"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that it was already occupied. The exclamation of surprise he gave forth soon brought the others to his side; and to their horror, drunk as they were, they found that the body before them was that of a dead man, arrayed in all the ghastly pomp of a corpse. A little nearer inspection showed that he had been a priest, probably the Padre of the village; on his head he had a small velvet skull cap, embroidered with a cross, and his body was swathed in a vestment, such as priests ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... so amazed and terrified, not only at the sight of the blood, but at her extraordinary behaviour, that he turned ghastly white. The pain, however, recalled him to his senses; he rolled the handkerchief over the wound, twisted his own round it too, for the red stain came through Pauline's cambric, and departed. The account current in the college was, that ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... little scene of desolation beside the right of way met Bucks's eye, and he caught sight of the ghastly battle-field. A frightened section crew emerged from the wild-plum thickets along the creek bottom, as the cavalrymen, followed by Casement's armed men, poured out of the three cars. Stanley with his scouts led the way to the emigrant camp, where the fight ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... secure a mould of his features. This latter design had to be abandoned. An impression of the hands alone was obtainable. Decomposition had set in so rapidly that the face was distorted beyond recognition. A lead coffin was hastily brought to cover up the ghastly spectacle of nature ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... you gain a great deal by giving to the school lesson all the color and light which every-day affairs can lend to it. Do not let it be a ghastly skeleton in a closet, but let it come as far as it will into daily life. When you read in Colburn's Oral Arithmetic, "that a man bought mutton at six cents a pound, and beef at seven," ask your mother what she pays a pound now, and do the sum with the figures changed. When ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... influence, if not a school. The younger Lytton, George Meredith, Buchanan, here and there Swinburne and William Morris, seem to break loose from the graceful harmony which the Tennysonians affect, and to plunge headlong into the obscure, the uncouth, the ghastly, and the lurid. No one denies originality and power in many of these pieces: but they are flat blasphemy against the pellucid melody of the Tennysonian idyll. Our poetry seems to be under two contrary spells: it is enthralled at one time by the ravishing symmetry of Mozart; at another time ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the night the scenes of the last few hours, of the last few days, came back to him and burnt into his soul. The gulf yawned before him now plain enough, open at his feet—black, ghastly. He shuddered at it, wondering if he should even yet fall in, felt wildly about for strength to stand firm, to retrace his steps; but found it not. He found not yet the strength he was in search of, but in the grey morning he wrote ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... at once so ghastly that Peter's heart stopped beating. He thought in a horrible flash that the end had come, and that he, Peter Maginnis, had brought it by tearing at the worst wound his friend had. His clumsy diplomacy fell from him as at the last trump. He dropped on his knees beside ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the man who was supervising the operation, and the rope was carefully eased away until the first five- foot mark reached the cliff edge, while Butler, who now also began at last to recognise and appreciate the ghastly peril to which his obstinacy had consigned a fellow creature, moved off to a point about a hundred yards distant, from which he could watch the entire descent. And he no sooner reached it than he perceived that Harry's objections to the plan were well grounded, ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... It became a giant, a Briareus, wielding a hundred swords, and speaking in a voice of thunder. Every one of the nymphs at the same instant became a Cyclops; tempest and earthquake ensued, and the air was full of ghastly spectres. ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... Buchanan and Breckinridge another Presidential ticket had been placed in the field. The pro-slavery section of the American party and the ghastly remnant of the Whigs had presented Mr. Fillmore for the Presidency, and had associated with him Andrew Jackson Donelson of Tennessee as candidate for the Vice-Presidency. On the engrossing question of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to plunge in those swellings, Along with that ghastly face, Going out on unknown waters In that clinging ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... progress, to return the ghost any civilities which he might think meet to offer him. On arriving on the spot, he found his suspicions were too well grounded; for whom did he see but the ghost of Bogandoran apparently ready waiting him, and seeming by his ghastly grin not a little overjoyed at the meeting. Marching up to my grand-uncle, the bogle clapped a huge club into his hand, and furnishing himself with one of the same dimensions, he put a spittle in his hand, and deliberately commenced the combat. My grand-uncle returned the salute with equal spirit, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... the least wavering. I have had a single passion; I have given my life to it; it is there still, consuming me. Only the girl I loved: it's as if she had died. Yes, she is dead, as dead as Helen: and I have not the consolation of knowing where they have laid her. Our marriage will be a ghastly mockery: a marriage of corpses. Her heart, how can she give it me? She gave it years ago to the man I was, the man who is dead. We, who are left, are nothing to ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... bands wandered about the streets of Laon searching everywhere for relatives, friends, or servitors of the bishop, for all whom the angry populace knew or supposed to be such, and wreaking on their persons or their houses a ghastly or a brutal vengeance. In a fit of terror many poor innocents fled before the blind wrath of the populace; some were caught and cut down pell-mell amongst the guilty; others escaped through the vineyards planted ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... fought our way northward over the high Polar tableland. The silence now that we had no other party with us was ghastly, for beyond the sound of our own voices and the groaning of the sledge runners when the surface was bad there was no sound whatever to remind us of the outer world. As mile after mile was covered our thoughts wandered from the Expedition to those in our homeland, and thought succeeded thought ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... first thing he saw was his grandfather propped up in bed, with a ghastly pallor on his face. When he beheld his truant grandson, the scowl upon his brow deepened, and he shook ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... torchlight unsteady The dead and the dying seem one— What! trembling and paling already, Before your dear mission's begun? These wounds are more precious than ghastly— Time presses her lips to each scar, While she chants of that glory which vastly Transcends ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Side by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as she had made in her marriage. [Footnote: ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... acquired the dimensions and approximate outline of an adult human body, although all was still vague and blurred. It hovered lightly in the air, a foot or so above the couch. Backhouse looked haggard and ghastly. Mrs. Jameson quietly fainted in her chair, but she was unnoticed, and presently revived. The apparition now settled down upon the couch, and at the moment of doing so seemed suddenly to grow dark, ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... fever, shivering with the debility of disease, with pallid faces and emaciated frames, ask from us that its healing dews shall still be suffered to descend upon them. Stricken down upon the battle field in the full bloom of manly vigor, lying festering in their ghastly wounds among the dead and dying, exposed to the dews of night, the broiling fervors of the midday sun, we may hear them implore us that the ambulances of the Sanitary may be allowed to aid in bringing them shelter, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... we owe, in part at least, Carlyle's railings against progress and his deplorable criticism of England's great men and women,—poor little Browning, animalcular De Quincey, rabbit-brained Newman, sawdustish Mill, chattering George Eliot, ghastly-shrieky Shelley, once-enough Lamb, stinted-scanty Wordsworth, poor thin fool Darwin and his book (The Origin of Species, of which Carlyle confessed he never read a page) which was wonderful as an example of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... interest. Presently they were joined by her father, who had just finished his breakfast and was on his way to the office. Now he stooped down and gazed at something half concealed in the snow, then suddenly started back, and as she caught a glimpse of his face, she saw that it was ghastly white. A terrible foreboding seized her. She threw a shawl about her shoulders and rushed down-stairs. In the hall she was met by her father, who was just entering, followed by four men, carrying something between them. She well knew what it was. She would fain have turned away, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... finger-nails, the pendent nose jewels, the bulky ear-rings, the heavy bangles for ankles and arms. Without these, life, to the Hindu belle, is not worth living. On wedding occasions, among the common folk, red ochre is also daubed over the throat in ghastly suggestion to the Westerner; but in glorious attractiveness to the native ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... men pour out their indomitable will, and in that hell light of battle flame engineers labored to construct bridges, small bodies of troops moved forward to join their comrades in the trenches who had been able to make a footing the day before, and all night long, those ghastly yet merciful accompaniments of a battle field—the ambulance corps—carried on their work of relief. The searchlights swept up and down the valley, like great eyes that watched to give direction to the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... the good Father is not quite so ghastly. He tells us of one "M. Finlaison of burlesque memory," who, when all provisions were out, took his fiddle and, calling the men of his fort before the door of his empty larder, played to them a Scottish reel. That was their dinner for the day,—instead of meat they ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... sharpest antithesis. The Virgilian phrases, with their grave pity, are steeped in a golden softness that is just touched with a far-off trouble, a pathetic waver in the voice as if tears were not far below it. Those of Tacitus are charged with indignation instead of pity; "like a jewel hung in ghastly night," to use Shakespeare's memorable simile, or like the red and angry autumnal star in the Iliad, they quiver and burn. Phrases like the famous ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant, or the felix opportunitate ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... home from the Highlands? I tried to tell you. Something in me was rebelling. Ask mamma; papa. They knew! That's been my great trouble. My desires for myself were never strong enough to combat their desires for me. They've always placed me under such ghastly obligation for their having brought me into the world. Their obligation is to me, for having brought me here, the accident of their desires! But I let the molasses lake of family sentiment—suck—me in. If only I had fought ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... the greatest detail, Dundee told the whole story, beginning with his arrival Saturday evening at the Selim house, including the ghastly replaying of the "death hand at bridge"—a phrase, by the way, which the prosecutor instantly adopted—and ending with Ralph Hammond's establishing of an alibi, to the entire satisfaction of Captain Strawn, as well as of Dundee himself. ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... as ghastly in sunlight as they had done in the pale light of the moon. I could see too that this path was ancient, and nowhere could I find traces of its being used. As I had seen the night before, it led straight across the desert, and in the distance in that direction ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... energy, as if she were getting ready to fly. I looked and saw, sure enough, behind the dark mass of the Mole, (a huge blue-black mountain in the foreground,) the granite ranges rising gradually and grim as we rode; but, further still, behind those gray and ghastly barriers, all bathed and blazing in the sun's fresh splendors, undimmed by a cloud, unveiled even by a filmy fleece of vapor, and oh, so white—so intensely, blindingly white! against the dark-blue sky, the needles, the spires, the solemn pyramid, the transfiguration cone of Mont ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... own dominions to the utmost of his ability." He pointed to the condition of Spain, which was "overspread with the thickest gloom of heathenish ignorance, beneath which the fiends and demons of the abyss seem to be holding their ghastly revels." He described it as "a country in which all sense of right and wrong is forgotten . . . where the name of Jesus is scarcely ever mentioned but in blasphemy, and His precepts [are] almost utterly unknown ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... that the house had the most unpleasant physiognomy he had ever observed, but, at any rate, he glanced down the area and was a good deal astonished to see a man lying on the stones, his limbs all huddled together, and his face turned up. Our gentleman thought his face looked peculiarly ghastly, and so set off at a run in search of the nearest policeman. The constable was at first inclined to treat the matter lightly, suspecting common drunkenness; however, he came, and after looking at the ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... remarked as we passed up Aldgate High Street, "to have put one's finger into His Majesty's pituitary fossa—after his decease, of course. By the way, here is Harrow Alley; you remember Defoe's description of the dead-cart waiting out here, and the ghastly procession coming down the alley." He took my arm and led me up the narrow thoroughfare as far as the sharp turn by the "Star and Still" public-house, where we turned ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... and with sorrow prepared so soon to smite a many of these revellers in ways foreknown to Jurgen; and with death resistlessly approaching so soon to make an end of almost all this company in some unlovely fashion that Jurgen foreknew exactly,—here laughter seemed unreasonable and ghastly. Why, but Reinault yonder, who laughed so loud, with his cropped head flung back: would Reinault be laughing in quite this manner if he knew the round strong throat he thus exposed was going to be cut like the throat of a calf, while three Burgundians ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... and the near hills, and had nothing but the mulberry flats and ditches of water, and chilly rain and mist. It grew unpleasant as we went south. At dark we were riding slowly, very slowly, for miles through a country overflowed with water, out of which trees and houses loomed up in a ghastly show. At all the stations soldiers were getting on board, shouting and singing discordantly choruses from the operas; for there was a rising at Padua, and one feared at Bologna the populace getting up insurrections against the enforcement of the grist-tax,—a tax which has ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... sweetness, no more respect; this rebuff puts an end to all my constancy; at this ghastly moment, my heart ...
— Amphitryon • Moliere
... the first spots which the Frenchmen visited bore evidences of a ghastly tragedy. So numerous were the human bones bleaching on the sandy soil that they called it Massacre Island (to-day Dauphin Island). It was surmised—and with some plausibility—that here had perished some portion of the ill-fated following of Pamphile de Narvaez. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... teach me how to die; Banish desponding nature's gloom, Make me to hope a gentle doom, And fix me all on joys to come. With swimming eyes I'll gaze upon thy charms, And clasp thee dying in my fainting arms; Then gently leaning on thy breast; Sink in soft slumbers to eternal rest. The ghastly form shall have a pleasing air, And all things smile, while Heav'n and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... brain: I'VE been the brain that lit thy dull concavity! The human race Invest MY face With thine expression of unchecked depravity, Invested with a ghastly reciprocity, I'VE been responsible for thy monstrosity, I, for thy wanton, blundering ferocity ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... college rooms. Thackeray, in the "Book of Snobs," describes youths at a University wine-party as "drinking bad wines, telling bad stories, singing bad songs over and over again. Milk punch—smoking—ghastly headache—frightful spectacle of dessert-table next morning, and smell of tobacco." But the satirist is often tempted to be epigrammatic at the expense of accuracy, and this picture is at least too highly coloured. In the recently published memoir of "J"—John ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... drowned now—quite drowned: all I feel Is ... is, at swift recurring intervals, A hurry-down within me, as of waters Loosened to smother up some ghastly pit: There they go—whirls from a black ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... threatening attitude about 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 ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... day will come, in which proud Troy shall yield, And spread its smoking ruins o'er the field. Yet Hecuba's, nor Priam's hoary age, Whose blood shall quench some Grecian's thirsty rage, Nor my brave brothers, that have bit the ground, Their souls dismiss'd through many a ghastly wound, Can in my bosom half that grief create, As the sad thought of your impending fate: When some proud Grecian dame shall tasks impose, Mimick your tears, and ridicule your woes; Beneath Hyperia's waters shall you sweat, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... The next instant came the sound of crashing underbrush, and, through vistas, Donald saw a man approaching them on a lumbering run. It was Big Jerry. His beard and clothing were dishevelled, and, as he drew near, his deep, gasping breaths became audible. From his ghastly gray and working face his deep eyes looked forth with an expression which spelt pain of body ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... the French in the cleanliness of their methods, and some of their doctors were already beginning to accept the antiseptic theory; but it was not till 1872 that this principle can be said to have won the day. The hospitals on both sides were left with a ghastly heritage of pyaemia and other diseases, raging almost unchecked in their wards; but, in the two years after the war, two of the most famous professors in German Universities[48] had by antiseptic methods obtained such striking ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... The ghastly amusement which came to me out of the young lady in this volume, who amputates a man's leg, made me reflect a little about the mode in which writers of fiction have dealt with sick people and doctors. I lay half awake, and thought over this in ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... of the Chigi palace the commotion assumed the aspect of a riot. The carriage had to stop. Elena leaned forward to look out, and her face emerging from the shadows and lighted up by the glare of the gas and the reflection of the sunset seemed of a ghastly whiteness, an almost icy pallor, reminding Andrea of some head he had seen before, he could not say where or when—in some gallery ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... what the mind is apt to do; it is very apt to confound the ideas of the surviving soul and the dead body. The vulgar have always, and still do confound these very irreconcilable ideas. They lay the scene of apparitions in churchyards; they habit the ghost in a shroud; and it appears in all the ghastly paleness of a corpse. A contradiction of this kind has given rise to a doubt, whether the Druids did in reality hold the doctrine of transmigration. There is positive testimony, that they did hold it. There is also testimony as positive, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... his neck and on his naked back between the shoulder-blades. This, with the coal-black hair, the chalky face partly buried in mud, and the distorted, agonized attitude of the half-nude body, made one of the most ghastly pictures I had ever seen. There was already a stench of decomposition in the hot air of the tent, and the coagulated blood on the half-naked corpse, as well as the bloody bandage around its head, was swarming with noisy flies. Just beyond this terrible object, and ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... began with a ghastly description of the shooting of prisoners, and went on to a nauseating account of the effects of gas and a terrible story about the crucifixion of a Canadian sergeant; and then, when our flesh was creeping and our throats were ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... loss of the crown; for though the subserviency of the electors might well disgust him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind. It was the moral shock of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother's true nature, falling on him when his heart was aching with love, and his body doubtless was weakened by sorrow. And it is essential, however disagreeable, to realise the nature of this shock. It matters little here whether Hamlet's age ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... whistle answered us from shore—a piercing human whistle. Dim lights burned through the fog. We advanced with fearful caution; and while voices out of the air were greeting us, almost before we had got our reckoning, we drifted up under a dark pier, on which ghastly figures seemed to be floating to and fro, bidding us all-hail. And then and there the freedom of the city was extended to us, saturated with salt-sea mist. Probably six times in ten the voyager approaches Monterey ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the glaring sunlight. There, in Blythe's Bunk, the only home he knew, they laid him gently down and at Doc's request those who were not needed went out. The victim lay quite unconscious, his face ghastly pale and with a look of being polished caused perhaps by the water which Doc Carson ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the victorious Duke of Lorraine rode into the rescued city and re-entered his palace. At the gates was heaped up a ghastly memorial of the steadfastness of the burghers in their devotion to his cause. This was a pile of the bones of the foul animals they had consumed when other food was exhausted, rather than capitulate to their liege's foe. To ascertain the fate of that foe now became Rene's chief anxiety, ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... He pictured to himself what must happen in the morning—"to have to follow a torpedo-boat into the naval base and lie there till the whole Ulster scheme was unravelled and known to the world as a ghastly failure, and the Province and Sir Edward and all the leaders the laughing stock of the world"—and the thought of it all plunged him almost ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... corpses by scores. It was popularly believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infection, and could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life. No foundations were laid there till two generations had passed without any return of the pestilence, and till the ghastly spot had long ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... arrived opposite to where the duke and duchess and Don Quixote stood, the attending music ceased, as well as the harps and lutes within the car. The figure in the gown then stood up, and throwing open the robe and uncovering his face; displayed the ghastly countenance of death, looking so terrific that Don Quixote started, Sancho was struck with terror, and even the duke and duchess seemed to betray some symptoms of fear. This living Death, standing erect, in a dull and drowsy tone and with a sleepy ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the heavens. Thunder rolls, and the electric current cuts the air, illuminating the wild scene with a picturesque touch that is almost ghastly in ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... you hosts, Of ghosts, And that without reflectors; And creepy things With wings, And gaunt and grisly spectres! He can fill you crowds Of shrouds, And horrify you vastly; He can rack your brains With chains, And gibberings grim and ghastly. Then, if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, Spirit philology, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... are, like factory children that die, instantly succeeded by new competitors for misery and death." There is no hour of a summer's or a winter's night, in which there may not be found in the streets a ghastly wretch, expiring under the double tortures of disease and famine. Though less aggravated in its features, the picture of prostitution in New York or Philadelphia would be ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Hope is dead. Faith is dead. Honour is dead. Truth is dead. Purity is dead. Liberty is dead. Humility is dead. Fidelity is dead. Decency is dead. It is the blight of humanity. Death— moral and spiritual death in all her hideous and ghastly power—reigns around us. Men are indeed dead—"dead in trespasses and sins." What do we need? What is the secret longing of our hearts? What is the crying agony of our prayers? Is it for any human thing we seek? No. God knows—a thousand times, no! We have but one hope or desire, ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... of the murderess. "Scene on the scaffold!" It was a little after nine o'clock; the enterprising paper had promptly got out its gibbet edition. A morning of midwinter, roofs and ways covered with soot-grimed snow under the ghastly fog-pall; and, whilst I lay there in my bed, that woman had been led out and hanged—hanged. I thought with horror of the possibility that I might sicken and die in that wilderness of houses, nothing above me but "a foul and pestilent congregation ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... say the land is full of apes, which have Their own gods and worship; how ghastly, this!— That demons (for it must be so) should build, In mockery of man's upward faith, the souls Of monkeys, those lewd mammets of mankind, Into a dreadful farce of adoration! And flies! a land of flies! where the hot soil Foul ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... her hand, to offer it to you as if she was afraid you were going to throw it back in her face. It's bad enough being a woman anyway, but to have the feelings of a woman, and then have to say a thing like this—it's—it's—ghastly." ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... D'Alencon was ghastly white as he placed his arquebuse to his shoulder and fired. The ball, instead of hitting the boar, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... lost letters. Miss Keene turned, heart-sick, away. Worse than the ghastly interruption to their easy idyllic life was this grim revelation of selfishness. She began to doubt if even the hysterical excitement of her sister passengers was not merely a pleasant titillation of their ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... death by crucifixion seems to include all that pain and death can have of horrible and ghastly—dizziness, cramp, thirst, starvation, sleeplessness, traumatic fever, tetanus, publicity of shame, long continuance of torment, horror of anticipation, mortification of untended wounds—all intensified just up to the point at which they can be endured at all, but all stopping just ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... school in which stoical indifference to suffering, whether personal or in another, is esteemed a cardinal virtue; yet even he could not wholly conceal the emotion which possessed him as he turned to von Schalckenberg and drew the attention of the professor to the ghastly injuries already inflicted by the ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... by the dying bed of their mother, and neither needed a monitor to warn them of the crisis, and every sign of resentment vanished from the face of the first. Hutter opened his eyes, and even tried to feel about him with his hands, a sign that sight was failing. A minute later, his breathing grew ghastly; a pause totally without respiration followed; and, then, succeeded the last, long drawn sigh, on which the spirit is supposed to quit the body. This sudden termination of the life of one who had hitherto filled so important a place in the narrow scene on which he had been ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the Bourse he came upon poor Matifat, who had three hundred thousand francs in Nucingen's bank. Matifat, ghastly and haggard, beheld the terrible Gigonnet, the bill-discounter of his old quarter, coming up to worry him. He ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... upon the sand. In an instant Jack had sprung to his assistance; but this time it was no false alarm. The bullet had done too well its cruel work. For a moment Valentine seemed to recognize him, and looking up, with his left hand still clutching at his breast, made a ghastly attempt to smile. Then, with a groan, he fell over on his side, ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... in August there was a dull, murky sunset after a dead, breathless day of heat, with not a wind stirring. The sea was not blue as a sea should be, but pink—all pink—a ghastly, staring, painted pink. I lingered on the harbor shore below the house until dark. The evening bells were ringing faintly and mournfully in a church across the harbor. Behind me, in the kitchen, ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... neighbourhood of Madrid, and being apprehended, was forthwith conducted to the capital, where he shortly after terminated his existence on the scaffold, with his two associates; Gabiria and his children being present at the ghastly scene, which they surveyed from a ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... what May's drawing-room would look like. He knew that Mr. Welland, who was behaving "very handsomely," already had his eye on a newly built house in East Thirty-ninth Street. The neighbourhood was thought remote, and the house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger architects were beginning to employ as a protest against the brownstone of which the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate sauce; but the plumbing was perfect. Archer would have liked to travel, to put off the housing ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... mend, On the waist that's weary and worn. Stitch, stitch, stitch, Each tatter so jagged and torn. Collar and cuffs and sleeves, Cobble and darn and baste, Before they gape in a ghastly row, And shriek the dirge of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... advocate, ghastly pale, and yet leaning for support on the fatal balustrade. Alas! what a change! His countenance was grown haggard, and his white hair hung dishrevelled about his collapsed visage, like icicles round the pinched countenance ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... and the coral, down where earth's wonders are spread, Helmeted, ghastly, and swollen, Kanzo Makame lies dead: Joe Nagasaki, his 'tender', is owner and ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... imprisoned exercise in long, swift steps up and down the deck, ready for any sort of enterprise, bursting with energy and sea-air and spirits. So that at last the left-overs, those of the young men the lady of the rosy nails was less kind to, actually in their despair attempted ghastly flirtations with the two German ladies. They approached them with a kind of angry amorousness. They tucked them up roughly in rugs. They brought them cushions as though they were curses. And it was ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... executioner, receiving it in his hands, held it up, saying in a loud voice, 'This is the head of a traitor.' He then dropped it into the coffin, which being removed, another was brought forward, and they proceeded to cut down the next body and to go through the same ghastly operation. It was observed that the mob, which was very large, gazed in silence at the hanging of the conspirators, and showed not the least sympathy; but when each head as cut off and held up, a loud and deep groan of horror ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... couches to think how rain, wind, and smoke dwell with the blanketless peasant?—will ye not turn from the sumptuous board to look at those hard-won meals of black and slimy roots on which man, woman, and child feed year after year?—will ye never try to banish wringing hunger and ghastly disease from the home of such piety and love?—will ye not give back its dance to the village—its mountain play to boyhood—its serene hopes ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... to ice. All my hopes dashed to the ground. "Dig! Dig!" cried the bloodthirsty accuser, working himself with all his might. I looked at the rector. He was ghastly pale, staring with wide-open eyes at ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... face that terrified her; seating himself in a chair, he buried his face in his hands, and would neither look up nor speak; not until Ramona was near crying from his silence, did he utter a word. Then, looking at her with a ghastly face, he said in a hollow voice, "It has begun!" and buried his face again. Finally Ramona's tears wrung ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... gently from the stream and laid on the shingle just as the foot men arrived with torches. It was a sad spectacle, this fine old man we all loved and respected so much, only a few hours before full of life and health, now a ghastly corpse, his hair and long white beard lying dank over his cold white face and glaring eyes. The scene was rendered all the more weird and awful by the surroundings, the still dark night, the rushing water, and overhanging cliffs under the ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... out a system necessarily suggestive of violence and cruelty. There is nothing like the repulsiveness of the Hindoo burning, only half carried out, or even of Mr. Trelawney's furnace for burning poor Shelley. I do not remember to have lately read anything more ghastly and revolting than the entire account of Shelley's cremation. It says much for Mr. Trelawney's nerves, that he was able to look on at it; and it was no wonder that it turned Byron sick, and that Mr. Leigh Hunt ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... It was ghastly cold in the ruined church. It had been warm enough there during the day, but the fire that had gutted it had died like the young acolyte, like the aged sacristan, the venerable mother, the sweet young novice, the women who had sought shelter there in vain. Neither the dignity of age nor ...
— And Thus He Came • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... wonders are more gross and nearer to common life. Such is the story of the hauntings at Froda, in Eyrbyggja; the drowned man and his companions coming home night after night and sitting in their wet clothes till daybreak; such is the ghastly story of the funeral of Vga-Styrr in Heiarvga Saga. Things of that sort are no exceptions to common experience, according to the Icelandic judgment, and do not stand out from the history as something different in kind; they do not belong to the same order as ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... forgot to tie the horse, and it wandered off in search of herbage. He called, but the beast made no sign of returning. Alone again. Alone in the night; spectral forms about him; the sleeping man adding to the ghostliness of the scene by his incoherent mutterings, his hideous, gulping breath, his ghastly, blood-curdling outcries. Then through the gloom the shining outlines of the white oak, like shreds of shrouds hung on funeral foliage. Ah! he would go mad—he must break the brutish sleep of ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... not. You made a ghastly mistake, but it's no more shame to you than it is to him. Besides, you ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... teeth and rolled their blood-shot eyes; With feeble groans they drew each painful breath, And racked with torments called aloud for death! Far o'er the field in wild confusion rose Piles of the ghastly dead—of friends and foes— In death stretched side by side, mangled and cold While over all the sulphurous war-clouds rolled, In dark, dense columns mounted up on high, Tainting the air, polluting ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... "get properly going" with the brumbies, two travellers rode into the homestead, supporting between them a third rider, a man picked up off the track delirious with fever, and foodless; and at the sight of his ghastly face our hearts stood still with fear. But the man was one of the Scots another Mac of the race that loves a good fight, and his plucky heart stood by him so well that within twenty-four hours he was Iying contentedly ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Now, when you've taken toll of every dish, Have mingled roast with boiled and fowl with fish, The mass of dainties, turbulent and crude, Engenders bile, and stirs intestine feud. Observe your guests, how ghastly pale their looks When they've discussed some mystery of your cook's: Ay, and the body, clogged with the excess Of yesterday, drags down the mind no less, And fastens to the ground in living death That fiery particle of heaven's ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... less felicitous sample of the kind as it stands, none which has received greater vituperation for dulness and commonplace, than Sir Amadas. Yet who could much better the two simple lines, when the hero is holding revel after his ghastly meeting with the unburied corse in the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... pleased to hear that the Bolsheviks were not likely to return. These workmen looked upon the Bolshevik rule as on some horrible nightmare. They cared for little else so long as you could assure them on this point. So ghastly was the dream from which they had awakened compared with the flowery promises held out to them that I readily believe "Ivan the Terrible" would have been received at that moment as a saviour. This was a dangerous ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... received no answer. She had a mind to retreat rather than face the anger of Miss Loach. But remembering that the bell had rung, she opened the door, determined to explain. Miss Loach was seated in her usual chair, but leaning back with a ghastly face. The glare of the electric lamp fixed in the ceiling, shone full on her white countenance, and also on something else. The bosom of her purple gown was disarranged, and the lace which adorned it was stained with blood. ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... had been near three part wasted, Full half the meeting more like spectres seem'd Than of this world. The clamour then grew great; Whilst ev'ry torturing passion of the foul Glar'd in the ghastly visages of several. Some grinn'd in rage, some tore their hair, whilst others, Upon their knees, with hands and eyes uplifted, In curses dar'd assail all-ruling Providence Under the varied names of Fate and Fortune. Nor is there one in ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... scene which presented itself was shocking beyond belief,—frightful and ghastly wounds from shells and cannon-shot were seen on all sides, every imaginable species of suffering that man is capable of was presented to view; while amidst the dead and dying, operations the most painful were proceeding with a haste and bustle that plainly showed how many more waited their turn ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... and bobbed about on the door of the pantry. Mary generally slept through prayers, while for Willie it was a time of nervous dread. The room was so dark, and his uncle's voice so strange and rolling, the little fellow feared to kneel down and turn his back to the long table with its ghastly white cloth; his imagination pictured fearful things stealing upon him from the mysterious space beneath it, and his heart beat so he could scarcely hear the words of the prayer. But Mr. Denner enjoyed it. Not, however, because prayer was the expression of his soul; family prayer was merely ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... heap of skulls and fibrous dust. There is no other decay in that atmosphere; and there they remain during the short days and the long nights, the only human company out of doors, withering away by grains, and holding ghastly possession of the mountain ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... when Raynal, after taking leave, went to the stable for his horse. At the stable-door he came upon a man sitting doubled up on the very stones of the yard, with his head on his knees. The figure lifted his head, and showed him the face of Edouard Riviere, white and ghastly: his hair lank with the mist, his teeth chattering with cold and misery. The poor wretch had walked frantically all night round and round the chateau, waiting till Raynal should come out. ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... cast his eyes on the governess as he spoke; the injunction concerned her as much as it did Mr. Carlyle. And the doctor started, for he thought she was fainting; her face had become so ghastly white; he could see ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... boy," replied the other, unabashed. "I'm doing the choosing, myself, and I choose you. Your idea was palpably based on separating my barnacled connection from some of the ghastly pile of glittering gold that he has taken, five cents at a time, from the widows, orphans, blind, halt, and lame who patronize his trolley lines. Elucidate forthwith, Benny—in the vernacular, unbelt. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... was working convulsively. After a time slow, big tears gathered in her eyes. Her complexion changed from its usual dull ugliness to a vivid red; it then went white, so ghastly white that the girl might have been going to faint. All this took place in less than a minute. At the end of that time Maggie was her old disdainful, ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... drew back to where, trembling and ghastly-looking, Mike was watching him, and now whispered, with ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... converged from every point to this, exploding powder burned the faces of these contending hosts, who, hand to hand, fought each other to death, while far-away widows and orphans multiplied to mourn through the coming years over this ghastly folly ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... Staines. There we got in a fresh team, galloped all the way to Houndslow. Laura brought her sister. Kitty was with us. Made us die with a story she told us of a fellow she was spoony on. Had to put him under the bed.... Ghastly joke, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... weight of his armor, and the extreme violence of the exertion which he had made. His friends raised him up again, and proceeded to unbuckle and take off his armor. Relieved from this burden, he began to come to himself. He opened his eyes and looked around, staring with a wild, bewildered, and ghastly look, which moved the pity of all the beholders, that is, of all but Anneslie. He, on leaving the king, came to where poor Katrington was sitting, and, full of rage and hate, began to taunt and revile ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... presentments, varying them according to her humour,—now showing the Lord Francis in his panoply as a man of war, now in a court habit, now in an embroidered night-gown and Turkish cap, now leaning on the shoulder of her brother, the Captain, deceased. And anon she would make a ghastly image of him lying all along in the courtyard at Hampton Court, with the purple bullet-marks on his white forehead, and a great crimson stain on his bosom, just below his bands. This was the one she most loved to look upon, although her father sorely pressed her ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... word," said Professor Gray, as he stood on the balcony the following morning, and looked out over the white and ghastly picture of desolation, "I thought Labrador the most inappropriately named country upon the earth, but think of calling this picture of all that is ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... not allow him to know anything but Latin grammar, "and that," says he, "I know as well as he does." I never heard Johnson say anything severe of him, though when he mentioned his name, he generally "grinned horribly a ghastly smile,"' ['Grinned horrible,' &c. Paradise Lost, ii. 846.] Forbes's Beattie, p. 333. The use of the abbreviation Monny on Johnson's part scarcely seems a proof of kindliness. See ante, i. 453, where he said:—'Why, Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull,' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... Autolycus cured Ulysses, who had been injured while hunting the wild boar, by stanching the blood flowing from a wound in his leg, by means of a verbal charm. "With nicest care the skilful artists bound the brave, divine Ulysses' ghastly wound; and th' incantations stanch'd the gushing blood."[108:1] We have also the testimony of the Grecian lexicographer, Suidas, that various maladies were cured by the repetition of certain words, in the time ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... head. The woman breathed an invocation to the Deity and sank back against the wall, her face ghastly beneath ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... burdens are heavy, our natures weak, Some pastime devoid of harm May we look for? "Puritan elder, speak!" "Yea, friend, peradventure thou mayest seek Recreation singing a psalm." If I did, your visage so grim and stern Would relax in a ghastly smile, For of music I never one note could learn, And my feeble minstrelsy would turn Your chant to ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... over his forehead, and tried to think, but it was of no use. Everything was vague, broken, crushed, and shapeless. Faces seemed to rise to his disturbed sight, and he wondered whether he had ever known these people; a ghastly weariness as of death was upon him, and his arms fell heavily by his sides. He groaned aloud, and if in that bitter sigh he could have breathed away his existence he would ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... day Baruch Mendoza was more pallid than his robe; his eyes looked like twin stars, they so glittered, and the fire in them was hardly of this earth. His cheek-bones started through the skin; beard and hair hung in damp masses about the ghastly face and head; his lips were parted in a contemptuous grin, and there was a strained, listening look on the countenance: he was listening for the key that was slaying him, and he saw it now, saw it in the flesh, a creeping, crawling, shapeless thing that slowly strangled his life. All his soul had ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... cliffs, where the "cruel, hungry foam" is dashing among the rocks, the seaward view is grand and awful. In Turtle Bay, as we casually learned, the dead bodies of those shipwrecked farther up the coast generally come ashore, and a ghastly kind of interest attaches to the place. For miles along the shore the same sad tale is being continually told: it is the solemn burden of the sea's loud wail. We heard it at Fire Island; walking along ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... eternal home, Child of its narrow house!—how late the bloom, The facile smile, the soft eye's crystal light, Each grace of Youth's gay morn, that charms our sight, Play'd o'er that Form!—now sunk in Death's cold gloom, Insensate! ghastly!—for the yawning tomb, Alas! fit Inmate.—Thus we mourn the blight Of Virgin-Beauty, and endowments rare In their glad hours of promise.—O! when Age Drops, like the o'er-blown, faded rose, tho' ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... eyes again from his ghastly face to the river, the current had done its work, and the body had been swept away into midstream and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight, turning over and over on the waves like ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... the orator was greeted with three times, three cheers, throughout the ship, which reached even to the shores. The oratory of the boatswain seemed to electrify the officers and men set over us. The master and the surgeon appeared really pleased; even Osmer, our jailor, "grinn'd horribly a ghastly smile." ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... young officer gazed as though stricken with sudden horror, his blue eyes staring, his gaunt, pinched features ghastly white, and then Sergeant Haney and another trooper sprang from their horses and ran to his side. Weak, worn, starved, he had quailed at the dreadful sight, and was toppling head-foremost to the ground, ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... overwhelmed. The only thought that now ran through his addled brain was that he simply had to do something. He couldn't stand there forever, like a fool, waving a pistol. In a minute or two they would all be laughing at him. It was ghastly. The wave of self-pity, of self-commiseration submerged him completely. Why, oh why, had he got himself into this dreadful pickle? He had merely come to talk it over with Nellie, that and nothing more. And now, see what ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... These ghastly souvenirs were the bounty warrants of a band whose deeds have been already chronicled by this same pen. They were the trophies of "Scalp Hunters"—vouchers for the number ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... River. That's where she's bound for, if she don't stop before she gets there Guess there ain't many of 'em inquired where she was goin', or cared much," he added, with a ghastly effort to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to the casual observer that no further proceedings were to be taken in the matter. The god's face wore its usually placid look, unmoved by the shifting panorama of human life which ebbed and flowed in front of him from morning till night. The ghastly-looking policemen, with their grinning visages and ferocious scowls and contorted bodies, remained in the same unchanging ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... history of England, from its earliest times, there is no such black and ghastly page as that of the sack of Drogheda. Even supposing Cromwell's assertion that he wished only to terrify the Irish rebels to be true, no shadow of an excuse can be pleaded for the massacre of the women and children, or for that of the English ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... his name, but some swift intuitive warning restrained the utterance. Suddenly a new horror, a ghastly possibility, thrust itself for the first time before her, and she felt as though some hand of ice ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... with the ecstatic breath of those innumerable censers. C'est vrai que de toutes ces choses il a pense beaucoup—mais! The Duc De L'Omelette is terror-stricken; for, through the lurid vista which a single uncurtained window is affording, lo! gleams the most ghastly ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... batch of letters on my birthday that year. "Dear, sweet Miss Terry, etc., etc. Will you give me a piano?"!! etc., etc. Another: "Dear Ellen. Come to Jesus. Mary." Another, a lovely letter of thanks from a poor woman in the most ghastly distress, and lastly an offer of a two years' engagement in America. There was a simple coming in for one woman acting at ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... conscious of their size and colour as he sat at his desk and waited for word to come to "the office." A sudden and almost insupportable itching of his heels filled him with fresh alarm, and for one ghastly moment he forgot his ears and his crime. Were his heels frost-bitten? If so—then, what was to ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... to thousands, of whom each And one and all a ghastly gap did make In his own kind and kindred, whom to teach Forgetfulness were mercy for their sake; The Archangel's trump, not glory's, must awake Those whom they ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... still continued, and so at last George purchased a medical book, dealing with the subject of the disease. Then, indeed, he opened up a chamber of horrors; he made up his mind an abiding place of ghastly images. In the book there were pictures of things so awful that he turned white, and trembled like a leaf, and had to close the volume and hide it in the bottom of his trunk. But he could not banish the pictures from his mind. Worst of all, he could not forget the description of the ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... found? Could evil have befallen them? God help him if a hair of those innocent heads had been touched. In his weakness he could not always control the horrible imaginations that beset him. Often he would wake from some ghastly dream and lie till dawn, unable to shake off his deadly terror. Then all of a sudden he would remember that hasty postscript, "Do not be anxious about me. I am going to some kind people who will be good to me and the boy;" and he would fall asleep again while vainly trying to recall if he had ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... He was arrested and sent to the guillotine, with a large number of his confederates. The people greeted the fall of the tyrant's head with demonstrations of unbounded joy. The delirium was over. "France had awakened from the ghastly dream of the Reign of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... There was not a line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines. Each stood apart in its own lot. Each opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it were a billiard-board indeed, and these only models that had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... horror of such a death, betraying the crime without repenting of it, passing to the other world with imprecations on the lips, and hatred in the glare of the eye, all the frightfulness enhanced by the familiarity of the allusions, and the ghastly association of the tones that had tempted and tyrannized over his childhood, altogether crushed and annihilated ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... enter into these tales. Many of them are untrue; war is a grim, ghastly business at best, and I am not going to say that all that has been said in the way of tales of outrage is true. I will go beyond that, and say that if you turn two millions of men forced, conscripted, and compelled ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... ravine went the foot-track which Johnson followed. Darkness had now gathered all around, yet here and there were wild lights struggling with the gloom. Just on the right, where the path came out on to the dusty road, and a little way down a bank, a row of blazing coke-ovens threw a ghastly glare over the scene, casting fantastic shadows as their waves of fiery vapour flickered in the breeze. A little farther on he passed a busy forge, from whose blinding light and wild uproarious mirth, mingling with the banging of the hammers, he was glad to ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... even shake to his stoutest kick. Breathless and panting, he desisted. I then tried the door myself, equally in vain. As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror came over me; but this time it was more cold and stubborn. I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... on the dreadful morn of execution, drawn in a cart (attended by the sheriff's officers on horseback, with his coffin behind him) through the public streets to Tyburn, there to receive the just reward of his crimes,—a shameful ignominious death. The ghastly appearance of his face, and the horror painted on his countenance, plainly show the dreadful situation of his mind; which we must imagine to be agitated with shame, remorse, confusion, and terror. The careless ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... were dearest to them were descending into everlasting fire, must have often experienced pangs compared with which the torments of the martyr were insignificant. The confident assertions of the Methodist preacher and the ghastly images he continually evoked poisoned their imaginations, haunted them in every hour of weakness or depression, discolored all their judgments of the world, and added a tenfold horror to the darkness of the grave. Sufferings of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... lady's pale face changed to scarlet, and then to ghastly green. In a whisper, rising to a scream, she exclaimed, "Good heavens! you do not mean to that man's house" (meaning me). "Indeed, I cannot go to him, on any account; he is a most horrid man, I am told, and charges ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... prominent citizens of the town, they broke into the jail and hanged Fowler. The point in the hanging which especially tickled my friend's fancy, as he lingered over the reminiscence, was one that was rather too ghastly to appeal to our own sense of humor. In the Turk's mind there still rankled the memory of Fowler's very unprofessional conduct while figuring before him as a criminal. Said Simpson, with a merry twinkle of the eye: "Do you know that Turk, he was a right funny fellow too after all. Just ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... and showing his long, yellow teeth. Sary fled at once and barred the door behind her; but neither she nor Scott ever saw their "gift horse" again. For aught I know he still roams the Adirondack forest, and maybe personates the ghostly and ghastly white deer of song and legend. Who can tell? But he was lifted off Scott Peck's shoulders, and all Scott said by way of epitaph on the departed, when he came home to find his white steed ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... I had brutally struck him; I shall never forget the long, slow, almost ghastly look of pain, with ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... in the forward stokehole. Water was pouring in from the starboard side—was welling up through the floor plates. The wound was ghastly, fatal! The smouldering in the bunker had weakened resistance there and her necrosed ribs had given away. The Red Un, scurrying through the tunnel, was met by a maddened rush of trimmers and stokers. He went down under them and came up ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... scenes in Germany, to come into close contact with the Hun as he really is, when he has been stripped of the mask and veneer which he assumes for parade and to impress his visitors, that the hollowness of the Teuton pretensions is laid bare in all its ghastly nakedness. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... "looking ghastly," said the ladies along that somber line of quarters, and something really ought to be done. Just what that something should be no two could unite in deciding, but really Major Plume or Dr. Graham ought to see that, if something wasn't done, she would ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn; ghastly mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's children. They were only diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine of trench warfare by which our men strengthened the mud walls of their School of Courage, so that the new boys already coming out ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... that you never think to look and see who is on your right or left, or whose spirit is winging its flight from the body over which you are walking. The soldier does not seem to feel pangs of sorrow when arms clash the loudest; he does not see danger and suffering and ghastly sights until all is over and quiet restored. Those who are unacquainted with the mental condition of the soldier in time of battle, wonder and ask why it is that those whom he knows so intimately are wounded and many times killed by his side without knowing ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... it over. When she gave it back her glance was fixed far away over the miraculous river that ran with mimic waterfalls through the gardens, and she was ghastly pale. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various |
