver of an echo. You drink it, and instead of seeing cool vineyards and purple waters and cataracts of icicles in your glass, you find a pale, gaunt spectre, or a poor, half-drowned Bacchus, staring at you. It's just so with your Landon Snowe. You, and other people, too, have a habit of admiring him, a great creature with eyes of milky blue, who goes about disbursing his small coin like some old Aladdin! Why, my dear children, the man, I don't ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... guidance fail, Whereby my prophet-soul is onwards led? Look! for their flesh the spectre-children wail, Their sodden limbs ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... sheathing his dagger, those apparently capricious actions would be found to be done because they were illustrative parts of that monarch's personality, warranted by the text and context. Many years ago an accidental impulse led him, as Hamlet, to hold out his sword, hilt foremost, toward the receding spectre, as a protective cross—the symbol of that religion to which Hamlet so frequently recurs. The expedient was found to justify itself and he made it a custom. In the graveyard scene of this tragedy ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... images among the realities of the soul,—though the grave should forever shut them from our communion. But this relation of memory has peculiar propriety and efficacy when associated with a Christian faith. If the dead live no more, what would memory be to us but a spectre and a sting? Should we not then seek to repress those tender recollections,—to close our eyes to those pale, sad visions of departed love? Should we not invoke the glare and tumult of the world to distract or absorb our thoughts? Would we not say, "Let it come, the pleasure, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... between them, in the filthy den, Were twenty-three more miserable men, Who hardly could be said to be alive, So fearfully did death among them strive To make them all his own, leaving no trace Of aught but spectre life in that vile place. This dreadful history cannot fail to show, How fatal consequences surely flow, From disregard of the Creator's laws, For these foul poisonous vapours were the cause Of five score agonising deaths, within The space of a few hours, ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... slumber bound. Or, panting like the ocean, when a dream Of storm awakes her:—Heaven and Earth are still; In radiant loveliness the stars pursue Their pilgrimage, while moonlight's wizard hand Throws beauty, like a spectre light, on all. At Judah's tent the lion-banner stands Unfolded, and the pacing sentinels,— What awe pervades them, when the dusky groves, The rocks Titanian, by the moonshine made Unearthly, or yon mountains vast, they view! But soon as morning bids the sky exult, As earth from nothing, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... the first part of the 'Suspiria,' as we find from a note of the author's own, was to include 'The Dark Interpreter,' 'The Spectre of the Brocken,' and 'Savannah-la-Mar.' The references to 'The Dark Interpreter' in the latter would thus become intelligible, as the reader is not there in any full sense informed who the 'Dark Interpreter' was; and the piece, recovered from his MSS. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... They cry out with a shriek of terror—because Jesus Christ is coming to them in so strange a fashion! Have we never shrieked and groaned, and passionately wept aloud for the same reason; and mistaken the Lord of love and consolation for some grisly spectre? When He comes it is with the old word on His lips, 'Be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... community of brave men in dread of some indefinable tragedy. Mobs and riots of much greater magnitude than the John Brown uprising had frequently occurred in the free States, and they were put down by the firm authority of law, without the dread hand of a spectre behind which might in a moment light the horizon with the conflagration of homes, and subject wives and daughters to a fate of nameless horror. Instead, therefore, of arresting the spread of Republican principles, the mad scheme of John Brown tended to develop and strengthen them. The conviction ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... always anxious to avoid the sight of her husband in such a state as this, which had become as dreadful to her as the trial scene was to Judas Iscariot. It brought before her eyes the spectre of a worn-out woman knocking at a door which she would not open; and she shrank from contemplating it. Yet it was better for Yeobright himself when he spoke openly of his sharp regret, for in silence he endured infinitely more, and would sometimes remain ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... profitably, landed her in Standard Oil is not a part of this drama. But meanwhile she had shuddered. Like many another widow, to whom New Haven was as good as Governments, she might have been in the street. Pointing at her had been that spectre—Want! ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... celestial harem. As the apparition of a man wanders into the next state, a shadow of his present state floats over into the future with him. The Hereafter is the image flung by the Now. Heaven and hell are the upward and downward echoes of the earth. Like the spectre of the Brocken on the Hartz Mountains, our ideas of another life are a reflection of our present experience thrown in colossal on the cloud curtains of futurity. Charles Lamb, pushing this elucidating observation much ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Hapford,—far less of a Julia Tinker living with him. But they all listened to the contributor's explanation with interest and eventual sympathy; and in truth,—briefly told, with a word now and then thrown in by Jonathan Tinker, who kept at the bottom of the steps, showing like a gloomy spectre in the night, or, in his grotesque length and gauntness, like the other's shadow cast there by the lamplight,—it was a story which could hardly fail ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... All eyes were turned to the leeward. A stately ship, under full sail, had suddenly appeared, bearing down upon us. She came silently, the water splitting in foam at her bows. We could see the crew working about her decks, but no sound came from the spectre. All at once we noticed her hull and sails were transparent. We could see through them ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... and his courtiers were sleeping, Sabbatai wrestled sore with himself in his lonely audience-chamber. The spectre of self-doubt—long laid to rest by music and pageantry—was raised afresh by this new and unexpected development. It was a rude reminder that this pompous and voluptuous existence was, after all, premature, that the Kingdom had yet to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... not live a hole-and-corner life in China, but boldly come out and take their part in the pleasures and business of life. It has always been a question with me whether ghosts, in a haunted house, appear when there is no audience. What does the spectre in the tapestried chamber do when the house is NOT full, and no guest is put in the room to bury strangers in, the haunted room? Does the ghost sulk and complain that there is "no house," and refuse to rehearse his little performance, in ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... employer would be helpless without his aid. Medland's sanguine mind caught eagerly at the chance, and in a moment turned it into a hope—almost a conviction. Then the whole thing would go down to the grave with the unlucky man, and not even its spectre survive to trouble him. For if no one had certain knowledge, if there were never more than gossip, growing, as time passed, fainter and fainter from having no food to feed on, would not utter silence follow at last, so that ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... morrow he will face the waves again, though the winds blow ever so fiercely. In Unorna the master passion was as strong as ever. In a dim vision the wreck of her pride floated still in the stormy distance, but she turned her eyes away, for it was no longer a part of her. The spectre of her humiliation rose up and tried to taunt her with her shame—she almost smiled at the thought that she could still remember it. He lived, she lived, and he should yet be hers. As her physical weariness began ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... panic-terror pervaded the halls, and like an evil-announcing night-spectre passed over the heads of the stiffened, lifeless crowd the dismal rumor—"The regent and the princess are at variance; the regent is speaking to her with vehemence, and the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... On the road are many wonders, Three times Death appears to frighten, Thrice destruction hovers over!" Spake the reckless Lemminkainen, These the words of Kaukomieli: "Death is seen by aged people, Everywhere they see perdition, Death can never frighten heroes, Heroes do not fear the spectre; Be that as it may, dear mother, Tell that I may understand thee, Name the first of all destructions, Name the first and last destroyers!" Lemminkainen's mother answered: "I will tell thee, son and hero, Not because I wish to speak it, But because the ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... community, arrive at the state of mind in which unconsciously and as a matter of second nature he estimates the quality of the most trivial act by its relation to the standard set by the Military High Command. Like a spectre does that solemn, impalpable, often perfectly unreasonable omniscient and omnipotent entity lurk in the shadow ready to reach out a clutching hand, and for some infraction of regulations, wilful or inadvertent, hale the luckless and shivering defaulter to judgment. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... a sinister apparition, looming through a cloud-rent in the west—a scarlet sun in a green sky. His sanguine disk, enormously magnified, seemed barred like the body of a belted planet. A moment, and the crimson spectre vanished; and the ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... say I am altogether at my ease when I see anywhere in my path that meagre, squalid, famine-faced spectre, Poverty; attended as he always is, by iron-fisted oppression, and leering contempt; but I have sturdily withstood his buffetings many a hard-laboured day already, and still my motto is—I DARE! My worst enemy is moi-meme. I lie so miserably open to the inroads and incursions of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... outward as if awaiting unconsciously some imminent solution from the gliding spectre, it seemed as if the night suddenly opened on the left to shoot forth a burst of red fire. A few seconds later, the hollow boom of cannon shook the air around them. Sir Adrian's nails ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... edge. The boiling liquid splashed over the table. I stood fascinated by the horrible apparition as the captain continued to hold its dreadful bones in view. Presently my head swam; a painful oppression weighed at my heart; I was ill; and, in a jiffy, the appalling spectre was laid beneath the calm waters of the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... spirit. He removes all the impediments between His love and us. His love can now come undisturbed. His deepest and solemnest judgments do not need to come; and no more does there stand frowning between us and Him the spectre of our past. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... plays were being enacted in dumb show on the stages of theatres apparently decorated by Rothenstein. The Russian ballet had stopped in the midst of "Le Spectre de la Rose." Suits of armour, which Ursus called "pewter raincoats," glimmered in dark spaces behind piled drums and under limply hanging flags or aeroplanes ready to take flight. Almost everything was mechanical—each article warranted to do what it ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... remains of his once happy friend; but so miserably altered and disguised, that his features were scarce cognisable. The florid, the sprightly, the gay, the elevated youth, was now metamorphosed into a wan, dejected, meagre, squalid spectre; the hollow-eyed representative of distemper, indigence, and despair. Yet his eyes retained a certain ferocity, which threw a dismal gleam athwart the cloudiness of his aspect, and he, in silence, viewed his ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... rugged features that we seemed to see him through a web of silver gauze. His torch was out; his fires were smoldering; a tall column of smoke that rose up and lost itself in the growing moonlight was all the sign he gave that he was a living Autocrat of the Sea and not the spectre of a dead one. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... again laying his hand upon my arm, and glancing over his shoulder with hollow eyes, "was just a year ago. Six or seven months passed, and I had recovered from the surprise and shock, when one morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at that door, looked towards the red light, and saw the spectre again." He stopped, with a ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... jungen Geislein," in his Kinder und Hausmaerchen, vol. I. p. 29. In the notes to this story, vol. III. p. 15, Grimm says, "In Pomerania this is told of a child who when his mother had gone out was swallowed by the child-spectre, resembling the varlet Ruprecht. But the stones which he swallows with the child make the spectre so heavy that he falls to the earth, and the child unhurt springs out of him." See, too, the demons at p. 99 of these stories, who swallow ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... basking like monsters along the shore, half out of the water, half in; a solitary heron starting up here and there, as you rounded some point, and flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to view, or standing like a gaunt spectre on the umbrageous side of the mountain, his motionless form revealed against the dark green as you passed; the trees and willows and alders that hemmed you in on either side, and hid the fields and the farmhouses and the road that ran near by,—these things and others ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... with bated breath and gaping month. It was late before Ida got to bed, and later still before she fell asleep; for, somehow, now that she was back at Herondale the memory of that happy past grew more vivid; in fact, the whole place was haunted by the spectre of her lost love: and of all spectres this is the most ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... in vain for the thin, bowed figure of his grief-stricken sister. There were two willow-shaded graves in the grass-grown church-yard, and o'er them bent the spectre-like form of the Hermit of the Cedars, his gray locks moistened by the falling night-dews, and his pale face turned upward to the midnight stars with ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... majority of the deputies looked forward to the return of the King (whether the Comte de Chambord of the elder Bourbons, or the Comte de Paris of the House of Orleans) as soon as France should be freed from the German armies of occupation and the spectre of the Red Terror. Some of their more impatient members openly showed their hand, and while at Bordeaux began to upbraid Thiers for his obstinate neutrality on this question. For his part, the wise old man had early seen ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... lay down on the bench in her rags and Slimak went into the alcove. He sat on the bed, determined to be on the watch. He did not know that this strange state of mind is called 'nerves'. Yet a kind of relief had come in with Zoska; she had driven away the spectre of Maciek and the child. But an iron ring was beginning to press on his head. This was sleep, heavy sleep, the companion of great anguish. He dreamt that he was split in two; one part of him was sitting by his sick wife, the other was Maciek, standing outside the window, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... me in the face every waking hour, like a grisly spectre with bloody fang and claw, is the extermination of species. To me, that is a horrible thing. It is wholesale murder, no less. It is capital crime, and a black disgrace to the races of civilized mankind. I say "civilized mankind," because savages ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... cried the duchess, sympathizing, in spite of herself, with his sudden sorrow. He was ghastly as a spectre, and his whole frame shook like the leaf of ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... he had loosened, he softly raised it, listened, and climbing through, dropped noiselessly to the floor. Feeling his way in the darkness amid the bales and boxes, he reached a nook behind a piano-case he had previously noted, and settling down, prepared to await the appearance of the "spectre." ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... drew it back, but as he did so he recoiled violently, for he saw advancing upon him a terrible spectre, holding its head in its two hands. Its eyes seemed full of blood and fire, and rolled round and round in a most horrible manner. The hermit was about to shriek in terror when the head of the apparition, after laughing ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... other with a frightened air. She advanced to him and asked him what was the matter, in his native tongue. He shrunk farther back. The man could not or would not speak. He murmured something to himself, and stared at her as if she were a spectre. ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Apology of St. Perpetua," over which thou porest, for under all thy dignity and formalism there beats a loving father's heart. The shadows are gathering, dear sir, around thy fifth son in a far country, and in the gathering shadows there stalks, noiselessly, relentlessly, that grim, gray spectre, Death. On thy knees, then, oh Rector of St. Agnes, and blend thy prayers with the feeble petitions of her who even now, for thy house, entreats the Throne of Grace. Pray, oh thou on whom the bishop's ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... well-meaning men who, as a parish council, might conduct the affairs of Dorminster Town with unqualified success. As statesmen they do not exist. It seems to me, Nigel, that you and I are going to see in reality that spectre which terrified the world twenty years ago. We are going to see the breaking up of a ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings from broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to-night, O Sweet, and wail, A spectre at my door, Shall mortal Fear make Love immortal fail— I shall but love you more, Who, from Death's house returning, give me still One moment's comfort in ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... that Wallace actually saw the visions, and that the legend originated in the fact. I do not mean to imply that Fawdon became present, embodied or disembodied, whatever may have been the case with his spectre. I only say that what the legend reports Wallace to have seen, was actually in the hero's eyes. The remainder of the question I leave ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... still remained in the sack had completely whitened his fellow-traveller and given him a most unearthly appearance. The frightened miller was "putrified," as Mrs. Malaprop would say, at the sight, and a push from the white spectre brought the unfortunate man to the ground, when away rode the gallant quartermaster with his sacks of flour, which, at length bursting, made a ludicrous spectacle of man ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... not dead, then, since he rose of a sudden, like a spectre, took up his wife in his arms, and descended from the pyre in the midst of the clouds of smoke, which only heightened ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... he had just made, weakly, it seemed to him. A good deal of the importance of his revolt against commercial medicine disappeared. Lindsay tried oily, obsequious means of attracting attention. He was to hang his sign from a corner store. Some dim idea of the terrible spectre that haunts the days and nights of those without capital or position confronted him. If he had never been rich, he had always the means to give him time to look about, to select from a number of opportunities. If he could ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... less a person than Marshal Saxe. One night, on the march, he bivouacked in a haunted castle, and slept the sleep of the brave until midnight, when he was awakened by hideous howls heralding the approach of the spectre. When it appeared, the Marshal first discharged his pistol point-blank at it without effect, and then struck it with his sabre, which was shivered in his hand. The invulnerable spectre then beckoned the amazed Marshal to follow, and preceded him to a spot where the floor of the gallery ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... The spectre of death that hovered above his head imparted such an imposing majesty to his person that the soldiers paused, ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... house there is a gruesome witch, and I felt her breath and her long nails in my face; and by the door there stands a man who stabbed me in the leg with a knife, and in the yard there lies a black spectre, who beat me with his wooden club; and above, upon the roof, there sits the justice, who cried, 'bring that rogue here!' And so I ran away from the place as fast as ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... he paced his narrow room, In the bright sunshine of that Paris day; Saw in his thought the awful hand of doom; Saw in his dream his glory pass away; Tried in his heart, his weary heart, to pray: "O God! who made me, give me strength to face The spectre of this ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... scientist fought off the grim spectre valiantly. He patted Ulana's hand as his weak voice resumed. "You will take care of her I know, Carson. Take her with you to your own world; make her happy." He fell silent ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... and rumbled up the street, disappearing in the twilight, while the ear still tracked its course. Scarcely was it gone when the people began to question whether the coach and attendants, the ancient lady, the spectre of old Caesar and the Old Maid herself were not all a strangely-combined delusion with some dark purport in its mystery. The whole town was astir, so that, instead of dispersing, the crowd continually ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... apostleship of equality that was M. de Vilmorin's. You lacked the vision that would have shown you that God did not create men equals. Well, you are in case to-night to judge which of us was right, which wrong. You see what is happening here in Paris. You see the foul spectre of Anarchy stalking through a land fallen into confusion. Probably you have enough imagination to conceive something of what must follow. And do you deceive yourself that out of this filth and ruin there will rise up an ideal form of society? Don't ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... and through the darkness shout again, Rousing the streets, and call and call anew 'Creusa,' and 'Creusa,' but in vain. From house to house in frenzy as I flew, A melancholy spectre rose in view, Creusa's very image; ay, 'twas there, But larger than the living form I knew. Aghast I stood, tongue-tied, with stiffening hair. Then she addressed me ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... the Indian's plume, a single feather waving silver-white. Then it became riveted on the bubbling, refulgent spring. The pool was round, perhaps five feet across, and shone like a burnished shield. It mirrored the moon, the twinkling stars, the spectre trees. ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... another victim as soon after as I conveniently could. The one spectre superseded the other, until all vanished. They never trouble me now, though sometimes, in my waking moments, I have met them on the roadside, glaring at me from bush or tree, until I shouted at them fiercely, and then they were gone. These are my terrors, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... all-pervading and impalpable as the air we drew into our lungs. And suddenly this danger, this breath of our life, had taken this material form. It was material and expected, and yet it had the effect of an evil spectre, inasmuch as one did not know where and how it was vulnerable, what precisely it would do, how one ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and calmly, indeed he was surprised that he could face it like that, but his one thought was for peace, to put this spectre that had haunted him these ten days behind him and watch the world again with a straight ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... of the gown, Oh! be it mine, unknowing and unknown, [45]With deans deceased, to sleep beneath the stone." As tearful thus, and half convulsed with spite, He lengthen'd out with plaints the livelong night, At that still hour of night, when dreams are oft'nest true, A well-known spectre rose before his view, As in some lake, when hush'd in every breeze, The bending ape his form reflected sees,[46] Such and so like the Doctor's angel shone, And by his gait the guardian sprite was known, Benignly bending o'er his aching head— "Sleep, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... was capable of taking part in the whole round of the British drama, provided he was allowed to use his own language in getting through the dialogue. It happened one night that Reginald, in the Castle Spectre, was taken ill, and this veteran of a hundred characters was, of course, called up for the vacant part. He responded with his usual promptitude, although knowing nothing whatever of the character, but while they were getting him into the dress, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... point from their experiences in the war. All they wanted to do was to sit down together, and, man to man, talk their difficulties over. He would be glad to assist them, and he had no doubt as to the result. He warned the working man that hard times were coming. The spectre of unemployment was already parading their streets. Unemployment meant disorder, rioting. This, he assured them, would not be permitted. At all costs order would be maintained. He had no wish to threaten, but he promised them that the peace would be preserved at all costs. He suggested ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... something very much like horror. Some words certainly left his lips, but they did not carry to the hearing of any one of those three people. He looked at Maraton with the fierce, terrified intentness of one who looks upon a spectre! ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dissent, And at the stake teach wretches to repent. Clad cap-a-pie in mail we'll face our foes, And arm our British soldiery with bows. Dirt and disease shall rule us as of yore, The Plague's grim spectre stalk from shore to shore. Proceed, brave BALFOUR, whom no flouts appal, Collect stupidities and do them all. Uneducate our men, unplough our land, Bid heathen temples rise on every hand; Unmake our progress and revoke our laws, Or stuff ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... hours and for hours You are alone with your husband and lord. There is a skeleton hid in yon flowers; There is a spectre at bed and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... the Jacobins was a dictatorship, which was quite a new substitute for monarchy, and the Orleans spectre was no more than an illusion on which the Gironde spent much of its strength. In retaliation, they were accused of Federalism, and this also was a false suspicion. Federal ideas, the characteristic of America, had the sanction of the greatest names in the political literature of France—Montesquieu ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Aunt Olivia's flower garden, and sat with little brown chin palm-deep on the doorsteps. Gradually the indignation melted out of existence and only the homesickness was left. It sat on her small, lean face like a little spectre. It troubled ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... himself, as his sole purpose was to make good acting plays. Had it been necessary to that end to make Richard walk on three legs, or Henry on one leg, no doubt he would have done so,—just as Monk Lewis said he would have made Lady Angela blue, in his "Castle Spectre," if by such painting he could have made the play more effective. Prince Henry was a very precocious youth, and had the management of great affairs when he was but a child, and when it would have been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... sense had rolled back at last and shown a sweet, eternal landscape behind—a shadowless land of peace where the lion lay down with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid. There should be war no more: that bloody spectre was dead, and with him the brood of evil that lived in his shadow—superstition, conflict, terror, and unreality. The idols were smashed, and rats had run out; Jehovah was fallen; the wild-eyed dreamer of Galilee was in ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... He was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... that made a light curtain about this fantasia, and from time to time, with a shrill cry of exultation, a half-naked form, all gleaming eyes and teeth and polished bronze-hued limbs, rushed out of the blackness beyond the fire, leaped through the tongues of flame and vanished like a spectre into the ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... twenty-seven years, who had been carried to the tribunal almost in a dying state wrapped in blankets, to vote against the death of the "Tyrant," and who was termed, from this act and this costume, the "Spectre of Tyranny." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... in his ever-helpful Diary: "Sept. 20. Now I hear from Salem that about 18 years agoe, he [Giles Cory] was suspected to have stamp'd and press'd a man to death, but was cleared. Twas not remembered till Ann Putnam was told of it by said Cory's Spectre the Sabbath day night before ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... was not a sight that we should wish any one to see in our house, as desirable as a dignified spectre might have been. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... deserving of better treatment than she received at the hands of the hard-hearted author, who suffered her to be cheated and bullied by a scheming and brutal guardian, to be slandered by his envious daughter, persecuted by a dissolute nobleman, haunted by a spectre, shut up in a tower, exposed to manifold dangers, beset by robbers, abducted, assaulted, barely rescued, and, finally, even teased and tormented by the chosen lover of her heart, a jealous-pated fellow, who was always making ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... air above the promontory! The spectre of a woman—of his wife, clad, as she had been clad that fatal night! Outlined in supernatural light, it faces them with lifted arms showing the ends of rope dangling from either wrist. A sight awful to any eye, but to the man of ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... to see any one enter her apartments. When the mulatto chambermaid came there, in the ordinary course of her duties, she would shrink back in her chair and shade her eyes, as if some hideous spectre had crossed her path; but, if Agnes Barker entered, this nervous shock became unendurable, and it was with the greatest effort that she could refrain from rushing madly into the next room, and holding the ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... to be abandoned: but the objectives were not. Most of them were eventually to be translated into action and actuality. It was in their modification, perhaps, that the author was to display most of all his foresight and acumen. From 1848 onwards he recognised the true nature of "the spectre which haunted Europe"—and which still haunts the world. From then onwards he was not to write in the way which ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... The spectre army fades Far up the glimmering hill, But, vaguely lingering still, A group of shuddering shades Infects the pallid air, Growing dimmer as day invades The hush of the dusky square. There is one that seems a King, As if ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... that he entered the dreaded shades with fear, yet no spectre ever crossed his path. But perhaps that was because the thoughts of the old man were pure, or perhaps because he never entered the forest without singing a hymn in ...
— Undine • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... connected with these voyages. The inflammation, which had proceeded from it, had reached his eyes; it could not be dispersed; and the consequence was, that he was then blind. The second was lame; he had badly ulcerated legs, and appeared to be very weak. The third was a mere spectre; I think he was the most pitiable object I ever saw. I considered him as irrecoverably gone. They all complained to me of their bad usage on board the Thomas. They said they had heard, of my being in Bristol, and they hoped I ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... no one had as yet been found who had really seen the spectre old man, nevertheless the place kept its ghost reputation and was ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... front of you; fluted columns and draperies in broad folds with a formation that resembles the finest hemstitching may be seen all around you, while Pluto's chasm, a wide rift in the walls, contains a spectre clothed in shadowy draperies. One wonders how long this grim, ghastly person has stood here. Long ages came and went in that shadowy and evanescent time with no record save these stony ghosts, and over all a black pall of ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... the ivied ruins of yonder elm There glides and gazes a sadder face; Spectre Queen of a vanished race— 'Tis the full moon shrunk to a fleeting film, And she lingers for love of her ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... of being able to see things inside his head; in his drunken hysteria he was to see them always. The vision he beheld against the darkness of his mind projected itself and glared at him. He was pursued by a spectre in his own brain, and for that reason there was no escape. Wherever ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... in this vortex of existence, can the Son of Time not pretend: still less if some Spectre haunt him from the Past; and the Future is wholly a Stygian Darkness, spectre-bearing. Reasonably might the Wanderer exclaim to himself: Are not the gates of this world's happiness inexorably shut against thee; hast thou a hope that is not ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... experience, suppose you hint to any one inclined to spectre-shooting, that he runs the risk of killing a live man, and having two ghosts on his hands,—the ghost of the poor devil shot, and one of himself hanged for murder. As for you, young girls, remember that when you go forth to meet the perils of dark mornings, you are more likely to encounter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... state of things is dreary enough, but what unimaginable dreariness there will be when there are neither rich nor poor, when all have been educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and hopelessness than Dante's lowest circle of hell. The spectre of famine, of the plague, of war, etc., are mild and gracious symbols compared with that menacing figure, Universal Education, with which we are threatened, which has already eunuched the genius of the last five-and-twenty years of the nineteenth century, and produced ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... terminating, like an ancient satyr's, in a cloven foot; but it is furnished with two arms, bearing hard fists at the end of them, with which it has been known to strike the benighted traveller in the face, or to tumble him over into some dark pool. The spectre may be seen at the close of evening hopping vigorously among the distant bogs, like a felt ball on its electric platform; and when the mist lies thick in the hollows, an occasional glimpse may be caught of it even ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... struggle of the marketplace, money had lost its high value for him. Money was only a means, not an end. But to have it, to be able to bestow it where it was sadly needed, was worth while, after all. If he "crashed" over there, it was something to have banished the grim spectre of want from these two who were old ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... man whom guilt chases from his country! He flies to distant lands in the hope of shaking off the remembrance of his crime. He finds that, go where he will, the spectre dogs his steps. In Paris, in Milan, in Rome, the grizzly form starts up before him. He must change, not his country, but his heart—himself—before he ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... I was in a deep recess, and in a seat hardly raised above the level of the floor, I escaped her, although it seemed to me for some seconds, as I gazed on this spectre, that our ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... A spectre that impresses as wearing rags under a gorgeous robe, lurks among the foliage of the quiet bosquet beyond the orangerie. It is the infamous Madame de la Motte, chief of adventuresses, and it was in that secluded grove that her tool, Cardinal de Rohan, had his pretended interview with ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... upon his sad burden as it loomed faintly through the flowering laurustinus, then at the unfathomable gloom amid the high trees on each hand, indistinct, shadowless, and spectre-like in their monochrome of grey. He felt anything but cheerful, and wished he had the company even of a child or dog. Stopping the horse, he listened. Not a footstep or wheel was audible anywhere around, and the dead silence was broken ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... The history of the soup was fallen into the great forgotten, like one of M. Heller's speeches. In the baggage room, Meiser had already seized the handle of a black leather trunk, when, at the other end, he saw the spectre of Fougas, which was pulling in the opposite direction, and seemed inclined to dispute possession. He bristled up, pulled stronger, and even plunged his left hand into the pocket where the revolver was lying. But the luminous ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... the love of my mother, and mounting to the top of the pedestal, I look up and behold my mother before me. The spectre of her, standing before the monument, looks down upon me, reproachfully, piteously, affectionately. I sit down at the feet of the Virgin Mary and bury my face in my hands and weep. I love what thou lovest, O my mother, but I can see no ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... in stone, these gods were dog-headed or longly beaked. Some, though, were alive. In temples were saurians on purple carpets, bulls draped with spangled shawls, hawks on shimmering perches, that little gold chains detained. Among gods of this character, the Sphinx, in its role of eternal spectre, must have seemed the ideal. Others were nearly sublime. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... are ready for him" says the Major and brings him in here. But on the way Mr. Buffle looks about him in his usual suspicious manner and the Major fires and asks him "Do you see a Ghost sir?" "No sir" says Mr. Buffle. "Because I have before noticed you" says the Major "apparently looking for a spectre very hard beneath the roof of my respected friend. When you find that supernatural agent, be so good as point him out sir." Mr. Buffle stares at the Major and then nods at me. "Mrs. Lirriper sir" says the Major going off into a perfect steam and introducing me with his hand. "Pleasure ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... away I grew morose, morbid, and hypochondriacal. The pride which kept me from sharing my secret with my friend also held me at my post and nerved me to endure the torment in the rapidly diminishing hope of finally exorcising the spectre or recovering my usual healthy tone of mind. The difficulty of my position was increased by the fact that the apparition failed to appear occasionally, and while I welcomed each failure as a sign that the visits were to cease, they continued spasmodically for weeks, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... at the dismal sounds, But vainly strove a word to say; So, pointing to his bleeding wounds, The threat'ning spectre stalk'd away. ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... earth owns not"—he hears, and starts, And grasps the handle of his weapon tried; Then, while the rustling tent-cloth slowly parts, A figure enters and stands by his side: There was an air of majesty and pride In the bold bearing of that spectre pale— The crimson on its robe was still undried, And dagger wounds, that tell a bloody tale Beyond the power of words, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... the welter of the east One gaunt barque like a spectre bore; The mad wind trumpeted, then ceased, Then trumpeted ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... more about missing links than what I have said. I should rely much on pre-Silurian times; but then comes Sir W. Thomson like an odious spectre. Farewell.—Yours most sincerely, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... term second sight seems to be meant a mode of seeing superadded to that which nature generally bestows. In the Erse it is called Taisch; which signifies likewise a spectre or a vision.' Johnson's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... modern communism in all this, but there is a lesson to the modern Church as to the obligations of wealth and the claims of brotherhood, which is all but universally disregarded. The spectre of communism is troubling every nation, and it will become more and more formidable, unless the Church learns that the only way to lay it is to live by the precepts of Jesus and to repeat in new forms the spirit of the primitive Church. The Christian sense of stewardship, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... between St. John and the Virgin,' bearing the name of Ignatius: and it is not improbably connected with the outburst of Mariolatry in the eleventh and following centuries. But with 'the first streak of intellectual dawn this Ignatian spectre vanished into its kindred darkness.' The forgery was 'consigned to the limbo of foolish and forgotten things.' This pretender set aside, St. Ignatius was represented in Western Europe by the epistles ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... played, besides the characters already named, Rolla, Penruddock, Lothaire, Othello, George Barnwell, Octavian, Osmond (Castle Spectre) Hotspur, Frederick in Lovers Vows, Petruchio, Gondebert, and many others, if not all with equal excellence, at least with so much as to rank him among the first ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... Blaize, was a stout, stumpy fellow, about four feet ten, with a head somewhat too large for his body, and extremely long arms. Ever since the plague had broken out in Drury-lane, it haunted him like a spectre, and scattered the few faculties he possessed. In vain he tried to combat his alarm—in vain his mother endeavoured to laugh him out of it. Nothing would do. He read the bills of mortality daily; ascertained the ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... renders them miserable and unamiable—a real London rain—an eternal drizzle accompanied with mist and fog. When the sun shone it appeared but a pale image of itself, and old pagazis, wise in their traditions as old whaling captains, shook their heads ominously at the dull spectre, and declared it was doubtful if the rain would ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Nevertheless, the Imperial Government, not finding it possible to suppress the social democrats, does its best to employ them for its own ends. It uses them in fact as it uses irreconcilable France, namely, for the purpose of terrorisation, since it has discovered that the spectre of socialism is as effective to keep the middle classes loyal as the spectre of French revenge is to keep the Southern States loyal. But it also hopes in time to eradicate socialism from the State. "A vigorous national policy" Prince von Buelow declares to be "the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... ornamental design, and took the Great Exhibition to witness the fact. We have also pointed to that strange phenomenon, the rise anew of monastic institutions among us, long after their object is accomplished, giving a spectre-like expression to an obsolete idea; we have exposed, likewise, the inclination of the working-classes to trust to the protection, and, on every emergency, claim as a matter of right the aid of the wealthy, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... 1590. Then the morbid poet turned suspicious, and began to indulge fresh hopes of fortune in another place. He would again offer himself to the Medici. In April he set off for Tuscany, and alighted at the convent of Monte Oliveto, near Florence. Nobody wanted him; he wandered about the Pitti like a spectre, and the Florentines wrote: actum est de eo.[59] Some parting compliments and presents from the Grand Duke sweetened his dismissal. He returned to Rome; but each new journey told upon his broken health, and another illness made him desire a change of scene. This time Antonio ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... carried off Petrarch's Laura, and those other thousands of whom the world knew nothing then and knows nothing now. Some, too, have heard that the plague swept over Europe—desolating, devastating—the spectre with the swinging scythe mowing down broad swathes of men. Some, when they hear of it, picture to themselves Pope Clement VI. at Avignon, sitting in that vast palace that overlooks the Rhone, the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... it, when a sigh from Captain Nemo nailed me to the spot. I knew that he was rising. I could even see him, for the light from the library came through to the saloon. He came towards me silently, with his arms crossed, gliding like a spectre rather than walking. His breast was swelling with sobs; and I heard him murmur these words (the last which ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... with the fever, and never was there such an evidence of the racking of a bad conscience. In his ravings he shrieked for mercy, and then would blaspheme in the most awful manner. At one moment the spectre of his dead comrade would be invoked by him, requesting it to depart, or desiring those around him to take it away. At others, the murdered man was standing at his bed-side, and he would attempt to run, that he might ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... with the light that came through leaves of ivy, completed the interior of this portion of the ruin. It was not quite destitute of furniture. A few strange chairs, whose arms and legs looked as though they had dwindled away with age; a table, the very spectre of its race: a great old chest that had once held records in the church, with other quaintly-fashioned domestic necessaries, and store of fire-wood for the winter, were scattered around, and gave evident tokens of its occupation as a dwelling-place ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... possible here! He must feel as young Goethe felt when he first peered into the melancholy atheistic twilight of the Systme de la Nature; to him this book seemed so grey, so Cimmerian and deadly, that he could only endure its presence with difficulty, and shuddered at it as one shudders at a spectre. ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... thoughts, he put it away desperately. The man was dead—or his fickle fancy had veered elsewhere. Nothing else could explain his absence. But they could never know, and the uncertainty would forever stand between him and Lynde like a spectre. But he thought more of Lynde's pain than his own. He would have elected to bear any suffering if by so doing he could have freed her from the nightmare dread of Harmon's returning to claim her. That dread had always hung over her and now it must be intensified to agony by her ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Allies could not properly refuse to recognize Japan's claims. The secret agreements themselves hardly speak as eloquently for the absence of China from the average western consciousness. In saying that China and Asia are to be enormously significant figures in future reckonings, the spectre of a military Yellow Peril is not meant nor even the more credible spectre of an industrial Yellow Peril. But Asia has come to consciousness, and her consciousness of herself will soon be such a massive and persistent thing that it will force itself upon ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... like a spectre ship, so shattered was her framework. From the main-mast to the stern post, her timbers above the water-line were shot away, a few blackened posts alone preventing the upper deck from falling. Through this ruined ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... I bet you do a jolly rank paper too,' I said, remembering that the sceptic is sometimes vouchsafed revelations to which the most devout believer may not aspire. It is, for instance, always the young man who scoffs at ghosts that the family spectre chooses as his audience. But it required more than a mere sneer or an empty gibe to pump information out of Bradshaw. He took me ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... and spiral columns of vapour rose around the altar, and from each column came a spectre of fire and stood with ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... part of the river Wye, between the city of Hereford and the town of Moss, which was distinguished and well known for upwards of two centuries, by the appellation of the Spectre's Voyage; across which, so long as it retained that name, neither entreaty nor remuneration could induce any boatman to convey passengers after a certain hour of the night. The superstitious ideas current amongst the lower ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... board with my own money,' replied the spectre. It is all my own, and I shall keep it. The church shall never have one stiva of it if I can ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... reappeared; but it had yet some spots which were never to fade away. The word "separation" which Bonaparte, so often in Egypt, and now in Paris, had launched against Josephine, was to be henceforth the sword of Damocles, ever suspended over her head: like a dark, shadowy spectre it was to follow her everywhere; even amid scenes of happiness, joy, and glory, it was to be there to terrify her by its sinister presence, and by its ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... before her dressing-room fire, she heard her maid soliciting entrance, and paid no heed, the door being locked—as though a spectre could be bolted out of rooms and houses! Pacing the floor, restless, annoyed, and dismayed by turns, she flung her wet skirt and coat from her, piece by piece, and stood for awhile, like some slender youth in riding breeches and shirt, facing the fire, her fingers ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... sorrow—she won't expect you to; but you mustn't fail her; and you must do as you are bid. This afternoon you must just go out for a walk, and you must SLEEP, dear; that's what you want; you don't know what a spectre you are; and you must just get well as quick as you can, for ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... needle darting from north to south and from south to north. In public he still played the part of chorus to the wild speeches of his friends: but he would have taken in petto the first dictator who came along and swept away the red spectre. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... minutes afterwards we were desired to lie down. Feeling helpless as babes, we passively obeyed, and watched our guide as he moved about like a spectre in the long grass on the banks of the Potomac, looking for his canoe. At last he returned and whispered that the boat was all right, and we all crept like serpents to where it was concealed. Nothing could be heard but the wind blowing through the trees, and the discordant noises of frogs and ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... going deranged together?" retorted he, wondering what had come to the house. "Seen a spectre, Joyce?" ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... to glimpses of the earl in his restless night-walks; but by the domestics, both such as had seen something and such as had not, the apparition was naturally associated with the lost chamber, as the place whence the spectre ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... may be committed, and much more, convictions whereupon persons may be condemned as guilty of witchcrafts, ought certainly to be more considerable than barely the accused persons being represented by a spectre unto the afflicted, inasmuch as it is an undoubted and notorious thing that a demon may by God's permission appear even to ill purposes, in the shape of an innocent, yea, and a virtuous man. Nor can we esteem alterations made in the sufferers, by a look or touch of ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... before me at different times and in different forms during that eventful journey,—that youth, whose features are imprinted on my memory, is the very individual forester who this day rescued us in the forest. I cannot be mistaken; and connecting these marvellous appearances with the spectre which I saw while at Gay Bowers, I cannot resist the conviction that Heaven has permitted my guardian angel to assume mortal shape for ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... her Ladyship begins to doubt whether this romantic gentleman was not hoaxing her, and certes it was time; but 'melt and disperse ye spectre doubts!' an attempt to hoax Lady Morgan, impossible! They do quickly pass away, and the conversation is pursued in the same strain, until "Monsieur de —— one of the conscript fathers of classicism" is announced. No sooner has his name passed the lips of the servant, than the romantic ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various |
