"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... what troubles me, that my Lord Buckhurst hath got Nell away from the King's house, and gives her 100l. a-year, so as she hath sent her parts to the house, and will act no more and yesterday Sir Thomas Crewe told me that Lacy lies a-dying; nor will receive any ghostly advice from a bishop, an old acquaintance of his, that went to see him. It is an odd and sad thing to say, that though this be a peace worse than we had before, yet everybody's fear almost is, that the Dutch will not stand by their promise, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... Roman Empire. The faded pageantry of Ratisbone and Frankfurt was all that remained of the glories of the realm of Charlemagne: the medley of States which owned him as elected lord cared not for the decrees of this ghostly realm; and Goethe might well place in the mouth of his jovial toper, in the cellar scene of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... it still," he said, "drip! drip! faster and plainer than ever. That ghostly dropping of water is the last and the surest of the fatal signs which have told of your father's and your brother's deaths to-night, and I know from the place where I hear it—the foot of the bed I lie on—that it is a warning ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... which he lent freely, being a good-natured fellow. He liked good living and jolly young fellows, and was popular among the officers, who used to pop in freely enough at his reverence's green hall-door whenever they wanted a loan of his dogs, or to take counsel of the ghostly father (whose opinion was valued more highly even than Toole's) upon the case of a sick ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and pleasant murmur Of its subsiding, As the pulse of the storm beats firmer, And the steady rain Drops into a cadenced chiding. Deep-breathing rain, The sad and ghostly noise Wherewith thou dost complain,— Thy plaintive, spiritual voice, Heard thus at close of day Through vaults of twilight-gray,— Doth vex me with sweet pain! And still my soul is fain To know the secret of that yearning Which in thine utterance ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... business. Certain California stocks which I had seen quietly interred in the old days in the tombs of their fathers were magically revived; and I remember, as one who has seen a ghost, to have been shocked as I looked over the quotations one morning to have seen the ghostly face of the "Dead Beat Beach Mining Co.," rouged and plastered, looking out from the columns of the morning paper. At last a few people began to respect, or suspect, the Man from Solano. At last, suspicion ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... locked, which in haste he had taken out and still held in his hand. Without attempting to decide whether the thing he had seen was of common clay or of some lighter substance, he still did not lend his mind with sufficient readiness to ghostly theory to imagine that his unwelcome guest could pass through ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... alone on the Banks. A dory forty feet away is invisible. The great fleet of busy schooners, tacking back and forth, watching their boats, is suddenly, obliterated. Hoarse cries, the tooting of horns and the clanging of bells, sound through the misty air, and now and then a ghostly schooner glides by, perhaps scraping the very gunwale and carrying away bits of rail and rigging to the accompaniment of New England profanity. This is the dangerous moment for every one on the Banks, for right through the center of the fishing ground lies the pathway ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... when the man was almost winded, and his breath was coming in quick gasps, a faint, far-off cry floated down to him through the ghostly aisles of the naked wind-swept forest. At first it was so faint as to be almost unintelligible, but as they pressed on, it grew louder and clearer, until the man recognized the pitiful ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... the moon in a yellow stain, And the clouds are flying before the wind, The leaves fall fast in a ghostly rain,— Summer ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... in silvery shade the song of chromatic ecstasy, others "huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail" and black upon black. Chopin is the color genius of the piano, his eye was attuned to hues the most fragile and attenuated; he can weave harmonies that are as ghostly as a lunar rainbow. And lunar-like in their libration are some of his melodies—glimpses, mysterious and vast, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... them crossed to the window overlooking the river. They opened it, and peered out fearfully. Even Catherine trembled now that the hour approached. The air was fresh and cool, swept clean by the stirring breeze of the dawn, whose first ghostly gleams were already in the sky. Suddenly, somewhere near at hand, a pistol cracked. The noise affected them oddly. The King fell into an ague and his teeth ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... domestic, rode to the town on the laird's best horse, and returned with the mid-wife en croupe. Daring the short space of his absence, the Tweed, which they must necessarily ford, rose to a dangerous height. Brownie, who transported his charge with all the rapidity of the ghostly lover of Lenore, was not to be stopped by this obstacle. He plunged in with the terrified old lady, and landed her in safety where her services were wanted. Having put the horse into the stable (where it was afterwards found in ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... public disclosure, once more to make the experiment coolly in her company. Accompanied by a trusty servant, they accordingly repeated their visit next night, and again heard, as the marquess had done before, the same ghostly and inconceivable noise; and nothing but the anxious wish to get rid of the castle, cost what it would, enabled them to suppress their terrors in presence of the servant, and to ascribe the sound to some accidental cause. On the evening of the third day, when both, determined ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... outlined distinct and glistening like a gossamer veil of silver, while the office building to their left was ripped and rended and the adjoining walls leaped out into sudden relief, their shattered windows looking like ghostly, sightless eyes. The curtain of darkness closed heavier than velvet, and the men cowered in their tracks, shielding themselves behind the nearest objects or behind one another's bodies, waiting for the sky to vomit ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... darkened, the woods blackened, and the light of a ghostly moon rose over the trees, rushing fearfully like great waters. Frederick ran along the edge of gloomy fields, when suddenly the cry "Moira! Moira!" resounded, and a piece of the darkness severed itself from the edge of the woods ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... across the eastern sky, was spread the first faint hint of a wondering dawn. Far out over the harbor a lightening could be seen, a prescience of day, and a ghostly half light, like that in a dim cathedral, replaced the flame-lit darkness. There were mists above the water, and the light gained progress slowly; still, it gained, and presently the salt sea odors came rolling in from the bay. The water turned from black to silver-gray, the shadows faded silently ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... peeping over his shoulder, next his cheek; it dogged him by day, and was his incubus by night; and often he would start and wrestle, for the desperate grasp of the dying appeared to be clutching at his throat: so, in his ghostly fears, and bloody conscience, he had girded round his neck a piece of thin sheet-iron in his cravat, which he wore continually as armour against those clammy fingers: no wonder that he held his ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... wig-making establishments, with shocks of dead and repulsive hair bound upon the heads of painted waxen brigands who stared out from glass boxes upon the passer-by with their stony eyes and scared him with the ghostly white of their countenances. We shunned these signs for a time, but finally we concluded that the wig-makers must of necessity be the barbers as well, since we could find no single legitimate representative ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his gesticulations, and spoke. "Ezekiel Grosse," said he, in a hollow, ghostly voice, "Ezekiel Grosse, follow me. I can show you buried gold, the wealth for ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... the familiar streets each approaching face, each distant figure seemed hers. The obsession was intolerable. It would not last, of course; but meanwhile he had the exposed sense of a fugitive in a nightmare, who feels himself the only creature visible in a ghostly and besetting multitude. The eye of the metropolis seemed fixed on him in ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... just been promenading the line of tents in his nightshirt, with a club, in search of some scoundrel, supposed to be the Adjutant, who has stuffed his bed with stove-wood and stones. Wilson, on seeing the ghostly apparition ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... who in all probability died in the faith of a roman catholick. This, however, I am apt to think, will not disparage his declaration in the opinion of some great men at home, even tho he did not make his confession to a ghostly physician. ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... to find some pattern, or meaning—withdrew baffled. But its invasion, as ghostly as that had been, loosened a knot here, cleared a ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... to my wont, and visited the sick even by way of a letter. And by this time I hope you are quite well again, and do not need ghostly counsels.... I have felt very badly about Miss Lyman's dying at Vassar, but since Mrs. S.'s visit and learning how beloved she is there, have changed my mind. What does it matter, after all, from what point of time or space we go home; how we shall smile, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... the young Irishman as plainly as he had ever seen him. The face, though, was white and bloodless. The ghostly figure moved with a heavy step, coming straight up the walk toward the building. Frank sat rooted to his chair. In the shadow of the piazza the figure seemed to turn, and was then lost to view. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... caution given me, no sooner had I quitted the ghostly governor than I hastened to my little upright friend. Tell him indeed I must not: honour, shame, principle, forbade. Yet to keep the good news wholly secret would be to render the severe covenant cruel. What could ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... be. No, it is not good that I should be alone; now, however, since I have seen the unknown beauty, I will not have to search my mind for subjects to keep it occupied, for Senorita California is quite a solid damsel and far from ethereal, and not at all ghostly, only that look about the eyes when the lids are drooping, and ...
— A Napa Christchild; and Benicia's Letters • Charles A. Gunnison
... are, then, two sorts of ghosts, or, more precisely, two sorts of ghostly activity—the friendly and the unfriendly—and corresponding to these are the emotions of love and fear which they call forth. On account of paucity of data it is difficult to say which of these emotions is the commoner among savages; probably the feeling is a mixed ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... whispering tenderest words in a visionary ear, I too now clasped her in my arms—a visionary Rima. How different the nights had seemed when I was without shelter, before I had rediscovered fire! How had I endured it? That strange ghostly gloom of the woods at night-time full of innumerable strange shapes; still and dark, yet with something seen at times moving amidst them, dark and vague and strange also—an owl, perhaps, or bat, or great winged moth, or nightjar. Nor had I any choice then but to listen to the night-sounds ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... mean? he asked himself again and again, while suspicions taunted him almost to madness. Up and down that disordered garden he paced like a ghostly sentinel; the doves fluttered to and fro, and were dismayed; the night-winds came in from the chilly sea, and the dews gathered in his beard. Through the deepening dusk he beheld the lights of the little town below him: across the solemn silence ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... cheerful, but did not clear the voice for music. So he approved chiefly of those plain things that sprang direct from the earth, particularly of potatoes, turnips, and other roots, with a little bread soup and such like ghostly diet. For drink he would have nothing but what he called "innocent clear water," just as it flowed from ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... with her. They thought that this Madame Arnoul had shown Marie-Therese to the good man of Salon in order to induce the King to live honourably with widow Scarron. But in 1697 widow Scarron had been married to Louis for twelve years at least; and one cannot see why ghostly aid should have been necessary to attach ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... spoken some ghostly consolation, but she answered with pettish impatience, "Waste not words—waste not words!—Let me speak that which I must tell, and sign it with my hand; and do you, as the more immediate servant ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... now led the way, hurling himself through the water on his side at top speed. He could not fathom this mysterious phosphorescence, and he wished to get his people out upon dry land before it reached them. But fast as the adventurers swam, the ghostly radiance spread faster. Before they got to the ledge, the light was all about them; but it seemed to be coming ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... nature—and who has the courage to avow himself aught else?—the sea-shore can never be monotonous. The swirl and sweep of ever-shifting waters, the flying mist of foam breaking away into a gray and ghostly distance down the beach, the eternal drone of ocean, mingling itself with one's talk by day and with the light dance-music in the parlors by night—all these are active sources of a passive pleasure. And to lie ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... slow growth have assumed many wild forms, and the visitor who stands there towards evening, and peers into that sombre grove, will sometimes yield to the spell which the scene is sure to exercise on imaginative natures; he will half fancy that these ghostly trees are conscious creatures, and that they have marked with mingled pity and scorn the long processions of mankind come and go like the insects of a day, through the centuries during which they have been stretching out their distorted limbs ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... of but one person, and that person is a young lady, it is hardly possible that he should not become personally intimate with her; hardly possible that he should not be in some measure grateful. Miss Gushing's responses came from her with such fervour, and she begged for ghostly advice with such eager longing to have her scruples satisfied, that Mr Oriel had nothing for it but to give way to a certain ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... in a long white cashmere robe, with a pale blue fleecy wrap about her shoulders. She looks tall and ghostly, and her brother's heart fills with pity, as he seems more closely drawn to ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... lattice, in the faint morning twilight, saw a tall, dusky figure, that looked much too substantial to be any such shadowy being as the old negro surmised, and the strokes of his hoe were too vigorous and noisy for ghostly gardening. ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... the ending of the story, with only this to observe, that whether that strange appearance of Captain Brand's face by the light of the pistol was a ghostly and spiritual appearance, or whether he was present in flesh and blood, there is only to say that he was never heard of again; nor had he ever been heard of till that time since the day he was so shot from behind by Capt. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... ghostly way you see Stanley turning the pump handle. With a handful of waste which he has borrowed from the Rosa's engine room, the Professor wipes from the section of wall through which the searchlight plays the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... night and seven the next morning, this mute ghostly waif from Palestine, with the half-century old dust of a pomegranate flower in its keeping, had come up that dark stairway. It appeared now that the letters were always found on the fourth stair from the top. This fact had not before been elicited, but there seemed little doubt ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... of any draught. "Here," said she. "Set down here." She drew up another chair close beside Rose and sat down. There came a flash of lightning and a terrible crash of thunder. A blind slammed somewhere. Out in the great front yard the rain swirled in misty columns, like ghostly dancers, and the flowering shrubs lashed the ground. Horace watched it until Sylvia called him, also, to what she considered a place of safety. "If you don't come away from that window and set on the sofa I shall have a conniption fit," she said. Horace obeyed. As ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fay, Supernal guest and sharer of my might, Wherefore and whither dost thou fly away, Exquisite phantom, nude and ghostly white, Never with me again to flit and play, Never ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... which seems to be so characteristic and so essential, is only the means to an end, and an ever changing means to secure a successful comfortable existence of the spirit in the life after death,—in the ghostly duplicate of life ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... the road is upon me, and the thirst of the sultry day; when the ghostly hours of the dusk throw their shadows across my life, then I cry not for your voice only, my ...
— Fruit-Gathering • Rabindranath Tagore
... footlights, and in the looking-glass at the side the reflection of part of the house, stalls, dress-circle, boxes, rows of faces, pretty dresses, bonnets, all as it were drowned in a blue haze, and presenting the colourless ghostly appearance of things dimly seen under water. During the entr'acte came the usual infliction ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... be it gigantic mountains, a waste of waters, or an illimitable jungle, are saturated with superstitions; every pool, every tree, every rock is the home of an evil spirit, and all mysterious noises in the forest are ghostly whisperings. Everywhere are signs and omens to warn man of danger or direct his course; theirs is a life where no schooling is so vital as the ability to read aright the "sermons in stones, books in the running brooks." For them the world is the patch ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... ghostly mountain to us who see it for the first time, unable to look long away while it remains in view. It is the same, old Washingtonians tell me, with those who have kept watching it every day of visibility for many years. And ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... waves of Suvla Bay. The slopes of Gallipoli, the sands of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Judasa afford them sepulture. Mons and Ypres provide their monuments. Wherever the battle-line extends from the English Channel to the Persian Gulf their ghostly voices whisper a response to the roll-call of the guardian-spirits of Liberty. ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... ask himself whether the character and cleverness of these bourgeoisie would not lead them to ignore not only the works, but even the existence, of the authors who sought to "astonish" them; and he thought, not without sadness, that when La Guepe should have published this young novelist's ghostly composition, the unconquerable bourgeoisie would know nothing about it, and would continue to devote itself to its favorite customs, such as tapping the barometer to know whether there was a change, or to heave a deep sigh after guzzling ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... into the church after my ancient mariner No. 2 had fumbled a good deal with a bunch of ghostly-looking keys. The door opened with a dismal scroop, and shut with an appalling bang. Grim and dark as the church is without, it is grimmer and darker within, and damp and vault-like, a faire fremir. There are all the mysterious cupboards and corners peculiar to such edifices; an organ-loft, from ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... incompetent advisers in times of danger—he chose to await the approach of the enemy in his own capital; and it was not till the latter had arrived within a few leagues of Cuzco, that the Inca, taking counsel of the same ghostly monitors, sallied ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... school we fear that De Foe must, on the whole, be reckoned. We have already made acquaintance with Mrs. Veal, who, in her ghostly condition, talks for an hour and three-quarters with a gossip over a cup of tea; who, indeed, so far forgets her ghostly condition as to ask for a cup of the said tea, and only evades the consequences ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Cleo, noticing how high the lad's forehead was, and with what evident care he had been dressed. His glasses were still on, and the sunset made ghostly shadows ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... of certain other notes; for instance, of the C in the octave immediately above, then the G immediately above that, then the E higher still; he will hear them all in time as clearly as the note originally struck; and, finally, a shrill little ghostly and quite importunate B flat in the treble will pulsate so loudly in his ear that he will never cease to hear it whenever that ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... "Whitaker's Almanack," which, with a Shakespeare and "Pickwick," now composed our library. And here an incident occurred which might well have startled a person with weak nerves, for the most practical being scarcely cares to be suddenly confronted, at dead of night, with a ghostly apparition unpleasantly suggestive of graveyards. On this occasion the spectre might have dropped from the clouds, for I looked up from my book for an instant, and noiselessly as a shadow it appeared before me, a shapeless thing in rags with a pale and gibbering face framed ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... nothing save the huge trunks, and their lower limbs, garlanded with ghostly tillandsia here and there draping down to the earth. This baffles him, both by its colour and form. The grey gauze-like festoonery, having a resemblance to ascending smoke, hinders him from perceiving that ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... crab defended itself with ever-ready claws. Borne down by numbers, it sank into the mud, the energy of the victors creating a tiny spiral of slush. A huge stingray passed on its way, the edges of extended wings rippling never so gently, its shadow half the size of the boat; and presently, with ghostly glide, a dull-skinned shark came into view with motion so steady and apparently effortless that it might have been a spectre. The pectoral fins swayed listlessly. The swirl of the tail was as tender as a caress. Passing ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... and tore the ducal circlet from her brow and cast it from her, and, thereafter, laid by her rings and jewels, and coming to the open casement fell there upon her knees and reached forth her pale hands to where, across the valley, the dark forest stretched away, ghostly and unreal, 'neath ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... in the boat, our silent boatman, like a spectral gondolier, rowed us silently along the labyrinthine canals of this dim and ghostly Venice. Vathek Beckford would have made them waterways to the Hall ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... bell of Westminster chimed midnight, that hour of picturesque ghostly tradition, when simple village maids shudder at the thought of traversing a dark lane or passing a churchyard, and when country folks of old-fashioned habits and principles are respectably in bed and for the most part sleeping. But so far as ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... nearer and nearer, the effort to control myself grew more severe. The struggle was between my will, my identity, my very self, on the one hand, and on the other, the ten thousand ancestors who were twisted into the fibres of me and whose ghostly voices were whispering of the dark and the fear of the dark that had been theirs in the time when the world was dark and full ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... all her 'guides' will allow her to do. Clarke still dominates the household by the aid of the ghostly granddaddy—a grim old chap that. They hold regular ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... milkman can perpetrate, and almost vie with the performances of the sweep. When "the cocks are crowing a merry midnight," as in the ballad, the sleepless patient wishes he could make off as quietly and quickly as the ghostly sons of the "Wife of Usher's Well." Dogs delight to bark in the country more than in town. Leech's picture of the unfortunate victim who left London to avoid noise, and found that the country was haunted by Cochin-China cocks, illustrates ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... host ever quivering before him in the tremulous heated air against the cloudless horizon. Now all his energies were bent toward finding the way that led to the camp by the water-holes, but sense of locality seemed to have left him, and the ghostly company which hung so persistently on his flanks gave no indication of direction, but merely followed as before they had fled. One by one the Count's soldiers succumbed, and when at last the forty spears hedged him round the Emir approached a prisoner incapable of action. ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... half-past nine, I put the book into my pocket and strolled leisurely toward the haunted house. I took with me a favorite dog—an exceedingly sharp, bold, and vigilant bull-terrier—a dog fond of prowling about strange ghostly corners and passages at night in search of rats—a dog of dogs ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, And the highwayman came riding— Riding—riding— The highwayman came riding, up to the ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... well, half filled with slimy, green water, mud, and filth, in a remote end of the plantation. Thither, unobserved, Sybilla made her way in the ghostly moonlight and flung her blood-stained bundle into its vile, ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... at large, and might waylay me from any bush or tuft of grass. The moonbeams were ghostly and the stillness of the wide solitude was eerie. Being but a child,—and a girl-child,—I thought of these things, and of the likelihood of meeting runaway negroes, and mad dogs, and stray sane curs whose duty it was to attack nocturnal trespassers, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... these atolls, so narrow, so barren, so beset with sea, here would seem a superfluity of ghostly denizens. And yet there are more. In the various brackish pools and ponds, beautiful women with long red hair are seen to rise and bathe; only (timid as mice) on the first sound of feet upon the coral they dive again for ever. They are known to be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leg— George Frederick Augustus to Peg. "At Christmas refinement is all fuss And nonsense," said Fan to Adolphus. "Would romps—or a tale of a fairy— Best suit you," said Robert to Mary. "At stories that work ghost and witch hard, I tremble," said Rosa to Richard. "A ghostly hair-standing dilemma Needs 'bishop,'" said Alfred to Emma; "What fun when with fear a stout crony Turns pale," said Maria to Tony; "And Hector, unable to rally, Runs screaming," said Jacob to Sally. "While you and I dance in the dark The polka," said Ruth unto Mark: "Each ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Past ghostly hill and moor and still-gleaming flood we flew. "I am happy," I could say at last, "as I ought not to be. In all scenes and places where I may ever be I shall remember ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... calculate to ask the Earl of Yalding to permit me to pass a night in his ancestral best bed- chamber. And if I hear so much as a phantom footstep, or hear so much as a ghostly sigh, I'll take ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... think, they sat there, two ghostly figures formless against the woods; then one rose, and presently I saw ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... there swept back across the threshold of my memory the vivid picture of the horrors of that ghostly Arizona cave; again, as on that far-gone night, my muscles refused to respond to my will and again, as though even here upon the banks of the placid Hudson, I could hear the awful moans and rustling of the fearsome thing which had lurked and threatened ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... we fancy that they will disappear magically as they have come. And here again one wild visionary scene after another reminds us that we are in the land of Dor's most original inspiration. There are bits of broken pine-wood, jagged peaks and ghostly ruins that have been already made quite familiar to us in the pages of ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... on the bed with the high, carved walnut back lay the night-dress borrowed from Mary. Through torn clouds a few stars glittered like coins in a gashed purse, and very far away to the west, at the end of all things visible, was a faint, ghostly gleam which meant the dazzling lights of the Casino and its terrace, ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... fern-roots and the drenched and dripping vine; Where the gum trees, ringed and ragged, from the mazy margins rise, Staring out against the heavens with their languid gaping eyes; There I listened—there I heard it! Oh, that melancholy sound, Wandering like a ghostly whisper, through the dreaming darkness round! Wandering, like a fearful warning, where the withered twilight broke Through a mass of mournful tresses, drooping ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... piety, composed, in 1712, for the young ladies who were then pensioners at the monastery of St. Augustin, at Bruges, we have been surprised into frequent smiles by the scrupulous watchfulness with which the ghostly writer followed the lady-pensioners (though with pious fancy only) to the very sacred of sacreds! He was not contented with directing them concerning the prayers which he believed proper to be used when they assumed, or laid aside, their respective ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... the frequent presence, by day and night, of his ghostly monitor and friend. To understand the nature of this companionship we must remember that devotion to the shepherd's craft was the controlling principle of Snarley's being. Had he been able to philosophise on the basis of his experience, he would have ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... water and were floated ashore in the arms of naked girls; she had lain for weeks in enormous atolls, where the only life was that of birds, and the silence was unbroken save for the long roll of the surf, and at night the ghostly scurrying of turtles over the sand; she had been everywhere in those labyrinthine seas, those haunts of romance and mystery, with love, danger, and death ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... burial,—the grave, the tumulus. Afterwards there slowly developed the idea of an underworld, connected in some mysterious way with the place of sepulture. Only at a much later time did this dim underworld of imagination expand and divide into regions of ghostly bliss and woe .... It is a noteworthy fact that Japanese mythology never evolved the ideas of an Elysium or a Tartarus,—never developed the notion of a heaven or a hell. Even to this day Shinto belief represents the pre-Homeric stage of imagination ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... friend, 'if a real army, coming over the sea to do battle for the king, has been represented by that ghostly multitude which passed before our view, you will find the number too strong for this fanciful faith of yours, in the help of an ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... repute writes to a magazine that she once occupied for a season a wainscotted room in an old manor house. On several occasions she awoke in the night: each time to witness the same ghostly performance. Four gentlemen sat round a table playing cards. Suddenly one of them sprang to his feet and plunged a dagger into the back of his partner. The lady does not say so: one presumes it was his partner. I have, myself, when playing bridge, ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... unamiably notorious Mull Sack, who once emptied Cromwell's pocket on the Mall, and whose courage was as formidable as his rough-edged tongue. Another favourite was the ingenious Crowder, whose humour it was to take the road habited like a bishop, and who surprised the victims of his greed with ghostly counsel. Thus it was a merry party that assembled in the lady's parlour, loyal to the memory of the martyred king, and quick to fling ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... As thick as heaps that through the livelong day With patient toil the sturdy woodmen rear, While clearing forests for the golden grain, And set aflame when evening's shades descend, Filling the glowing woods with floods of light And ghostly shadows: So these funeral-piles Send up their curling smoke ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... confined for debt or for political offences. And, lastly, there was a small capilla or chapel, in which prisoners cast for death passed the last three days of their existence in company of their ghostly advisers. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... sympathizing in her forms and aspects with the emotions of terror or awe which the tale excites. His genius broods entranced over the evanescent phantasmagoria of the vague debatable land in which the realities of experience blend with ghostly doubts and wonders. ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... she truly here, "And was I dreaming when I heard "That she was dead last year? "Or was it true, and is she but a shade "Who brings a fleeting joy to eye and ear, "Cold though so kind, and will she gently fade "When her sweet ghostly part is played "And the light-curtain falls at dawn of day?" But while my heart was troubled by this fear So deeply that I could not speak it out, Lest all my happiness should disappear, I thought me of a cunning ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... awoke again in my heart, slow-swelling through the blissful moments with infinite softness. Doubtless the child whose hand pressed my own also heard them; and then, elevated by their enchantment above the material world, the poor old man and the artless young girl both knew that a tender ghostly Presence was making sweetness all ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... human eye see these astounding revelations, but the impartial evidence of inanimate chemicals could be brought forward to prove that the mind harbored no illusion. The photographic film recorded the things that the eye might see, and ghostly pictures galore soon gave a quietus to the doubts of the most sceptical. Within a month of the announcement of Professor Roentgen's experiments comment upon the "X-ray" and the "new photography" had become a part of the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... sweetheart," was Mr. Fogo's first thought. But then followed the reflection—would ghostly oars sound? On the whole, he decided against the supernatural. But the mystery remained. More curious than agitated, but nevertheless with little inclination to resume his communing with the night, Mr. Fogo sought his ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... best; but he was no match for the fawn-footed gentleman, who led him. Lumps of ghostly clay, inherited from a long line of furrow-following ancestors, clung to his ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... strange occurrence confirmed his hope and faith. For a long time the ghostly apparition had ceased to trouble him. Its appearances had been but occasional since he took refuge in the house of God, but still it did sometimes reappear. The sceptic will see in the spectre but the pangs of conscience taking a bodily form, but even ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... 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 their ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... fruitful avenues. Well: what hinders us from covering as much of the world as we like with pleasant shade, and pure blossom, and goodly fruit? Who forbids its valleys to be covered over with corn till they laugh and sing? Who prevents its dark forests, ghostly and uninhabitable, from being changed into infinite orchards, wreathing the hills with frail-floreted snow, far away to the half-lighted horizon of April, and flushing the face of all the autumnal earth with glow of clustered food? But Paradise was a place of peace, we say, and all the animals ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... what name he would be called. Then the moon struggled out from behind her covering, and sent a shaft of light into the gloomy chamber, with its dark draping and heavy carved furniture. With the coming of the light Claverhouse, who was not unaccustomed to ghostly sights, for they were his heritage, raised himself in bed, and knowing no fear looked steadily. What he saw thrown into relief against the shadows was the figure of a hillman of the west, and one that in an instant ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... placid river murmured softly. The hills in the distance seemed but a darker, lower sky lost in the obscurity of the night. From out of the gloom the tents gleamed ghostly white. It was so still that she could hear the footsteps of the sentries as they made their rounds. With the faint streaking of the dawn came a sound that caused her to flee, horror-stricken, to her room. For the sound was that of hammering. ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... voice broke off, because a new sound was coming from the speaker. It was a voice that was unhuman and queerly horrible and somehow machine-like. Hoots and howls and whistles came from the speaker. Wailing sounds. Ghostly noises, devoid of consonants but broadcast on a wave-length close to the G.C. band and therefore produced by intelligence, though unintelligible. The unhuman hoots and wails and whistles came through for nearly a minute, ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... long. Major Kent drove into the town in his pony trap and pulled up opposite the statue. He called to Father McCormack, who had satisfied himself about Mary Ellen's appearance, and was prowling round the statue, making mild jokes about its ghostly appearance. Doyle detected a note of urgency in the Major's voice, and hurried across the square, reaching the pony trap just as ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... the sightless engine were wrapped in darkness. It was a ghost of a train, a Flying Dutchman of a train, a nightmare of a train. It was as unreal as the black swamp, as the moss on the dead trees, as the ghostly tug-boat tied to ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... whose bodies he may have assisted in eating. His total world very soon comes to have an unseen region which is the abode of ordinarily invisible beings having the forms of men, with whom his own dream person can associate; this unseen sphere is furnished also with ghostly counterparts of the trees and rocks and waters with which he is familiar when he is awake. Before long his soul or ghost or spirit is conceived as something which possesses two qualities: it can be disassociated from his body ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... burning of the clipper-ship 'Hornet' on the line, May 3, 1866. There were thirty-one men on board at the time, and I was in Honolulu when the fifteen lean and ghostly survivors arrived there after a voyage of forty-three days in an open boat, through the blazing tropics, on ten days' rations of food. A very remarkable trip; but it was conducted by a captain who was a remarkable man, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Joe went to sleep—HOW, I don't know. Then Dad sat beside him, and for long intervals would stare silently into the darkness. Sometimes a string of the vermin would hop past close to the fire, and another time a curlew would come near and screech its ghostly wail, but he never noticed them. Yet he seemed to ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... of her brother's return, of Mr. Cobb's miraculous generosity, and, for the first time, of the ghostly haunting of the little back bedroom. In the latter story Captain Obed seemed to find much amusement. He ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... ghostly shapes of mist which had thronged the heights, shutting in the prospect on every side, had now vanished, discovering as wild and melancholy a spot as a romantic heart could desire. There was something sinister and ironical even in the sunshine that lighted up these bleak hills. The ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... is evident also, by the triumph that such men make over all their enemies, both bodily and ghostly: "Now thanks be unto God," said Paul, "which always causeth us to triumph in Christ." And, "who shall separate us from the love of Christ" our Lord? and again, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... thoroughly terrified savages, who by this time realised that to remain in the canoe was but to court death. Yet what else could they do? There was but one alternative, and that was—to jump overboard, and trust to their ability to swim to the island that loomed ghostly in the moonlight ahead. And this they did, one after the other—the laggards being stimulated by another shot or two from Leslie's rifle—until the canoe, a fine big craft of about five feet beam and forty feet long, fitted ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... such riot and glory had come to San Francisco. This was the season for winds that seemed to blow from the four points of the compass at once and of ghostly fogs that stole up and down the streets of the city, abandoning the hills to bank in the valleys, as if seeking warmth; abruptly deserting the lowlands to prowl along the heights, always searching, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... chaos of human elements. The tortured airs of heaven howl out curses in a horrid unison, this fair free soil of ours, dishonored and befouled, moans beneath our feet in a dismal drone of hopeless woe; there is no rock or cavern or ghostly den of our mighty land but hisses back the echo of some hideous curse, and hell itself is upon earth, split and ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... termed the Admiralty, and had never regretted the not seeing England again. The thought that she was bound thitherward enfolded her like a frosty mist. But these bare walls, these loud floors, chill rooms, dull windows, and the vault-sounding of the ghostly house, everywhere the absence of the faces in the house told her she had no choice, she must go. The appearance of her old friend the towering mountain-height, up a blue night-sky, compelled her swift mind to see herself far away, yearning to him out of exile, an exile ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... garret was dark, except where the light of the waning moon filtering through the sheet, fell upon the portrait and patterned the floor in squares of silver. Olivia's eyes still shone out from the easel. In the softened, half-ghostly light there seemed to struggle out from their depths a certain pleading look, as if she needed help and was appealing to him for sympathy. He knew it was only a trick the moonlight was playing with his colors—lowering the reds and graying the flesh tones—that ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... overspread the canon till it lay like a ghostly sea dotted with strange islands of brush and rock; islands that seemed to waver and shift in a sort of vague restlessness, as though trying to evade the ever-brightening tide of moonlight that burned away their shrouds of dusk and fixed them in ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... comfortably installed in the Inspector's house. A kind of fete is held in the evening and a procession passes with lanterns on poles, but there is very little singing or noise of any kind and the whole affair is rather ghostly. ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... four-fold form, approached the child with joined hands. The Science of arms, with its four divisions, and all the weapons as also all kinds of arrows, came to him. One day, the child, of great energy, saw that god of gods, the lord of Uma, seated with the daughter of Himavat, amid a swarm of ghostly creatures. Those ghostly creatures, of emaciated bodies, were of wonderful features. They were ugly and of ugly features, and wore awkward ornaments and marks. Their faces were like those of tigers and lions and bears and cats and makaras. Others ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... ghostly consolation for the maharajah's sins!" he muttered, as he headed toward his own quarters for another stiff glass of brandy and some sleep. He felt he ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... it so happened, I should have deemed myself honorably bound to warn them of a listener's presence by flinging down a handful of unripe grapes, or by sending an unearthly groan out of my hiding-place, as if this were one of the trees of Dante's ghostly forest. But real life never arranges itself exactly like a romance. In the first place, they did not sit down at all. Secondly, even while they passed beneath the tree, Zenobia's utterance was so hasty and broken, and Westervelt's so ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the sea, and the black lines of the shores, under that intense and vivid radiance, which might fitly have emanated from one of those phantom-craft with which maritime superstition peoples the deep. Everything it touched took a ghostly and unreal look. ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... the Real Presence. It must be remembered that to contemporary England Wycliff's fame came from two of his opinions, viz. his denial of a real objective Presence in the Mass (for Christ was there only by "ghostly wit"), and his advice to King and Parliament to confiscate Church lands. But whenever Ball or anyone else is accused of being a follower of Wycliff, nothing else is probably referred to than the professor's ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... my ears and looking on my left I observed a Tank ambling forward to take up its position for the coming show. It was emitting clouds of bluish-grey smoke from its exhaust which gave it a rather ghostly appearance in the mist.... Now and again as it came to a very deep shell-hole it stopped to poise itself on the rim and then gently tipped its nose downwards, disappearing, to rise like a huge toad on the other side, and then ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... air and shrouded all the surrounding buildings in dull obscurity; while the fountains, rising and falling with an odd and ghostly movement as of gigantic living creatures, were seen dimly white in the midst of the gray gloom. The ceaseless stream of hurrying passers-by lost itself in darkness only a few paces from them. The chimes of unseen belfries and the roll of carriages ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... been, in the haunted hotel. He even described the outbreak of superstitious terror which had escaped Mrs. Norbury's ignorant maid. 'Sad stuff, if you look at it reasonably,' he remarked. 'But there is something dramatic in the notion of the ghostly influence making itself felt by the relations in succession, as they one after another enter the fatal room—until the one chosen relative comes who will see the Unearthly Creature, and know the terrible truth. Material for a play, ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... name, Buy what is woman born, and feel no shame? Trade in the blood of innocence, and plead Experience as a warrant for the deed? So may the wolf whom famine has made bold, To quit the forest and invade the fold: So may the ruffian, who, with ghostly glide, Dagger in hand, steals close to your bedside; Not he, but his emergence forced the door— He found it inconvenient to be poor. Has God then given its sweetness to the cane— Unless his laws be trampled on—in vain? Built a brave world, which cannot yet subsist, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... before the fire. Outside in the night ghostly shapes pass by, ghostly faces press against the window, and at the corners of the house ghostly voices pause for parley, muttering thickly through the swirl and smother of the snow. Inside burns the fire, kindling into glorious pink and white peonies ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... ghostly father and knight, Sir Raynald Ferrers, hath borne to me your tidings of my brother's sickness, and of all your goodness to him—whereof I pray that our blessed Lady and good St. John may reward you, for I can only pray for you. Touching ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Rita! do rein your Pegasus in, or he will fly away altogether. There certainly were a great many papers, and they confirmed our poor little Peggy in her belief that the man she had seen was Hugo Montfort, making his ghostly search for the papers ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... the foliage allowed, across the campus to the magnolia grove, where the eucalyptus trees shot up bare and leafless, ghostly, spectral in the ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... ghostly sigh, on this breath, with the feeble click of beads in the nun's hands, a silence fell upon the room, vast as the stillness of a world of unknown faiths, loves, beliefs, of silent illusions, of unexpressed passions and secret ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... though we were sinking in that sky stream's depths its light kept lessening, darkening imperceptibly with luminous shadows of ghostly beryl, drifting veils of pellucid aquamarine, limpid ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... like smoke, and a storm enveloped us. We sought shelter in a thick spruce. It rained and hailed. By and bye the air grew bitterly cold, and Teague suggested we give up, and ride back. So we did. The mountains were dim and obscure through the gray gloom, and the black spear-tipped spruces looked ghostly against the background. The lightning was vivid, and the thunder rolled and crashed in magnificent ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... carpetless and pictureless, and the furniture in it was draped in grey-white. Every room in the abode was in the same state, and, since all the windows were shuttered, every room lay moribund in a ghostly twilight. Only the clocks remained alive, probably thinking themselves immortal. The breakfast things were washed up and stored away. The last two servants had already gone. Behind Audrey, forming a hilly background, ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... her what himself had inspired her to demand; and was pleased to assure her, by a new revelation, that he had heard her prayers. She made known to her ghostly father what had passed betwixt God and her, and time verified it: for the sister above mentioned died without sickness, and appeared in dying to have had a foretaste of the joys to come. On the other side, the abbess was struck ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... Thou standest naked; nay, worse than naked; for thou art clothed with filthy garments, thy sins cover thy face with shame: nor hast thou in, from, or of thyself, any defence from, or shelter against the attempts, assaults, and censures of thy ghostly enemies, but art now in thine own eyes, though in the temple, cast forth into the open field stark naked, to the loathing of thy person, as in the day that thou was born, and there ready to be devoured or torn in pieces for ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the angels of learning, soon to come forth and judge the feeble mortals who dared present a claim to their recognition. October faded softly by, with its keen fresh mornings, and cold memorial green-horizoned evenings, whose stars fell like the stray blossoms of a more heavenly world, from some ghostly wind of space that had caught them up on its awful shoreless sweep. November came, 'chill and drear,' with its heartless, hopeless nothingness; but as if to mock the poor competitors, rose, after three days of Scotch mist, in a lovely 'halcyon day' of 'St. Martin's summer,' through whose ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... temperament. For Oubacha was a brave man, as respected all bodily enemies or the dangers of human warfare, but was as sensitive and timid as the most superstitious of old women in facing the frowns of a priest or under the vague anticipations 10 of ghostly retributions. But had it been otherwise, and had there been any reason to apprehend an unsteady demeanor on the part of this prince at the approach of the critical moment, such were the changes already effected in the state of their domestic politics amongst 15 the Tartars by the undermining arts ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... silence, and once more planted herself before him, her slim figure looking ghostly between the fading light of the departing day and the yellow flame ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... of an assault from inferior numbers of undisciplined and ill-armed militia, who did not possess so much as bayonets to their guns. They kindled fires along the levees, ate their supper, and then, as the evening fell, noticed a big schooner drop down the river in ghostly silence and bring up opposite to them. The soldiers flocked to the shore, challenging the stranger, and finally fired one or two shots at her. Then suddenly a rough voice was heard, "Now give it to them, for the honor of America!" and a shower of shell and grape fell on the British, driving them ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... diverse kinds of perfumes, blew there. The trees that stood there were adorned with the flowers of every season. A large number of Vidyadharas and Siddhas and ascetics too, O Bharata, repaired thither for waiting upon Mahadeva, the Lord of all creatures. Many ghostly beings, also, of diverse forms and aspects, and many dreadful Rakshasas and mighty Pisachas, of diverse aspects, mad with joy, and armed with diverse kinds of uplifted weapons, forming the train of Mahadeva, were there, every one of whom resembled a blazing ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... a delicate prose; the haunted twilight of the soul has found its notations in his work. With Amiel he could say of a landscape that it was a state of soul. His very defects became his strength. With normal eyesight we should not have had the man of ghostly reveries, the patient, charming etcher on a miniature block of evanescent prose, the forger of tiny chords, modulating into Chopin-like mist. His mania for the word caused him to neglect the sentence; his devotion to the sentence closed for him any comprehensive ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... at the sky; his eyes were fixed on a ghostly shape moving close ahead of them and on the fitful gleam of a ship's lantern that tossed and glimmered in the dark. Dropping his paddle he put his hands to his mouth and lifted his voice in a long hail. The light bobbed and swung ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... and the Italian lakes, the Fishers found themselves at the Hotel Splendide in Paris, surrounded by people from the States. It was a relief to Fisher, after his somewhat bewildering experience at Baden, followed by a surfeit of stupendous and ghostly snow peaks, to be once more among those who discriminated between a straight flush and a crooked straight, and whose bosoms thrilled responsive to his own at the sight of the star-spangled banner. It was particularly agreeable for him to find at the Hotel Splendide, in a party ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... them peace and happiness if dying in a good cause. His faith would do this for him. What was Buddhism doing? What help did it give to its believers in their extremity? It gave none. Think of the peasant lying there in the ghostly dim-lit fields waiting to attack us at the dawn. Where was his help? He thought, perhaps, of his king deported, his village invaded, his friends killed, himself reduced to the subject of a far-off queen. He would fight—yes, ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... in seventy senses," pouted Agatha, releasing herself from the last corner of her ghostly drapery. "Meg, ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... what is the boy about! I do believe it was him I saw in the—" She got no further in her mental exclamation for the sound of light approaching footsteps neared her. Slipping around the bed she waited in the shadow, and a moment after Paul appeared, looking pale and ghostly, with dark, disheveled hair, wide-open eyes, and a cloak thrown over his shoulders. Without a pause he flung it off, laid himself in bed, and ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott
... by little restaurants where the Venetians, in olden days, talked liberty for themselves and death to the Austrians, and at length they came out upon the Grand Canal where the Rialto curves its ancient blocks of marble and stalactites gleam ghostly overhead. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... proved too tempting for the young men, who frequently deserted civilization for the savage delights of the wilderness. These voyageurs and coureurs de bois seldom returned in the flesh, but on every New Year's Eve, back thro' snowstorm and hurricane—in mid-air—came their spirits in ghostly canoes, to join, for a brief spell, the old folks at home and kiss the girls, on the annual feast of the "Jour de l'an," or New Year's Day. The legend which still survives in French-speaking Canada, is known as "La ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... thou forsaken me. The prayer Whose crowning fervor lifts my nature up Midway to God, may still evoke thy form. Thou hast been with me, when the midnight dew Clung damp upon my brow, and the broad fields Stretched far and dim beneath the ghostly moon; When the dark, awful woods were silent near, And with imploring hands toward the stars Clasped in mute yearning, I have questioned Heaven For the lost language of the book of Life. Oh, then thy face was glorious, and thy hair On the white moonbeam floating, veiled thy brow, But in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... longer daylight when they came out of the little apartment in the Rue Spontini. Robert Le Menil made a sign to a coachman, and entered the carriage with Therese. Close together, they rolled among the vague shadows, cut by sudden lights, through the ghostly city, having in their minds only sweet and vanishing impressions while everything around them ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "The Ghostly Passenger." This illustration of what is one of the best tales of mystery is equally picturesque and original. The five figures in front are truly remarkable. The elegant interesting figure of the woman, the fop with his hat in the air, the bully with the big sword, the man with ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... He was locked in the ghostly cloisters, close to the graves of the dead; on the very spot where, as idle tales, went, the monks of bygone ages came out of those recording stones under his feet, and showed themselves at midnight. Not a step could he take, round the cloisters, but his foot must press ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... elevations from 6000 to 7000 feet. The birds used to sit close, and when put off their nests would commence their outcries, and from all parts they would assemble and flit about almost within reach of one's hand, making an awful noise, and in the dark shade of the forest their white gorgets had quite a ghostly look. The eggs are always three in number, of a beautiful shining blue-green, sometimes of a very long oval type. I have found the nests at Murree from the 3rd May to quite the end ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... wind, rougher than the others, swirled the fog about him in great ghostly sheets, turning and twisting it like the clouds of greasy smoke from a fire of wet leaves. The dory rolled heavily, and Code, losing his balance, sprawled forward on the fish, the horn flying from his hand overboard as he tried to ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... images, supine, Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay: And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray: 40 A crucifix of dim and ghostly white Surmounted the large altar left ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... say!" exclaimed Aunt Kate, who was an old-fashioned, motherly soul. "If the ghost comes I'm going to talk to it, and ask how things are— er— on the other side. Girls, it's a great privilege to have a ghostly friend. If the man who owns this island knew what was good for him he'd advertise the fact that it was haunted. If Mr. Lagg were here I'd get him to make up a poem about the ghost. That would scare it off, if ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope
... to the road, his horse occasionally taking fright, as a truck passed clanking slowly in the opposite direction, or a staff car turned out to pass him like a fleeting, ghostly shadow. By following the trees which lined the road at regular intervals he was fairly sure to keep the road. He was very tired and soon began to feel sleepy, but the driving storm, which by this time had assumed the proportions of ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill |
