"Haunting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... woman, young, pale, fair-haired, stately and forbidding," confronts these invaders of her private peace and enemies of her country, intending to freeze them by her haughtiness, her indifference, her disdain, but carries away even from the first encounter a haunting and rankling recollection of a tall man in blue; while the tall man in blue, Adjutant von Nordenfels, "from the moment she stood before the officers in her cold protest and unrelenting pride," was madly in love with the countess. The feelings of these two young people being thus from the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... awkward. Nutty and Miss Leonard were repeatedly leaving the table to tread the measure, and on these occasions the Good Sport's wistfulness was a haunting reproach. Nor was the spectacle of Nutty in action without its effect on Bill's resolution. Nutty dancing was a sight to stir the ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... respected myself any longer," the girl thought, as she made her way home that evening to the boarding-house, where for two pounds a week she was fed and lodged. But to be workless! It had been the nightmare of her dreams, the haunting fear of ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... describing the misery of the day that followed—the terrible blankness for many, the haunting recollection that all had ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... strike off across the hills to find her? Was it that she would not have welcomed me naked, have cherished me dying, have died herself to save me? Alas, no! It was because I had been drawn on to Siena by that lovely, haunting, beckoning, beguiling vision of Aurelia, my torture and stem of shame. Why, finally, were my eyes not lifted up to her wistful eyes, as she sat—poor sempstress—in that upper room? It was because ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... young ducks, enjoying every puddle they came to, since India-rubber boots made wading a delicious possibility. They took their dinner, and at noon regaled a crowd of comrades with an account of the mysterious dog, who appeared to be haunting the neighborhood, as several of the other children had seen him examining their back yards with interest. He had begged of them, but to none had he exhibited his accomplishments except Bab and Betty; and they were therefore much set up, and called ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... wandering forth beneath the passionate moon, Your love-strung zither and my soul in tune, We knew the joy, the haunting of the pain That like a flame thrills through me ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the Skylark justify the faith of her builders, and the two inventors, with an exultant certainty of their success, flew out beyond man's wildest imaginings. Had it not been for the haunting fear for Dorothy's safety, the journey would have been one of pure triumph, and even that anxiety did not prevent a profound joy in ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... would be wanted by the spirits of the deceased in the world they were about to visit. They had one custom, however, which I did not observe among the southern tribes—that of placing weights on the grave to prevent the body from getting out again, and haunting its friends. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... taking it for granted that such thoughts are today haunting many minds. Perhaps it is merely a matter of misapplied use of a large sounding word. In that case, however, it is absolutely necessary to create clear thinking. I take it for granted that I am voicing the sentiments ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... street of English houses; so that when it quakes, as it did last night, it means something. But the quaking was not what put me about; it was the horrible howl of the wind round the corner; the audible haunting of an incarnate anger about the house; the evil spirit that was abroad; and, above all, the shuddering silent pauses when the storm's heart stands dreadfully still for a moment. O how I hate a storm at night! They have been a great influence ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pushed back his cap—solely, of course, to cool his heated brow—gave incontestable evidences of being smitten with him. When he went to his couch that night sleep refused to visit his eyelids, and as he restlessly tossed to and fro, the image of Zuleikha haunting him with reproachful mien, his thoughts turned ever to the peerless maiden who menaced further fidelity to the old love. Ere morning dawned he had resolved to break the spell, and for several days avoided the locality of the fair enticer. But the attraction became finally too strong to resist. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... to fade. He took to haunting department store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... if the dream that preceded her illness was the suggestive cause that drew her so often to the shore. Her illness consequent upon that dream had filled his mind, so that for many months he himself had had no haunting vision of Kinraid to disturb his slumbers. But now the old dream of Kinraid's actual presence by Philip's bedside began to return with fearful vividness. Night after night it recurred; each time with some new touch of reality, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Now, of course, the inspiration of the villany is captured, though more than ever do I suspect Celestine as being confederate, or possibly principal actor. She has been utterly daft the last four days and constantly haunting the post-office for a letter ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... robber gull (generally Richardson's Skua) raises a tumult of screams, by making a raid upon a party of honest white gulls, to frighten them into vomiting up their prey for his benefit; or a single cormorant flaps along, close to the water, towards his fishing ground. Even the fish are shy of haunting a bottom which shifts with every storm; and innumerable shrimps are almost the only product of the shallow barren sea: beside, all is silence and desolation, as of a world ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... might be able to tell you something definite of her appearance. But faces have a trick of growing more and more spiritualised and abstract in the memory, until nothing remains of them but a look, a haunting expression; just that secret quality in a face that is apt to slip out somehow under the cunningest painter's touch, and leave the portrait dead for the lack of it. And if it is hard to catch with the finest ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was realized that it was her spirit which was haunting the house, the greatest alarm and terror were evinced by every one in it. There is nothing more terrible than the appearance of the spirits of those who have been wronged, for they always come with some vengeful purpose. ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... of the beautiful town That is seated by the sea; Often in thought go up and down The pleasant streets of that dear old town, And my youth comes back to me. And a verse of a Lapland song Is haunting my memory still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth, are ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... she recollected the events of the previous night—her retirement to her chamber; her talk there with the housekeeper about Rose Cameron, the "handsome hizzie," who had been haunting the premises and giving trouble all that day; the message from her father; her affecting interview with him in his bedroom; her return to her own apartment through the dimly-lighted, deserted hall, where she met the pale and spectral form of Lord Arondelle, who vanished as she called to him! ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... the matter fully for two or three days before we made up our minds. Lady Meadowcroft was undecided between her hatred of dulness and her haunting fear that scorpions and snakes would intrude upon our tents and beds while we were camping. In the end, however, the desire for change carried the day. She decided to dodge the rainy season by getting behind the Himalayan-passes, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... that peculiar gift of Mr. JACK LONDON'S that makes you not only see physical hardship but suffer it? I believe that after these chapters the reader of them will never again be able to regard a newspaper report of street-fighting with the same detachment as before, so vivid are they, so haunting. In the end, however, as I say, we find a happier atmosphere. The adventures of Billy and Saxon, tramping it in search of a home, soon make their urban terrors seem to them and the reader a kind of nightmare. Here Mr. LONDON is at his delightful best, and his word-pictures ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... into his soul that she is giving him death through love: "When thy dear hand the goblet raised, I recognised that death thou gav'st." And in the same way Isolde: "From golden day I sought to flee, in darkest night draw thee with me, where my heart divined the end of deceit, where illusion's haunting dream should fade, to drink eternal love to thee, joined everlastingly, to death ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... getting worse. Towers's prescriptions, which I had brought to London with me, were of no more use than nothing. In the cold winter sunlight, in the thick winter fog, in the black winter rain, in the white winter snow, the House was equally on my mind. I have heard, as everybody else has, of a spirit's haunting a house; but I have had my own personal experience of a house's haunting a spirit; for that ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... think," replied the woman. She herself had a haunting dread of recognition as Molly Maxwell. She had crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, carefully covering her tracks, and she did not intend to ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... ever and anon, those flashes of spirit and honour crossed his conversation, which seemed to intimate, that, when stirred to action by some adequate motive, Lord Dalgarno would prove something very different from the court-haunting and ease-loving voluptuary, which he was pleased to represent as ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... in the pavilion stopped its music. Mercer slid his little steel cross-piece over the guitar strings and began to play the haunting, crying music of the islands, the music of moonlight and love. After a moment ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... had gone through it seemed something dream-like, and they were ready to fancy that in that terrible dark forest they had stumbled upon some strange abode of the fabulous gnomes or kobolds described by the old German romanticists as being the haunting inhabitants of the mines and ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... of Barnaby, supposed to have been murdered the same night as Mr. Haredale, to whom he was steward. The fact is that Rudge himself was the murderer both of Mr. Haredale and also of his faithful servant, to whom the crime was falsely attributed. After the murder, he was seen by many haunting the locality, and was supposed to be a ghost. He joined the Gordon rioters when they attacked and burnt to the ground the house of Mr. Haredale, the son of the murdered man, and being arrested (ch. lvi.), was sent to Newgate, but made his escape with the other ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... note that should be more heroical; but the ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where a ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said, by way of conclusion to this brief survey, that, for those who are disposed to open their sensibilities to the appeal of this music, its high and haunting beauty must exert an increasing sway over the heart and the imagination. It is making no excessive or invidious claim for it to assert that, after one has truly savored its quality, other music, transcendent though it may demonstrably be, seems a little coarse-fibred, ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... of what he thought he had destroyed, Rossetti snatched the book out of the muddy hand that proffered it and flung it again into the Thames, with rather less than the courtesy which might have been looked for as the reward of an act that was meant so well. But the haunting volume was not even yet done with. Next morning, an old man of the riverside labourer class knocked at the door, bearing in his hands a small parcel rudely made up in a piece of newspaper that was greasy enough to have previously ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... Gertrude's haunting dread did not diminish, but rather increased from day to day. All her grief had turned to fear, and her strength to combat it grew less and less. "Soon I shall not dare venture outside the door," she thought. "I may get to be a ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... made himself known in the singular manner that we have related at the opening of our narrative. He had, in fact, come to be a sort of monomaniac, who delighted in annoying his former rival, and in haunting his footsteps as if he were his evil shadow. The abduction of his wife had not been definitely determined upon until that visit to the cabin, in the garb and paint of an Indian, when he received the tremendous blow that almost drove the life ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... palanquins, gharries, tongas; cloth of gold and cloth of jewels; color, confusion, maddening noises, and more color. There was very little semblance of order; a rajah preceded a princeling, and so on down. The wailing of reeds and the muttering of kettle drums; music, languorous, haunting, elusive, low minor chords seemingly struck at random, intermingling a droning chant; a thousand streams of incense, crossing and recrossing; and fireworks at night, fireworks which had come all the way across China by caravan—these ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... eggs safe, was thoughtful. So it must have been the tramp as he had suspected. But the eyes—he could not shake off that haunting fancy of a second encounter. All the way home his mind hovered round them, strained for a clearer vision, seemed at moments on the edge of illumination, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... till lunch, then returned and dozed again, with more success, till tea time. This was his only resource against the unpleasantness of the day. The others were nowise particularly weighed down by it, and the less that Cornelius was so little in the room, haunting the window with his hands in ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... farmer's point of view, there is still another distinction: the fish crow lets his crops alone. It contents itself with picking up refuse on the shores of the sea or rivers not far inland; haunting the neighborhood of fishermen's huts for the small fish discarded when the seines are drawn, and treading out with its toes the shell-fish hidden in the sand at low tide. When we see it in the fields it is usually intent upon catching field-mice, grubs, and worms, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... fair figure moving to and fro among the stricken and the mourning; watching her fair, fluttering hands, busy with their holy work, her deep, soul-haunting eyes, changeful with the light and shade of tenderness; listening to her sweet, clear voice, laughing with the joyous, comforting the comfortless, gently commanding, softly pleading, finds creeping into his brain strange new thoughts concerning ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... she was aware, to young people, but not she had thought to the people one knew. This termination came with a shock. The girl was no great personal loss to Ellen, they had belonged to different sets and classes, but the conception of her as lying very very still for ever was a haunting one. Ellen felt she did not want to be still for evermore in a confined space, with life and sunshine going on all about her and above her, and it quickened her growing appetite for living to think that she might presently have to be like that. How ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... home, and that they would prevent me." He stopped for a moment, and then went on, driven by that Ancient Mariner spirit which makes people, once they have touched on a forbidden subject, probe it to its haunting depths. "Did Cater tell you how she died? She died in a barn. My mother! She used to hold me in her arms at night, and make me rest my head against her bosom when I was tired; and I didn't even have a pillow for her when she was dying! It's one of those things you can ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... "comforted by the feeling that the Lord would take care of her." Next morning the effects of the "chill" had passed off, but there was left a more or less constant feeling of vague dread and fear of death, and with this a haunting idea born of this strongly felt hallucination of external touch that Satan was within her. The feelings of dread and fear grew steadily and became too strong for her faith in the Lord taking care of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... not to the doctor or me, but to the man on the jetty. Hrolfur vouchsafed me one quick, unfriendly glance, but apart from that scarcely seemed to notice me. The look in those sharp, haunting eyes went through me like a knife. Never before had anyone looked at me with a glance so piercing and so full ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... determined presently to think no more either of Adams or of the reasons which had prompted her impulsive visit to him. To forget oneself! Yes, Gerty was right in the end, and the object of all society, all occupations, all amusements, showed to her now as so many unsuccessful attempts to escape the haunting particular curse of personality. Gerty escaped it by her frivolous pursuits and her interminable flirtations, which meant nothing; Kemper escaped it by living purely in the objective world of sense; Adams escaped it—The name checked her abruptly, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... enlivened with many flyting poems about tailors—a favorite butt of the peasant past. Ballads of popular origin and ballads with an added sentimental touch, such as the famous Strassburg poem with the added Alpine horn motif, are found here. Delicate, haunting rhymes alternate with crude assonances, and occasionally one meets with banalities; but, as a whole, the collection is of surprising merit. It is a product of the Romantic return to the past, but is filled with a poetic outlook toward ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Smith; uncared for, she had gone to her grave beneath the water—unloved, the lovely Harriet cared not to live. What may have happened, it is not for those who may not have been tried to question; of cause and effect it is not for us to judge; but that her memory must have been a haunting shadow to Shelley and to Mary no one would wish to think them heartless enough to deny. Surely the lovely "Lines," with no name affixed, must be the dirge to Harriet's fate, and ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... only man's pain, but man's defiance, had been haunting her, and he guessed what persons and memories had been flitting through her mind. But he dared not talk lest she should exhaust herself. Presently, seeing a volume of Augustine's Confessions, her ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his exclamation she made answer that her young mistress was perfectly well, but could and would see nobody—was in attendance upon the sick. So his lordship was compelled to go without seeing her, not without a haunting doubt that he was being played upon, and she did ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Byron wrote was almost worthless. He has none of the haunting sense of the beauty of words in perfect order that marks the greatest poets. He has no passion for the correct use of words, and often his song seems tuneless and sometimes vulgar. For in Byron's undisciplined, turgid soul there is a strain of coarseness and vulgarity which ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... sail a silver sea, Caverned by plumy groves of sunny palm, Broke on my startled vision suddenly; When as but quickly parted, sweet and calm, That long forgot yet ever haunting psalm Floated from lips that flew to greet me home. A meteor flamed; I woke in rude alarm; Above me orbed the temple's sullen dome; Around me swam ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... only by hunters of the wild pigs haunting the depths of the gloomy mountain forest, led me to it one close, steaming afternoon. I had been pigeon shooting along the crests of the ridges, and having shot as many birds as I could carry, I decided to make a short cut down to the level ground, where I was sure of finding water, resting ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... mysterious, pathetic outline of the cliff dwelling, the somber figure of the chief only enhanced the vivid sense of motion and glee in the children. The picture was intrinsically lovely even without that haunting sense of the desert's significance that made Diana's work ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... of the doctrine of those old mystics, who have placed happiness only in an even and balanced quietude. And where but in utter loneliness was that quietude to be enjoyed? I no longer wondered that men in former times, when consumed by the recollection of some haunting guilt, fled to the desert and became hermits. Tranquillity and Solitude are the only soothers of a memory deeply troubled—light griefs fly to the crowd—fierce thoughts must battle themselves to rest. Many years had flown, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and enjoyment of man; we know now of huge tracts of the earth where for thousands of years a vast pageant of life has been displaying itself without any reference to humanity at all. Then, too, as a great scientist has lately pointed out, the dark and haunting sense of sin, that drove devotees to the desert and to lives of the grimmest asceticism, has given place to a nobler conception of civic virtue, has turned men's hearts rather to amendment than to repentance; well, that, in the face of all this, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... those days," and there is a "melancholy pleasure" in recalling them. The two combine in this autobiography with strange effect, for they set the man side by side with the child as an invisible companion haunting him. ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... McIntyre." A haunting quality in her voice caught Kent's attention, and he leaned eagerly forward, his eyes following each movement of her nervous fingers, busily twisting her gloves ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... intermittent, fitful, as if at each turn the Sentry paused. It always went on again, or so she thought. And she was sure she was not deeply sleeping, or that haunting cry of an owl had not penetrated ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... repercussions of thy iron flail half affright thyself, as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose. Be thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night, mixing thy laughing yell with the howling of the storm and the roaring of the flood, as thou viewest the perils and miseries of man on the foundering horse, or in the tumbling boat!—Or, lastly, be thou a ghost, paying thy nocturnal visits to the hoary ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... been haunting Frank ever since he had heard this man's voice was now at once made plain. The cloak being dropped and the man's face turned full upon him, he saw that it was indeed the same Highland drover who had borne unexpected testimony in his favour when he was in danger of his life ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... at evasion were useless and, little by little, Emily drew from her the story of the little back bedroom, of her own experience there the night of their first visit, of what Winnie S. had said concerning the haunting of the "Cap'n Abner place," and of Miss Timpson's "warning." She told it in a low tone, so as not to awaken Georgie, and, as she spoke, the wind shrieked and wailed and groaned, the blinds creaked, the water ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... spirits,—I mean haunting spirits," said Carol, stiffening her courage and her backbone ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... crossed the moors from Burnt Gap, climbing the ridge as the heavens began to kiss the earth with the peace of sunset. A lingering glory was then haunting the summits and crests and cairn-crowned hills that shut in the quiet of Rehoboth and forming an almost impassable rampart to those who, from the farther side, sought its shelter ere the close of day. As she then lifted her eyes ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... her powers as of his. How then could she forget it all, and wipe it away from her mind, as she would figures from a slate with a wet towel? How could it be fit that she should again be a bride with such a spectre of a husband haunting her memory? She had known that the request was to be made when he had come so quickly, and had not doubted it for a moment when he took his sudden departure. She had known it well, when just now the servant told her that Mr. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... to gaze, where gleaming white, Half hid by shadowy trees from passers' sight, The Convent lay, one who had dwelt for long In that fair home of ancient tale and song, Who knew the story of each cave and hill, And every haunting fancy lingering still Within the land, spake thus to me, and told The Convent's treasured Legend, quaint ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... happy for some good man. If women learned to read there seemed to be a possibility that some day some good man might come home and find his wife reading, and the dinner not ready—and nothing could be imagined more horrible than that! That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind—that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man's comfort. There are many people who believe that the physical needs of her family are a woman's ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... that distressed him was a haunting fear of the sights which Perkins would show him on the morrow's night. He had seen enough for himself to conjecture of what nature they would be. He did not want to see more, and yet how could he avoid it? He might plead ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the book and pour into my ear In accent sweet, the words I cannot see; I listen charmed, forget my haunting fear, And think with you as with your eyes I see. In the world's thought, so your dear voice be left, I still have part, I am not ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... masterpiece is the pearl of 'Sunday reading.'" As a work of fiction and recreation the book lacks, in his opinion, one quite indispensable quality: it lacks charm. Well, there are momentary flashes of beauty and grace, dazzling bits of color, haunting melancholy cadences in every chapter of Flaubert; but a charming book he never wrote. A total impression of charm he never gave—he never could give; because his total impression of life was not charming but atrocious. It is perhaps an ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... envy of his brother's lot grew, and in his heart smouldered a sullen rage. Here was Victor, a man at whom nobody would look twice in passing, happy and contented with his little family, untroubled by any haunting fear of the hand of the law, enjoying the respect of all men, and a veritable hero the length of the three rivers. And beside him, of his own flesh and blood, was himself, a bold figure of a man, a roisterer and a poser, ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... the charms prolong, In music's haunting tone, Of shores where spring's aye blossoming, And winter is unknown; Where zephyrs, sick with scent of flowers, Along the lakelets play; And lovers, wand'ring through the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... lost sight of him. A long time afterward we caught a glimpse of his bloated, sin-stained face, just as he was turning to skulk away to avoid recognition. Where this poor human wreck is now leading his miserable existence we cannot say, but have no doubt he is haunting the dens of iniquity and sin in the cities, seeking to find a little momentary pleasure in the gratification of his appetites and passions. A hopeless wreck, with the lines of vice and crime drawn all over his tell-tale countenance, he dares not go home, for he fears to meet the reproachful ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... brought so brilliant a sparkle to Marie's eyes, so joyous a laugh to her lips. The joyousness was all the more noticeable, because heretofore Marie, while very sweet, had been also sad. Her big blue eyes had always carried a haunting shadow, and her step had lacked the spring belonging to youth and happiness. Certainly, Billy had never seen her ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... and Browning was the first to express it thus whole-heartedly. There had been, of course, from all time the hymning of maiden purity and innocence, but beneath such celebrations had lurked that predatory instinct which a still more modern poet has epitomised in a haunting and ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... through the votes of the agricultural labourers. To those who, like myself, were brought up in agricultural districts, the notion that the labourer was a revolutionary seemed strangely unreal; but it was a haunting obsession in the minds ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... The haunting odour of the late autumn was in the air — delicately acrid — the scent of frost-killed brake and ripening wild grasses, of brilliant dead leaves and black forest loam pungent with ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... and it's haunting and haunting; It's luring me on as of old; Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting, So much as just finding the gold. It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder, It's the forests where silence has lease; It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It's the stillness ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... of the haunting Christ of Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven." And again in the presence of War's death the poet felt that other and greater presence without doubt, ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... still early, and though the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet. There was not a human soul near. Sad October and her sadder self seemed the only two existences haunting that lane. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... commanded by General Waite—General Willis Waite. He had fallen from his horse at the outposts, was brought helpless to the General's tent, and another sent on with the papers. And Mrs. Waite had dressed and bandaged his wound. That was where he had seen that woman's face before, with its haunting familiarity. He drew the locket from beneath his shirt, and gazed at the countenance revealed, with new intelligence. There could be no doubt—it was the face of her who had cared for him so tenderly in that tent at Manassas before the fever came and he had lost consciousness. And ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... it any more." Ruth's face was pale, her brows contracted, for Aunt Martha's reference to Randerson had brought back haunting sensations that, she thought, she had succeeded in putting out of her life. She was ready to cry, and when she thought of Randerson—how calmly he had accepted his dismissal, with what manliness he had borne her insults, ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... words. That afternoon she had ridden with her son to the funeral, holding him up with her strength, fortifying him with her courage. But now that his wife was gone for ever, and the pleasant house was overcast with its haunting emptiness, it seemed ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... seemed, was at last giving way to the terror that must have been haunting him for months past. His movements became feverish, erratic, irrational. He traveled in strange directions and by strange means, by bullock-cart, by burro, by dug-out, sometimes on foot and sometimes on horseback. Sometimes he stayed over night at a rubber-gatherers' camp, sometimes he visited ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... and it did not tend to alleviate his renewed sense of loss. A week had passed since his astounding experience on the Kajiar Road; a week in which the hours of sleep had been a more negligible quantity than usual; in which he had fought squarely against an imperative need to escape from the haunting consciousness of his wife's presence, and had been squarely beaten. His present need to see and speak with Honor Desmond was an ultimate ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... canebrake that seemed impassable, yet he made his way through it almost without slackening speed, and came to a grove of oaks, so large and so dense that the sunlight never entered there. He stopped at its edge and imitated the long, haunting cry of the owl. In a moment or two a note like it, but distant and faint, came. He uttered the cry a second time, and heard ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... place of her abode. Every house inhabited by a person of the name of Willing, had been the object of his observation; but no form that by any possibility could be mistaken for hers, had passed in or out of their doors. He became ashamed of haunting particular streets, and fancied the ladies of certain houses watched him; and that the maids and menservants chattered ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... had made them in some sense participants in the slaughter. If it was terrible to think that three thousand citizens had been butchered in the streets or in the Tullianum, it was comforting to remember that they had been officially denounced as public enemies by the senate. There was no haunting sense of an inviolable wrong inflicted on the tribunate, for Caius Gracchus had not been tribune when he fell; there was no memory, half bitter, half grotesque, of indiscriminate slaughter dealt by a mob of infuriated senators, for this latter and greater emeute had been suppressed ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Note-Books" show, sight-seeing and social intercourse took up a good deal of his time, and the daily record in his journal likewise had to be kept up. But he set to work resolutely to embody, so far as he might, his stray imaginings upon the haunting English theme, and to give them connected form. April 1, 1858, he began; and then nearly two weeks passed before he found an opportunity to resume; April 13th being the date of the next passage. By May he gets fully into swing, so that day after day, with but slight breaks, he ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as he moved, so that the world seemed the darker for his going. And as he went he blew upon his pipe a tremulous and hesitating melody, piercing sweet and piercing sorrowful, so that whosoever should hear it should clutch his throat with tears at the wild pity of it, and the strange and haunting beauty. And the boy stood still, watching, until the man was lost upon the edge of night. Then he turned his face eastward, whence the new day comes, carrying forever in his heart the echoes of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... that seems to stand alone— So strong, so clear it sharply echoing tone; And yet a name that holds a weirdlike grace, Withal like some strange, haunting, beauteous face; ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... the most serious, salutary, and impressive I ever received; for though, while reading, I affirmed to myself that every thing urged against me was weak, or ill founded, inconclusive, or absolutely false, yet the arguments returned with increasing and reiterated force, haunting and oppressing me like a painful dream from ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... turn with great complacency to the fourth class of my readers, who are men, or, if possible, women after my own heart; grave, philosophical, and investigating; fond of analyzing characters, of taking a start from first causes, and so haunting a nation down, through all the mazes of innovation and improvement. Such will naturally be anxious to witness the first development of the newly-hatched colony, and the primitive manners and customs prevalent among ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... had read "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" without extracting a glimmer of meaning; yet Mallarme, of course, was a master. How was I to know that Soames wasn't another? There was a sort of music in his prose, not indeed, arresting, but perhaps, I thought, haunting, and laden, perhaps, with meanings as deep as Mallarme's own. I awaited his ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... things of which we wish to be convinced in the face of all difficulties; with that blind, stumbling hope against hope with which we try to reconcile things irreconcilable, if only by so doing we can conjure away a haunting spectre, or lull to sleep a bitter suspicion; the architect had hitherto resolved to believe that if Lord Blandamer came with some frequency to Bellevue Lodge, he was only prompted to do so by a desire to keep in touch with the restoration, to follow with intelligence the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... pitiful boy Romulus Augustulus (475-476). Nothing can be said of them; they are less than shadows, and their empire, the material empire they represented, was no longer conscious of itself, was no longer a reality, but an hallucination, haunting the mind. It is true that the chief seat of their government, if government it can be called, was Ravenna, and that the city is concerned with most of the incidents of those vague and confused years; the proclamations of Majorian, of Severus, of Glycerius, ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... lived, would life have been easier for her, or would it only have meant—as she had first believed in her days of panic that it would mean—an added hardship, a haunting shame? It was the lack of love in her life that left so aching a void, the fact that apparently no one cared or heeded what became of her. The baby would at least have brought love to her, in its little hands, in its weak strength that ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... perform either of these actions are few. Yet all who have not seen Slindon are by so much the poorer, for Slindon House is nobly Elizabethan, with fine pictures and hiding-places, and Slindon beeches are among the aristocracy of trees. And here I should like to quote a Sussex poem of haunting wistfulness and charm, which was written by Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who once walked to Rome and is ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... from a painting by Stanfield represents the imposing pile of the "old religious house" crowning the noble rock, the royal yacht lying off the shore commanding St. Michael's Mount, the numerous spectators on shore and in boats haunting the royal footsteps—in short, the whole scene in the freshness and stir which broke ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... to be with the best in all these things. Perhaps at the stage which has been reached we have more reason than others to be dissatisfied with the results of success, since we are more beset than others by the haunting question—what then? For those who have to devote themselves to the cause of Catholic education it is often and increasingly necessary to win degrees or their equivalents, not altogether for their own value, but as the key that fits the lock, for the gates to the domain of education are ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... her, never quite able to forget the vague, haunting uncertainty, that seemed to challenge him, and which he would not hear. A pang of dread, almost guilt, as of insufficiency, would go over him as he heard her talking to the baby. She stood before the window, with the month-old child in her arms, talking in a musical, young sing-song that ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... of a tragedy of errors. With the ghost of Hector haunting us, none of us, except the Dux, who always kept his head, could do anything. The doctor's favours were lavishly and impartially distributed. Watkins, the "baby" of the class, made an ingenious calculation ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... who dread the night show the lines of fear on their faces during the day. They laugh, they join in the general sport, their gait is light, their clothes may be gay, but at the back of their eyes, the sympathetic can see the previous night's vigil; and it is the haunting fear of experiencing it again that gives their voices, their words, their very laughter that ring of overanxiousness, that stamp of heavily ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... arms around them. "I knew that I should love you both. How could I help it? And please be kind to me: God has been in giving me your son." Ah, if she had only said: "I shall love you because I love him!" But there was doubt, haunting doubt. If the glamour of married life wore out, and the craving for publicity returned, this woman might easily wreck her son's life and the lives of those ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... not heard her. "There is nothing for me in life without you; from the moment you came into my life there was nothing else, nothing in heaven or earth but you—your loveliness, your beauty, your hair, your hands, the echo of your voice haunting me, the memory of your every step, your smile, the turn of your head—all that I love in you—and all that I worship—your sweetness, your loyalty, your bravery, your honor. Give me all this to guard, to adore—try to ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... there was left not even the last comforting spark of hope within her bosom. Jan had gone out of her life for ever, leaving to her, as a haunting ghost of what they two had once been to each other, the old violin on the ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... magazine article upon extinct animals, and one of the pictures portrayed these identical monsters, labelling them "Plesiosaurus"! Yes, the more Harry thought about it the less room did he find for doubt that these so-called monsters haunting the lake in the Valley of the Sun were actually survivors—most probably the only ones—of the antediluvian plesiosaurus. How they got there was a most interesting problem, yet it seemed by no means a difficult ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... thoughts he fell asleep; but that night the dew of blessing did not fall for him on the fields of sleep. He was frightened by unbidden dreams, in all of which his conscience obtruded on him his sinfulness, and his affection called up the haunting lineaments of the dear dead face. He was wandering down a path, at the end of which Russell stood with open arms inviting him earnestly to join him there; he saw his bright ingenuous smile, and heard, as of old, his joyous words, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... old man's contentions. For, had he been pressed, he would have been forced to admit that there was in the child's pure presence a haunting spell of mystery—perhaps the mystery of godliness—but yet an undefinable something that always made him approach her with a ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... haunting you? If I didn't love you I wouldn't haunt you. Haven't I any feelings? Am I really a ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... either side. He debouches in extended order on the doomed house; gets his range and has the barrage well in hand (the quantity and quality of Madame's gesticulations furnish the key to this) before Colin drifts off the horizon and shows a peaked face with haunting eyes over George's shoulder. Colin does not speak. That is not his metier. He is the star shell illuminating the position; and usually in about six minutes' time it is safe for John to put in an appearance with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... the cards and dealt; Boule de Suif had a full thirty-one; and soon the interest in the game quieted the fears that were haunting the minds. But Cornudet noticed that the Loiseau couple had ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... that scarcely bow the grass, What stains are those of ripe pomegranate dyes?— When on my breast Thy head in slumber lies, What thorns are those that through my heart do pass? And round about these crowds of haunting forms That burn their splendor through my dimmest dreams! O little Child, Thou Wonder too divine, Thy precious body all my bosom warms With mine own blood, but oftentimes it seems, Too dearly loved,—that yet ...
— The Angel of Thought and Other Poems - Impressions from Old Masters • Ethel Allen Murphy
... were shining in the window of Lucy's tiny room, perhaps lighting her fair face. It seemed that these stars were telling him all was not well in Lucy's mind and heart. He could not shake the insidious vague haunting thought, and longed for dawn, so that in the sunlight he could dispel all morbid doubts and the shadows that came in ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... must be some information on my kind, particularly in this area where vampire legends are rife, so I took to haunting reading rooms. It was there I met Maria. She told me, after we knew each other better, that she was doing graduate work in regional superstitions and had decided that her thesis would treat of the history of vampirism. She found it terribly amusing, but ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... when they have become materialized. I have just now shown you the real condition of this old house, or rather the way in which the majority of men see it. I do not hesitate, therefore, to show you the ghost that haunts it; nor do I object to explaining the dreadful cause of the haunting, or a little of the philosophy of ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... desolation, in the changing seasons, when the window gave on the bitter rigors of blue and white winter mornings, the land choked with snow, on the golden blur of autumn, on the tender mists of April, draping the earth, and forever the cry of the waves on the shore haunting the air. That there was nothing of the mad woman about her, that she had retained reason in such a place, in such a room, with an eating grief to bear, impressed me as one of the marvels of the brain's endurance, ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... voice within me whispered, 'Go no further.' Was it the voice of conscience? I did not heed it. Something irresistible urged me forward. I thrust away from me with a sort of crude mental violence the haunting thought. And when the ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of the heart, and kept my light burning. I felt so utterly upset that I could not remain any longer in the place and insisted next morning on going home. I did not touch the phantom, I simply saw it—saw it three times, and its haunting persistency rendered it quite impossible for me to mistake it ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... in and about the sleeping-room, and the fearful words, "the deed," still rang in the ears of the man who had just committed the most monstrous of all atrocities. He could not get rid of the haunting words; all the ill he had done from his childhood returned to him in fancy, and seemed heaped up to form a mountain which weighed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... have the bully little compass along with us," declared the doubting one, looking considerably relieved; for truth to tell, if Bandy-legs feared any one thing more than another, it was the haunting idea of being lost in a great big wilderness, and meeting a slow ...
— In Camp on the Big Sunflower • Lawrence J. Leslie
... reports which had long ago faded were revived as to a ghost who was supposed to wander about the castle. There were many who asserted they had seen or heard him, and till to-day the ghost of Wildenstein is haunting people's heads." ...
— Maezli - A Story of the Swiss Valleys • Johanna Spyri
... for days hovering between life and death. But she could not shut her eyes or blind her conscience to the fact that she had been guilty in intention, if not in actual deed, and she could not shake off the haunting sense of shame or the feeling that others must know of the contemptible action of which ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... middle age fall into a well-known class. They can be seen haunting the Temple, and explaining to their more industrious and successful associates that they would have been Lord Chancellor if a big brief had ever come their way. They develop that terrible disease known as "the genius of the untried." Their case ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... honor the little building was decked with flags and banners, furnished with rugs and divans and a splendid buffet, on which was a light lunch and water ices all ready for his Highness. When he had arrived and alighted from his carriage, the Nabob shook off the species of haunting disquiet which had oppressed him for a moment past, without his knowing why. Prefects, generals, deputies, black coats and embroidered military coats stood on the broad inner platform, in impressive, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... towns by the river-side, Maidenhead, Richmond, Henley, Kew, Crammed with cottages far and wide, The thing for people like me and you; But I think of the haunting forest-lights And a path that wanders from tree to tree, Where the man of the cottage might walk o' nights, The cottage that doesn't belong to me. And it may be wrong, But it won't be long Before the feeling becomes too strong ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... to take the lives of Navarre and Conde, unless they should instantly recant, and was only prevented by the entreaties of his young wife, may be exaggerated.[1227] But certain it is that the unhappy king was the victim of haunting memories of the past, which, while continually robbing him of peace of mind, sometimes drove him to the borders of madness. Agrippa d'Aubigne tells us, on the often repeated testimony of Henry of Navarre, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... while something goes wrong with the nerves. The huge drafts on muscular endurance have, no doubt, something to do with it. They worked hard for fourteen, sometimes seventeen, hours at a stretch; they were ill-fed, suffering from exposure, intense cold, and a haunting uncertainty of the end of the undertaking. They were reasonable fellows as men go, with a respect for each other, but when hardship has got on the nerves, when you are suffering the agonies of snow-blindness, sore feet, and the pangs ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond) |
