"Phantom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... principalities which the despot and the stranger built in Italy after the fatal date of 1494, when national enthusiasm and political energy were expiring in a blaze of art, and when the Italians as a people had ceased to be; but when the phantom of their former life, surviving in high works of beauty, was still superb by reason of imperishable style! How much in Italy of the Renaissance was, like this plank-built, plastered theatre, a glorious sham! The sham was seen through then; and ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... that Don Antonito, the young friend who had planned and accompanied our day's excursion, was to be our guard of honor on the lonely road. A body-servant accompanied him, likewise mounted. Don Antonito rode a milk-white Cuban pony, whose gait was soft, swift, and stealthy as that of a phantom horse. His master might have carried a brimming glass in either hand, without spilling a drop, or might have played chess, or written love-letters on his back, so smoothly did he tread the rough, stony road. All its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... offering her a goblet overflowing with water; but when she attempted to take it, Willie changed into Lenora, who laughed mockingly at her distress, telling her there was water in the well and ice on the curbstone. Once more the phantom faded away, and the old porter was there, wading through a limpid stream and offering her to drink a cup of ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... Burgess could have got out of the situation. There are other comic British spooks, as in Baring-Gould's A Happy Release, where a widow and a widower in love are haunted by the jealous ghosts of their respective spouses, till the phantom couple take a liking to each other and decide to let the living bury their dead. This is suggestive of Brander Matthews's earlier and cleverer story of a spectral courtship, in The Rival Ghosts. Medieval and later literature gave ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... entry of the old Puritan diarist. "Robert Cole, having been oft punished for drunkenness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his neck for a year," to wit, the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to the greatest American romance, The Scarlet Letter. The famous apparition of the phantom ship in New Haven harbor, "upon the top of the poop a man standing with one hand akimbo under his left side, and in his right hand a sword stretched out toward the sea," was first chronicled by Winthrop under the year 1648. This ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... nor impracticably rigid. All the enchantment of fancy, and all the cogency of argument, are employed to recommend to the reader his real interest, the care of pleasing the Author of his being. Truth is shown sometimes as the phantom of a vision; sometimes appears half-veiled in an allegory; sometimes attracts regard in the robes of fancy; and sometimes steps forth in the confidence of reason. She wears a thousand dresses, and in ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... night on the roof! What a revel there was of brave scout doings, of gentlemanly conduct!—all witnessed by a large, fat moon. He wigwagged messages of great portent to phantom scouts who were in dire need. He helped blind men across streets that ran down the whole length of the roof. He held back pressing crowds while the police were rendered speechless with admiration. He swept off his scout headgear to scores of motherly ladies in three-cornered ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... a Phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight; A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... still want to give you a sample of his monologues. "Oh! dark shadows of the night! what horrible dream are you sending me from the depths of your sombre abysses! Oh! dream, thou bondsman of Pluto, thou inanimate soul, child of the dark night, thou dread phantom in long black garments, how bloodthirsty, bloodthirsty is thy glance! how sharp are thy claws! Handmaidens, kindle the lamp, draw up the dew of the rivers in your vases and make the water hot; I wish to purify myself of this dream sent me by ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... thou for friends Tricked by a phantom, cheated to the grave? Woe worth the God, the mocking God, that sends Lies to the pious, furies to ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... across the ploughed fields, I could see, through the glass, a phantom line, intersected at regular intervals by short and somewhat thicker lines. It was the shadow of a field-telephone and its poles! And the airplane from which that photograph was taken was so high ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... Roman Church made a good defender of herself. Julius II. had convoked at Rome, at St. John Lateran, a council, which met on the 3d of May, 1512, and in presence of which the council of Pisa and Milan, after an attempt at removing to Lyons, vanished away like a phantom. Everywhere things were turning out according to the wishes and for the profit of the pope; and France and her king were reduced to defending themselves on their own soil against a coalition of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of states have similarly passed their lives in doing violence to mankind; but it was for something that was likely to last, and for a national interest. What they deemed the public good was not a phantom of the brain, a chimerical poem due to a caprice of the imagination, to personal passions, to their own peculiar ambition and pride. Outside of themselves and the coinage of their brain a real and substantial object of prime importance existed, namely, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... dukes—masters of untold millions, and of fabulous English guardsmen whose bedrooms in Knightsbridge Barracks were inlaid with silver and tortoise shell. And yet such was her genius that she invested this phantom world with a certain semblance of life, and very often with a certain poetry also. In some respects she was even more striking than her books. In her dress and in her manner of life she was an attempted exaggeration of her own female characters. For many years she occupied ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... might lurk under cover of the darkness and solitude, where hands were waiting to swoop down upon a shawl. Belated pedestrians saw her by the light of the street lanterns, an ill-omened, shuddering phantom, gliding along, almost crawling, bent double, slinking by in the shadow, with that appearance of illness and insanity and of utter aberration which sets the thoughtful man's heart and the physician's mind at work on the brink of deep ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... of the drowsed soul from the dreams and phantom world of sensuality to actual reality—how has it been evaded! His word, that was spirit! His mysteries, which even the apostles must wait for the parable in order to comprehend! These spiritual things, which can only be spiritually discerned, were—say ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... hard winter, and, before it is half gone, become nervous lest we should miss our supply of ice. The fly, the murrain, the potato-rot, and the grasshoppers, all have a divine office in tipping over our calculations. The phantom host of the great North come out for parade without announcement, and shoot their arrows toward the zenith, and flout the stars with their rosy flags, and retire, leaving us looking into heaven and wondering. Long weeks of drought parch the earth, and then comes the sweet rain, and sets ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... governed and the most loyally infatuated among the great Nations of Europe. Her cure of the dust-licking distemper was Homoeopathic and somewhat slow, but it seems to be thorough and abiding. Those who talk of the National passion for that bloody phantom Glory—for Battle and Conquest—speak of what was, rather than of what is, and which, even in its palmiest days, was rather a penchant of the Aristocratic caste than a characteristic of the Nation. ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... and uneasy, not knowing what was happening, had got up, gone to his sister's room, and not finding her was frightened. Hearing the knocks he went down, unfastened the front door, and was nearly knocked over by Brigaut, followed by a sort of phantom. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... fix that fleeting phantom of beauty—that I could paint that likeness for the world to admire! It cannot be. The most puissant pen is powerless, the brightest colour too cold. Though deeply graven upon the tablet of my heart, I cannot ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... Time onwards softly flying, To meditate, in Christian love, Upon the dead and dying! Across the silence seem to go With dream-like motion, wavery, slow, And shrouded in their folds of snow, The friends we loved long, long ago! Gliding across the sad retreat, How beautiful their phantom feet! What tenderness is in their eyes, Turned where the poor survivor lies 'Mid monitory sanctities! What years of vanished joy are fanned From one uplifting of that hand In its white stillness! when the shade Doth glimmeringly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... the store in despair. He found himself engaged in what appeared to be an endless chase after a phantom Considine, and the difficulties in his way semed insuperable. Yet how could he go back and tell them all at home that he had failed? What would they think of him? The thought made him miserable; and he determined, if he failed, never ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... When she saw the good Brother crossing himself and sprinkling holy water she knew that he took her for something evil,—for a phantom fashioned by the spirit of wickedness, or at least for a witch.[1416] However, she was by no means offended as she had been by the suspicions of Messire Jean Fournier. The priest, to whom she had confessed, could not be forgiven for having ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... quest of glory seeks the field;— False glare of glory, what hast thou to yield? How long, deluding phantom, wilt thou blind, Mislead, debase, unhumanize mankind? Bid the bold youth, his headlong sword who draws, Heed not the object, nor inquire the cause; But seek adventuring, like an errant knight, Wars not his own, gratuitous in fight, Greet ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... that the form of one of those very Fays about whom I had been pondering made its way slowly into the darkness from out the light at the western end of the island. She stood erect in a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom of an oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams, her attitude seemed indicative of joy—but sorrow deformed it as she passed within the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at length ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cold breath accompanies its coming. Reaching the zenith, it seems there to hang poised awhile,—a ghostly bridge arching the empyrean,—upreaching its measureless span from either underside of the world. Then the colossal phantom begins to turn, as on a pivot of air,—always preserving its curvilinear symmetry, but moving its unseen ends beyond and below the sky-circle. And at last it floats away unbroken beyond the blue sweep ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... Their origin must be carried far into the mists of that "prehistoric" period, that mythical age which inspires the modern historian with such a feeling of squeamishness that anything creeping out of its abysmal depths is sure to be instantly dismissed as a deceptive phantom, the mythos of an idle tale, or a later fable unworthy of serious notice. The Atlantean "old Greeks" could not be designated even as the Autochthones—a convenient term used to dispose of the origin of any people whose ancestry cannot be traced, and ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... no veil before his eyes and no finger on his lips in presence of popular dogmas, and yet shrink from the conceit of esteeming his mind a mirror of the universe. Ideas, like coins, bear the stamp of the age and brain they were struck in. Many a phantom which ought to have vanished at the first cock crowing of reason still holds its seat on the oppressed heart of faith before the terror stricken eyes of the multitude. Every thoughtful scholar who loves his fellow men must feel it an obligation to do what he can to remove ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... own early idea, as my heir and favourite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader—(a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... he thought. His head bent toward the wind. "The streets are empty. The night is mine. I must think of what has happened. There is something inexplicable in what has happened. My hands fought with a phantom. That, of course, ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... of the world, that which is most universally received is the solicitude of reputation and glory; which we are fond of to that degree as to abandon riches, peace, life, and health, which are effectual and substantial goods, to pursue this vain phantom and empty word, that has neither body nor hold to be ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... convince any reasonable person that the bible is simply and purely of human invention—of barbarian invention—is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the cowled form of superstition—then read the holy bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity to be the author of such ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... had gained the day. As I came into the city Sir George met me and took me into his hotel, where were Power and the senhora, about to be married. Wounded by the innocent raillery of my friends, I escaped into an empty room and buried my head in my hands. Oh, how often had the phantom of happiness passed within my reach, but glided ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... two circuits at regular intervals, another unexplainable circuit was induced. Because this third circuit travels apparently without wires, in some manner which the scientists have not yet discovered, it is appropriately known as the phantom circuit. The practical result is that it is now possible to send three telephone messages and eight telegraph messages over two pairs of wires—all at the same time. Professor Pupin's invention has resulted in economies that amount to millions of dollars, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... to Mrs. Browning. It was originally appended to the collection of Poems called Men and Women. For other tributes by great poets to their wives see Wordsworth's "She was a phantom of delight," and "O dearer far than life and light are dear;" and Tennyson's "Dear, near and true." Mrs. Browning's love for her husband had found passionate expression in Sonnets from ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... we can say of Domizia in Luria. She is nothing more than a passing study whom Browning uses to voice his theories. Eulalia in A Soul's Tragedy is also a transient thing, only she is more colourless, more a phantom than Domizia. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... than his, and henceforth my destiny shall be to choose for myself the way in which I shall walk." He sat long in the darkness, and his thoughts were gloomy as it; then he went to the window to look down into the dark court below. A great white blossom rose before him like a phantom. Striking a light, he saw that it was the beautiful Calla out of Sabine's room. It hung down mournfully on its broken stem. Sabine had had it placed there. This little circumstance struck ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... like a phantom lake, rose and slate-colored, through the Peter Pan haunted glades of Kensington Gardens. Then he emerged from the Victoria Gate and found himself ringing a bell and being admitted by a butler, who relieved him of his coat and hat with ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... her fleeting, phantom smile. "Don't pray for the impossible, Stumpy!" she said. "I—I think that would ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... by the assistance of a 'louping-on-stane,' or structure of masonry erected for the traveller's convenience in front of the house, elevated his person to the back of a long-backed, raw-boned, thin-gutted phantom of a broken-down blood-horse, on which Waverley's portmanteau was deposited. Our hero, though not in a very gay humour, could hardly help laughing at the appearance of his new squire, and at imagining the astonishment ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... motion, And in their right abundance. Failing either, You have not long to dance. Failing a friend, A genius, or a madness, or a faith Larger than desperation, you are here For as much longer than you like as may be. Imagining now, by way of an example, Myself a more or less remembered phantom — Again, I should say less — how many times A day should I come back to you? No answer. Forgive me when I seem a little careless, But we must have examples, or be lucid Without them; and I question your adherence ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... hailed the ship. Again and again he sent his voice booming over the water, and the others supplemented his efforts by waving their arms. It was impossible that they should not have been heard or seen; but the Bertha Hamilton might have been a phantom vessel for all ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... government of France; all the powers and their agents, from the lowest to the highest, are there indicated and classed according to their prerogatives and relations. Nor have we there a mere empty nomenclature, a phantom of theory; things go on actually as they are described—the book is the reflex of the reality. It were easy to construct, for the empire of Charlemagne, a similar list of officers; there might be set down in it dukes, counts, vicars, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... follies: you, who know what scheme it was, who know the intoxicating influence of a specious project, and, especially, the wonderful address and plausibility of Catling, the adventurer who was my brother's prime minister and chief agent in that ruinous transaction, will not consider their adopting the phantom as any proof of the folly of either father or son. But let me return. To my compliment to his experience and discretion, my father replied, "Why, truly, I hardly know how it may turn out in the long run. At first, indeed, I only consented to come down ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... engagement with him, since I desired nothing but to serve him and be taught the mechanical details of his art. My father had no clue whatever to my direction, for he had not dreamed of anything unusual in my thoughts or plans. He was now entirely alone. But I knew that I was helpless against the phantom which was leading me forth; it also contained a stimulant which was able to bear me safely through seasons of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... discountenance those malicious rumours, spread by evil-minded persons, to the prejudice of credit, and the eminent hazard of the public peace and tranquillity. The queen's recovery, together with certain intelligence that the armament was a phantom, and the pretender still in Lorraine, helped to assuage the ferment of the nation, which had been industriously raised by party-writings. Mr. Richard Steele published a performance, intituled, "The Crisis," in defence of the revolution and the protestant establishment, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Arlesians who, putting down an insurrection of the Mint band, had repaired their ramparts, cut away their bridges and mounted guard with their guns loaded.[2427] But it is only a postponement. Now that the commissioners have gone, and the king's authority a phantom, now that the last loyal regiment is disarmed, the terrified Directory recast and obeying like a servant, with the Legislative Assembly allowing everywhere the oppression of the Constitutionalists by the Jacobins, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... And that grotesque accusation was hurled against his only son—the boy whom he so loved. The thing was monstrous, a thing incredible. This whole seeming was no more than a chimera of the night, a phantom of bad dreams, with no truth under it.... Yet, the stern voice of the official came with ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... shalt thou rest—-and what, if thou withdraw Unheeded by the living, and no friend Take note of thy departure? All that breathe Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favourite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come, And make their bed with thee. As the long train Of ages glide away, the sons of men, The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes In the full strength of years, matron, ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... cared nothing for the name of liberty; they had a ruler with whom they were well pleased, and they did not long for one of whom they knew nothing. But Stephen, brave, pure and devoted, was a man of dreams, and he died for them, as many others have died for the name of Rome and the phantom of an impossible Republic; for Rome has many times been fatal to those who ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... a little faster than it was wont when, with the silence of a phantom, she began slowly raising her head, with her eyes fixed on the top of the rock, which she touched with her hands. Before she reached the elevation in mind, she discovered the Indian was doing the same thing, and, fortunately ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... quite evident when the lamp, in flaring up again in the hall, gave a momentary glimpse, of his crouching, half-kneeling figure. In the pleading gesture of his trembling, outreaching arms, Violet beheld an appeal, not to herself, but to some phantom of his imagination; and when he spoke, as he presently did, it was with the freedom of one to whom speech is life's last boon, and the ear of the listener quite forgotten in the passion ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... of the sciences related to medicine are, I fear, liable to be looked upon by many older physicians, and by a part of the lay public, as less likely than others to attain eminence in the purely practical part of medical life. It is time that this phantom of vulgar prejudice faded out. "Whatever you do," said a late teacher of physiology in my presence to a young doctor, "do not venture to become an experimental physiologist—that is, if you wish afterward to succeed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... have no power, no throne, no title, I, who am but a memory in a phantom, That Duke of Reichstadt who with helpless grief Can only wander under Austrian trees, Carving an N upon their mossy trunks, Wayfarer, only noticed when I cough; Who have no longer even the little piece Of watered silk so scarlet in my cradle; ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... her hand on Sophy's shoulder with alarm. "Surely I have always believed that it was a mere superstition of the ignorant peasantry—a phantom of the imagination; but here is a dreadful reality. Yes, it surely must be the banshee, and what does it forebode? Sophy, you know too well, and so do I. Perhaps it is sent in mercy, to warn and prepare us for that dreadful event. But ought we not to have been prepared already? The ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out of her most ardent memories. [This is ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... clear as ever.' I will not waste time in criticising the bad English or the mixture of metaphor in these sentences, but will simply cite another from the same author which is even worse. 'The shadowy phantom of the Republic continued to flit before the eyes of the Caesar. There was still, he apprehended, a germ of sentiment existing, on which a scion of his own house, or even a stranger, might boldly throw himself and raise the standard of patrician independence.' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... admits that "everything seems to show" it was an accident. "Tamasese's people fit to bear arms," writes Knappe, "are certainly for the moment equal to Mataafa's," though restrained from battle by the lack of ammunition. "As for Tamasese," says Fritze of the same date, "he is now but a phantom—dient er nur als Gespenst. His party, for practical purposes, is no longer large. They pretend ammunition to be lacking, but what they lack most is good-will. Captain Brandeis, whose influence is now small, declares ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... scowls and frowns where smiles and sweet greetings should exist. Worry is the twister, the dwarfer, the poisoner, the murderer of joy, of peace, of work, of happiness; the strangler, the burglar of life; the phantom, the vampire, the ghost that scares, terrifies, fills with dread. Yet he is a liar and a scoundrel, a villain and a coward, who will turn and flee if fearlessly and courageously met and defied. Instead of pampering and petting ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... yon bones," said the phantom babe,—"bring back yon bones; let them rest in peace in the last home of their fathers. The curse of the dead will be on you otherwise. Back! back! bring them back ere it ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... that day, he stayed by the pool, either he himself fishing or watching the old chief try every while to entice the giant salmon to take that hook. At night they all returned to camp and told stories of phantom fish that could not be caught except by black magic. They came to the conclusion finally that the big fish must be one of that kind, with something uncanny about him, and they decided that it would be bad medicine to try to catch him. Pierre ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... are sinners all alike. It was to teach them, that the holiest amongst us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly upward. Without disputing a truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale's story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man's friends—and especially a clergyman's—will ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was fain to lay hold upon the soul of my mother. Thrice I sprang forward, eager to embrace her, and thrice she passed from out my hands, even as passeth a shadow. And when I said, 'How is this, my mother? art thou then but a phantom that the queen of the dead hath sent me?' my mother answered me: 'Thus it is with the dead, my son. They have no more any flesh and bones; for these the fire devours; but their souls are even as dreams, flying hither and thither. But do thou return so soon as may be to the light, ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... one from your dear sister, the second from Sharp, by which you will see at what short notice I must be off, if I go to the Canaries. If your last plan continue in full force, I have not even the phantom of a wish thitherward struggling, but if aught have happened to you, in the things without, or in the world within, to induce you to change the place, or the plan, relatively to me, I think I could raise the money. But ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... toward the goal, all unaware that years ago he had left that goal like a lighthouse on a rocky shore, and was now sweeping along with the turbulent tide of Mammonism. He still saw the light ahead, but it was now a phantom of the imagination. He said, "When I am worth ten thousand I will have reached it"; when he was worth ten thousand he found the faithless light had moved on to twenty-five thousand. He said, "When I am worth twenty-five thousand I will have reached it"; ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... our own stupidity! How, Burgundy? Do princes quake and fear Before the phantom which appals the vulgar? Credulity is but a sorry cloak For cowardice. Your people first ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Witnesses who saw the fight from the start were deeply impressed by the majesty of the scene. It was like a grand panorama. "From almost perfect silence,—the steamers moving through the water like phantom ships,—one incessant roar of heavy cannon commenced, the Confederate forts and gunboats opening together on the head of our line as it came within range. The Union vessels returned the fire as they came up, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... But now the wind comes whistling loud, To snatch and waft it, as a cloud, Or giant phantom in a shroud; It spreads, it curls, it mounts and whirls, At length a mighty wing unfurls, And then, away! but where, none knows, Or ever will.—It snows! ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... every night matters grew worse and worse. The shadow annoyed him exceedingly. If he slept, he dreamed that it kept a glimmering watch over him, and when he awoke, he, in turn, watched over that, until the misty day-light came to dissipate the phantom. ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... light-of-love trusted by so many, and never a wife till a widow—fame, the fair daughter of fuss and caprice, may yet take the phantom of bold Robin Lyth by the right hand, and lead it to a pedestal almost as lofty as Robin Hood's, or she may let it vanish like a bat across Lethe—a thing ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... short there is no end to the number of the things that he does, and does badly. His one manly taste is for the chase. In sum, he is but a plexus of weaknesses; the singing chambermaid of the stage, tricked out in man's apparel, and mounted on a circus horse. I have seen this poor phantom of a prince riding out alone or with a few huntsmen, disregarded by all, and I have been even grieved for the bearer of so futile and melancholy an existence. The last Merovingians ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... poor wretch was cursed with. Wherever I went, the countenance of him I had slain appeared to follow me. Wherever I turned my head I beheld it behind me, hideous with the contortions of the dying moment. I have tried in every way to escape from this horrible phantom; but in vain. I know not whether it is an illusion of the mind, the consequence of my dismal education at the convent, or whether a phantom really sent by heaven to punish me; but there it ever is—at all times—in all places—nor has time nor habit had any effect in familiarizing me with its terrors. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... seemed to shed a lustre on the woodland around, like lightning illuminating masses of dark clouds. And they who saw her asked themselves, 'Is this an Apsara, or a daughter of the gods, or a celestial phantom?' And with this thought, their hands also joined together, they stood gazing on the perfect and faultless beauty of her form. And Jayadratha, the king of Sindhu, and the son of Vriddhakshatra, struck ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Alec, half choked with wrath at sight of his father's obvious relief when the terrifying phantom of the Black Castle was replaced by this delectable Paris. Yet, with it all, he was aware of a consuming desire to laugh. There was a sense of utter farce in thus disposing of the affairs of nations in a flat in the Rue Boissiere. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... another one in God's name, so that we will worship a supreme human god, so that we will worship mercy, justice, love and truth, and not have the idea that we must sacrifice our brother upon the altar of fear to please some imaginary phantom. See what Christianity has done for the world! It has reduced Spain to a guitar, Italy to a hand organ and Ireland to exile. That is what religion has done. Take every country in the whole world, and the country that has got the least religion is ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... before Slone, that fanlike slope of sand which opened down into the valley, appeared a swiftly moving black object, like a fleeting phantom. It was a phantom horse. Slone felt that his eyes, deceived by his mind, saw racing images. Many a wild chase he had lived in dreams on some far desert. But what was that beating in his ears—sharp, ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... agreement between a few actual facts and the theory which we are so foolishly ready to believe; and straightway we interpret the facts in the light of the theory. In a speck of the immense unknown we catch a glimpse of a phantom truth, a shadow, a will-o'-the-wisp; once the atom is explained, for better or worse, we imagine that we hold the explanation of the universe and all that it contains; and ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... earlier in the day subsided; but the swelling waves, which broke with thud after thud upon the shelving beach, gave evidence of a gale still whirling somewhere off the coast. The clear-cut lines of the distant cliffs faded to dim, quiet masses. Far out on the horizon rose a line of phantom hills,—a line which, as night drew in, moved slowly shoreward, rising as it came, shutting out sail after sail, point after point, till at last it met the land and shut out the sea itself. There is something weird and uncanny about the approach ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... of the northern States; but to those who heard it first to-night it came as the revelation of a new reality. As the unveiling of some solid marble figure would transform the thought of one who had taken it, when swathed, for a ghost or phantom, so did the heart's desire of these singers stand out now with such intensity as to give it objective existence to those who ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... goddess, grey-eyed Athene, turned to other thoughts. She made a phantom, and fashioned it after the likeness of a woman, Iphthime, daughter of great-hearted Icarius, whom Eumelus wedded, whose dwelling was in Pherae. And she sent it to the house of divine Odysseus to bid Penelope, amid her sorrow and lamenting, to cease from her weeping and tearful lamentation. ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... warning, in a sudden and shocking burst of that high, voluble, metallic speech which Captain Alec had heard through the ceiling of the parlor, he began to address them, if indeed it were they whom he addressed, and not some phantom audience of Princes, Marshals, Admirals, or trembling sheep-like re emits. It was difficult to hear the words, hopeless to make out the sense. It was a farrago of nonsense, part of his own inventing, part (as it seemed) wild and confused reminiscences of the published speeches of the ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... as I came out upon a ledge which overlooked the valley, I perceived my horse's shadow floating on the phantom ocean far below me, a dark equestrian statue encircled with a triple-ringed halo of fire. In all my mountain experiences I had ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, in their wild pilgrimage after destined goals. Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head. Who walks? I do not know. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker. One—two—three—four; four paces and the wall." [Footnote: ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... however; the phantom voice, the treasure, and his discovery kept him awake, and he lay thinking about ghosts ...
— A Desperate Chance - The Wizard Tramp's Revelation, A Thrilling Narrative • Old Sleuth (Harlan P. Halsey)
... him with leaves, and never find him again. I often break my top joint; so, as I never carry string, I splice it with a bit of the line, which I bite off, for I really cannot be troubled with scissors and I always lose my knife. When a phantom minnow sticks in my clothes, I snap the gut off, and put on another, so that when I reach home I look as if a shoal of fierce minnows had attacked me and hung on like leeches. When a boy, I was—once or twice—a bait-fisher, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... proved useless. Like a phantom she had slipped away amid the underbrush, leaving him to flounder blindly in the labyrinth. Once she laughed outright, a clear burst of girlish merriment ringing through the silence, and he leaped desperately forward, hoping to intercept her flight. His incautious foot ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... arrow-like minarets; the Seven Towers, with their fancy-pictured terrors, fade gradually from my sight, as the steam-boat rapidly ploughs the glassy wave. The eye, straining itself for a last glimpse of the beautiful city, beholds it resting, like a phantom, on the indistinct verge where heaven and the waters meet, until it sinks into the bosom ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... though even upon the lowest species of probability. The mind can easily distinguish betwixt the one and the other; and whatever emotion the poetical enthusiasm may give to the spirits, it is still the mere phantom of belief or persuasion. The case is the same with the idea, as with the passion it occasions. There is no passion of the human mind but what may arise from poetry; though at the same time the feelings of the passions are very different when excited by poetical fictions, ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... exactly. I mean something more in the antique—something or other, you see"—here he began twirling his forefinger in the air and sketching an amorphous phantom of some sort, of an altogether unattainable character, "in ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... few lascivious dreams. In these the phantom partner was almost invariably a dead woman. (When about 8 I had seen the dead body of an aunt who died ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... (Dumouriez, ii. 137.) Feuillant-Constitutional, as your respectable Cahier de Gerville, as your respectable unfortunate Delessarts; or Royalist-Constitutional, as Montmorin last Friend of Necker; or Aristocrat as Bertrand-Moleville: they flit there phantom-like, in the huge simmering confusion; poor shadows, dashed in the racking winds; powerless, without meaning;—whom the human memory need ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... ministers, of naming guardians for the royal children, and of virtually controlling military, civil, and religious affairs. "If I granted your demands," replied Charles, "I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king." ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... train, with the door open, she lay sleepless through the night hours, listening to the rattle of the trucks, the thud of heavy wheels on the rails, disturbed only when the car was shifted to the Adirondack train by the blue glare of arc lights and phantom figures rushing to and fro in ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... ideas. But if he sees in these various states no more than is expressed in their name, if he retains only their impersonal aspect, he may set them side by side for ever without getting anything but a phantom self, the shadow of the Ego, projecting itself into space. If, on the contrary, he takes these psychical states with the particular colouring which they assume in the case of a definite person, and which comes to each of them by reflection from ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... hindrance I do not think Paul here refers. He is not alluding to those who indolently run, but to them who run in vain because missing their object; individuals, for instance, who pursue their aim at full speed, but, deluded by a phantom, miss their aim and rush to ruin or run up against fearful obstacles. Hence Paul enjoins men to run successfully while in the race, that they may seize the prize and not lose it by default. In consequence the race is hindered when a false goal is set up or the true one removed. ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... Spanish missionary, there appears nothing like systematic planning in all these immense operations. The tide of conquest flowed in capricious courses, according as it was invited by hopes of gold or of a passage to China, or of some phantom of a Fountain of Youth or a city of Quivira or a Gilded Man; and it seemed in general to the missionary that he could not do else than follow in the course ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... St. Launce's revisited Poems of 1912-13- The Going Your Last Drive The Walk Rain on a Grace "I found her out there" Without Ceremony Lament The Haunter The Voice His Visitor A Circular A Dream or No After a Journey A Death-ray recalled Beeny Cliff At Castle Boterel Places The Phantom Horsewoman Miscellaneous Pieces The Wistful Lady The Woman in the Rye The Cheval-Glass The Re-enactment Her Secret "She charged me" The Newcomer's Wife A Conversation at Dawn A King's Soliloquy The Coronation Aquae Sulis Seventy-four ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... command an armed ship and harry the pirates of the West Indies and Madagascar. Strangest of all the sea tales of colonial history is that of Captain Kidd and his cruise in the Adventure-Galley. His name is reddened with crimes never committed, his grisly phantom has stalked through the legends and literature of piracy, and the Kidd tradition still has magic to set treasure-seekers exploring almost every beach, cove, and headland from Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet if truth were told, he ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... now appear, stalking over the plain and circling gradually around me. There is something unearthly in the sight. They resemble creatures of a phantom world. They seem ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... to him the real Miss Grey might love another, belong to another, tortured him. Tortured him, too, the knowledge that if this was so he had no right to entertain that beloved phantom that he had made of her in his North Woods. Or it tortured him to remember that his love for her could come to nothing—nothing. He must not tell her that he loved her; he must not, upon a night flooded with moonlight and ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... dejection followed this phantom ray of hope. All returned to their accustomed places. Curtis alone remained motionless, but his eye no longer scanned ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... strong—gloriously strong—just as the blacksmith's right arm becomes mighty by the constant wielding of his hammer. Disappointment—let the coward pluck up courage—disappointment is a sheet-and-pumpkin phantom to the bold. Let him who has battled side by side with Trouble, say whether it was not an angel sent to be his help. Find a true-hearted man whose energies have brought him safe through years of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Raskolnikov went on, twisting his mouth into a smile, "that I am mad. I thought just now that perhaps I really am mad, and have only seen a phantom." ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of broad-minded French-Canadians, Quebec was not at war, as part of united Canada. Banging the drum and blowing the bugle in Quebec was as wrong in strategy as to send Bob Rogers down to exorcise, as he did in 1915, the phantom of conscription. Sir Robert knew that even in civil times his Government was electorally ignored on the St. Lawrence. How much more in a time of unpopular war? Was it not clear that every hurrah for the Empire in Ontario, every fresh battalion mustered and drilled in Toronto, every troopship ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... the stars shone down and were reflected, as in a mirror, on the otherwise ink-black water of the lagoon. As we pulled ahead, we appeared to be passing through a narrow canal, with lofty impenetrable walls on either side, while in the centre rose before our eyes the phantom-like outline of the schooner, her topmast heads and rigging alone being seen against the sky above the dark shadows of the trees. The splash of our oars was the only sound which broke the dead silence which reigned in this sequestered ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... best of my belief I have never seen anyone like her; what I felt was a kind of dim far-off memory, vague but persistent. The only sensation I can compare it to, is that odd feeling one sometimes has in a dream, when fantastic cities and wondrous lands and phantom ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... days, was not neglected. Sometimes the fairy put a shining sword into his grasp, and showed him how to wield it with a force no one could withstand; sometimes he was mounted on a fiery steed which few mortals could have bestrode, and with lance in hand he was taught to tilt against phantom knights, which, in the most desperate encounters, he invariably overthrew. Thus, by the time he had attained to man's estate, no knight in Europe was so accomplished, while none surpassed him in ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... distance from the wreck, he was met by a stream that his most desperate efforts could not overcome. He was a light and powerful swimmer, and the struggle was hard and protracted. With the shore immediately before his eyes, and at no great distance, he was led, as by a false phantom, to continue his efforts, although they did not advance him a foot. The old seaman, who at first had watched his motions with careless indifference, understood the danger of his situation at a glance; and, forgetful of his own fate, he shouted aloud, in a voice that was ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... resources; they consented to the abandonment of all the places won in the Low Countries during 1667. A congress was opened at Aix-la-Chapelle, presided over by the nuncio of the new pope, Clement IX., as favorable to France as his predecessor, Innocent X., had been to Spain. "A phantom arbiter between phantom plenipotentiaries," says Voltaire, in the Siecle de Louis XIV. The real negotiations were going on at St. Germain. "I did not look merely," writes Louis XIV., "to profit by the present conjuncture, but also to put myself in a position to turn to my advantage ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and colors flying, first exasperating him by the assurance of my complete forgiveness. Since then, if sitting alone, ligna super foco large reponens, I involuntarily recur to that ill-favored conception, it suffices to contrast with it the grotesque appearance of its originator, and the pale phantom evanisheth. ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... ahead, and just as his feet struck bottom whispered to Simmo for his softest call. At the sound the bull whirled and plunged after us again recklessly, and I led him across to where the younger bull was still ranging up and down the shore, calling imploringly to his phantom mate. ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... these difficulties they never hesitate in their tone. At least, let us do them this justice—there never were, in semblance, more determined Ministers. They seemed at least to rejoice in the phantom of a proud courage. But what do they do? They send a special envoy to Denmark, who was to enforce their policy and arrange everything. Formally the special envoy was sent to congratulate the King on ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... memory worked rapidly, constructing the story. The blood dyed her face at the thought of her obtuseness. Then she set her lips firmly. She had done her best; if a wanton fate chose to interfere now and make Millicent slave to the phantom of her early, radiant love, she, Anna, could ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... day he gave Thanks for the fair existence that was his; For a sick fancy made him not her slave, To mock him with her phantom miseries. No chronic tortures racked his aged limb, For luxury and sloth had ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... if she lives, he will marry her; and then, if there were twenty oceans, I should want them all to roll between us. I tell you now, I can not and will not stay here to see the day that makes that pale gray phantom his wife. I should go mad, and do something that might add new horrors to that doomed and abhorred 'Solitude,' that has become Dr. Grey's Mecca. I could live without his love, but I can not stand tamely by and see him lavish it on another. Some women,—such, for instance, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... though these things were worthy of our highest aspirations, as though they could satisfy the unappeasable appetite of man for happiness. Greater folly than this can no man be guilty of. He takes the dross for the pure gold, the phantom for the reality. Few men theoretically belong to this class; practically ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... filled with a suffocating smoke. In order to reach the rooms where the lodgers were imprisoned, there was no other way left but to pass over the roof. They instantly sprang upon it, and a moment later something which resembled a black phantom appeared on the tiles, in the midst of the smoke. It was the corporal, who had been the first to arrive. But in order to get from the roof to the small set of rooms cut off by the fire, he was forced to pass over an extremely narrow space comprised between a dormer window and the ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... commenced old Tabaret, who in the background of the picture presented by this singular revelation saw again the phantom of ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... FIRST. Birds of Passage Prometheus, or the Poet's Forethought Epimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought The Ladder of St. Augustine The Phantom Ship The Warden of the Cinque Ports Haunted Houses In the Churchyard at Cambridge The Emperor's Bird's-Nest The Two Angels Daylight and Moonlight The Jewish Cemetery at Newport Oliver Basselin Victor Galbraith My Lost ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... in his work, and as that arch-cheat, Hope, gradually becomes a phantom of the past, the neck will ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... its internal and actual. For of all we see, hear, feel and touch the substance is and must be in ourselves; and therefore there is no alternative in reason between the dreary (and thank heaven! almost impossible) belief that every thing around us is but a phantom, or that the life which is in us is in them likewise; and that to know is to resemble, when we speak of objects out of ourselves, even as within ourselves to learn is, according to Plato, only to recollect;—the only effective answer to which, that I have ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... fields of Shiloh Muster the phantom bands, From Virginia's swamps, and Death's white camps On Carolina sands; From Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, I see them gathering fast; And up from Manassas, what is it that passes Like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... were wholly unnecessary. I, too, had seen it; a wonderful and uncanny sight. Out of the darkness under the elms, low down upon the ground, grew a vaporous blue light. It flared up, elfinish, then began to ascend. Like an igneous phantom, a witch flame, it rose, high—higher—higher, to what I adjudged to be some twelve feet or more from the ground. Then, high in the air, it died away again ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... understand each other. To tell the truth, the more he understood her, the less he understood her. She was the first woman he had known. For if poor Sabine was a woman he had known, he had known nothing of her: she had always remained for him a phantom of his heart. Ada took upon herself to make him make up for lost time. In his turn he tried to solve the riddle of woman; an enigma which perhaps is no enigma except for those who seek some ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... North, Robinson, and Keene divided against. Charles said all that could be said on our side. But as the business was managed, it was the worst Question that I ever voted for. We were a Committee absolutely of Almack's; so if the Bill is not resumed, and better conducted and supported, this phantom of 30,000 pounds clear in Bully's pocket to pay off his annuities vanishes. It is surprising what a fatality attends some people's proceedings. I begged last night as for alms, that they would meet me to settle the Votes. I have, since I have been in Parliament, been of twenty at least of these ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... go,' said Emily, faintly, 'the air of these rooms is unwholesome;' but, when she attempted to do so, considering that she must pass through the apartment where the phantom of her terror had appeared, this terror increased, and, too faint to support herself, she sad down on the side ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... use of the sharp chisel of light and shade, it would cut away from each of them half of its trunk and branches, and, weaving together the two halves that remained, would make of them either a single pillar of shade, defined by the surrounding light, or a single luminous phantom whose artificial, quivering contour was encompassed in a network of inky shadows. When a ray of sunshine gilded the highest branches, they seemed, soaked and still dripping with a sparkling moisture, to have ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... murdered sister walks these corridors. To be plain, there is no room at Sloperton Grange for another ghost. I cannot have them in my room,—for you know I don't like children. Think of this, rash girl, and forbear! Would you, Selina," said the phantom mournfully,— "would you force your great-grandfather's spirit ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... late at night, who had seen something white flitting to and fro in the garden-patch, and when he called to it saw it vanish most mysteriously. This made quite a stir in the town; others watched also, saw the white phantom in the starlight, and could not tell where it went when it vanished behind the chestnut trees on the hill, till one man, braver than the rest, hid himself behind these trees and discovered the mystery. The ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... each other, for the sake of the monster gods of our own delirium. As we are whirled upon our spinning, glowing planet through the unfathomable spaces, where myriads of suns, like golden bees, gleam through the awful mystery of "the vast void night," what are the phantom gods to us? They are no more than the waterspouts on the ocean, or the fleeting shadows on the hills. But the man, and the woman, and the child, and the dog with its wistful eyes; these know us, touch us, appeal to us, love ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... at a corner, something beckons; a phantom finger-post, a will o' the wisp, a foolish challenge writ in big letters on a brand. And twisting his red moustaches, braggadocio Virtue takes the perilous way where dim rain falls ever, and sad winds sigh. And after him, on his ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... Caius stole involuntarily to his lips, and he wafted a kiss across the water. Then suddenly it seemed to him that the cliff had eyes, and that it might be told of him at home and abroad that he was making love to a phantom, and had ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... theatrical apparel," he continues, "and then imagine him in a dim light, where he can only see the expression of his eyes. If these speak to him, the figure itself is liable presently to make a movement, which will perhaps alarm him—but to which he must submit; at last the phantom's lips tremble, it opens its mouth, and a supernatural voice tells him something that is entirely real, entirely tangible, but at the same time so extraordinary (similar, for instance, to what the ghostly ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... no yapping and snarling from the wolves such as was usual, and such as Robert had often heard, but they had become a phantom pack, silent and ghost-like, creeping among the bushes, sinister and threatening beyond all reckoning. Robert began to feel that, in very truth, it was a phantom pack, and he wondered if his arrows, even if they struck full and true, would slay. ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... first to present an obstacle to the proper conduct of the scene; but gracefully uncovering the partridge, and as gracefully smiling towards the invisible, he appeared strongly to recommend the bird in preference to the beast. Dinner at length concluded, he rose, and apparently led his phantom guest from the table, and then returning to his arm-chair, threw himself into it, and, crossing his hands upon his breast, commenced a careful examination of the cinders and himself. His rumination ended ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... were ready to make, and pity for others, now parts of themselves, their brothers, their children, their loved ones. All were flesh of their flesh, closely drawn together in a superhuman embrace, conscious of the gigantic body formed by their union, and of the apparition above their heads of the phantom which incarnated this union, the Country. Half-beast, half-god, like the Egyptian Sphinx, or the Assyrian Bull; but then men saw only the shining eyes, the feet were hid. She was the divine monster in whom each of the living found himself multiplied, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... wildering dream and turned himself slowly Towards where the village lay and was wildered again; for again came Moving to meet him the lofty form of the glorious maiden. Fixedly gazed he upon her; herself it was and no phantom. Bearing in either hand a larger jar and a smaller, Each by the handle, with busy step she came on to the fountain. Joyfully then he hastened to meet her; the sight of her gave him Courage and strength; and thus the ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... looking pale," he declared. "Give me your hands to hold. Can't you see that I have come just at the right time? Even the coal barges look like phantom boats. See, there ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... day, he kept thinking of this phantom. What was she like now? How funny it was to meet in this way after twenty-five years! ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... beheld while upon the steamer, alone keeps despondency from a victory over hope; and although the continued existence of the Spottswood Hotel is vouched for by authority, my lodge in such a wilderness seems next to impossible. Away to the right, above the waste of blackened walls, around the phantom-looking flag upon the capitol,—the only sign betwixt heaven and earth, or upon the earth, that Richmond is not wholly deserted,—beyond and out of the ruins, we walk past one of two open doorways where ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... gigantic figure of frightful aspect stood before him, and continued to gaze upon him with silent severity. 23. Brutus is reported to have asked, "Art thou a daemon or a mortal? and why comest thou to me?" "Brutus," answered the phantom, "I am thy evil genius—thou shalt see me again at Philippi."[9] "Well, then," replied Brutus, without being discomposed, "we shall meet again." Upon this the phantom vanished; when Brutus, calling to his servants, asked ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... would continue to be what he always had been. He would paint portraits and everything that was given to him as a commission; he would please the public; he would make more money, he would adapt his art to meet his wife's jealous demands, that she might live in peace; he would scoff at that phantom of human ambition which men call glory. Glory! A lottery, where the only chance for a prize depended on the tastes of people still to be born! Who knew what the artistic inclinations of the future ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... its hand, which, Jock said, looked as if the ghost of old Barnes had come to threaten them for the wasteful expenditure of his hoards. Or, as Babie said, it was more like the ghastly notion of Bertram Risingham in Rokeby, of some phantom of a murdered slave ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to England, which seemed at the time of the Boer War, and during the years that had preceded it, to have been confined to a small number of the English, has become the rule. British Imperialism is no mere phantom: the Union of South Africa has proved it to have a very virile body, and, what is more important, a lofty ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... but, when he had cast off, taken the tiller and after a few moments of idle jockeying back and forth in the light puffs, squared away for the run seaward before the rising wind, his gloomy thoughts returned, to settle like a flock of phantom harpies ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... nearer still. His heart gave a great throb. Could it be, or was the moon weaving some hallucination in his troubled brain? If it was a phantom, it was that of Lady Clementina: if but modeled of the filmy vapors of the moonlight, and the artist his own brain, the phantom was welcome as joy. His spirit seemed to soar aloft in the yellow air and hang hovering over and around her, while his body stood rooted to the spot, like one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... to read: "'Under satisfactory test conditions, I have seen phantom forms and faces—a phantom form came from the corner of the room, took an accordion in its hand, and glided about the room ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... paths which ran about the sides of the mountain began to meet in two great roads, which insensibly gathered the whole multitude of travellers into two great bodies. At a little distance from the entrance of each road there stood a hideous phantom, that opposed our further passage. One of these apparitions had his right hand filled with darts, which he brandished in the face of all who came up that way. Crowds ran back at the appearance of it, and cried out, "Death!" The spectre that guarded ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... walks for a while, long enough to have ascertained that there was not a veridical phantom among the flowers, if they had been looking, and then when they came to their accustomed seat, they sat down, and she said, "I don't know that I've seen the moon so clear since we left Carlsbad." At the last ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fashion, was in Ireland a fury. In England a phantom of party, it was in Ireland a fierce superstition. In England a fading recollection of power lost, and a still feebler hope of favours to come, it was in Ireland a hereditary frenzy embittered by personal sufferings, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... Hardens, Hardens in trunk hose, Hardens in ruff and doublet, in ruffles and periwig; Hardens in powder and patches, in the loosest of stocks and the tightest of trousers; and never a petticoat among them all. It was just as well, Rickman reflected, that Poppy's frivolous little phantom had not danced after him into the Harden library; those other phantoms might not have received it very kindly, unless indeed Sir Thomas, the maker of madrigals, had spared ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair |
