"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the place, though earth Has many such; and wandering there alone, One Autumn evening when the moon rose late, I heard this song, though none was there to sing. A ghostly rune, yet left the alarmed dark Quivering with life, ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... across the moon-misted sea came a procession of ghostly sails. Every ship seemed to bear troops of white-robed maidens and, as they floated past, they gaily waved their hands to me, calling for comradeship and understanding, a wide-open ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... from the ship. As it was, with the outfly of the hurricane that weird, unnatural, ruddy light of which I have spoken almost immediately died out from the sky, leaving the night as pitch-dark as before, save for the ghostly gleam of phosphorescent light which arose from the storm-swept ocean, and which gave the water, as far as it could be seen, the appearance as if moonlight were ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... devil!" he called out. And then a figure appeared miraculously in the alcove, where one candle still burned, shedding a ghostly beam of light from a ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... sold ourselves bag and baggage for about thirty cents. It is a gray-shingled hotel trimmed with white, and battalions of rocking-chairs, mobilized in soldierly ranks, were all left rocking wildly at the top of their voices, their occupants had sprung up so suddenly. It did give a ghostly effect, as if the spirits of vanished guests had seized the chairs and begun visibly to use them the instant their rivals ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... cerebral column stiffens as, from day to day, he meets members of the bar, who congratulate him upon his advent, and feels his importance as he waits from day to day for the visit of his first client, but collapses when he arrives and with ghostly dread salutes him and prepares to listen with a disturbed sense of an awful responsibility he is about to undertake. For, side by side with his client's statements there seem to appear in stately majesty all the adjuncts of the law: First, the inquisitive glance ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... this pallid floor, The sparkling waves curl up the shore, The August moon is flushed and full; The soft, low winds, the liquid lull, The whited, silent, misty realm, The wan-blue heaven, each ghostly elm, All these, her ministers, conspire To fill my bosom with the fire And sweet delirium of desire. Enchantress! leave thy sheeny height, Descend, be all mine own this night, Transfuse, enfold, entrance me quite! Or break thy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... half-a-dozen old Admirals of ninety and upwards met and dined together! I don't know what I would not have given to have been present at that most ghostly banquet! How like a dream, a shadow, a bubble, a passing vapour, and all the rest of it, must life not have seemed to these ex-midshipmen of the Victory and the Temeraire! muffling their poor old throats against this sudden frost, and toddling to table, ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... brows, He sat in a bleak chamber of the Hall, His fingers toying with his poniard's point Abstractedly. Three times the ancient clock, Bolt-upright like a mummy in its case, Doled out the hour: at length the round red moon, Rising above the ghostly poplar-tops, Looked in on Regnald nursing his dark thought, Looked in on the stiff portraits on the wall, And dead Sir Egbert's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... of Julius, seems to him Formed from the moonlight of a misty sky: The birds of night, affrighted, flutter by, And a wild sound upon the shuddering air Creeps as if earth were breathing out a sigh, And the fast-waning lamp, as if aware Some awful shade was nigh, emits a ghostly glare. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... doted on one woman, whom he married, and who lived to deplore his death (as she believed) by poison. Guido was specially characterized by devotion to Madonna. He was a singular child. On every Christmas eve, for seven successive years, ghostly knockings were heard upon his chamber door; and, every night, when he awoke from sleep, the darkness above his bed was illuminated by a mysterious egg-shaped globe of light.[223] His eccentricity in later life amounted to insanity, and at last he gave himself ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Did a child stray off for an hour, the mother shivered with the apprehension that Jean Poquelin had offered him to strange gods. The house was the subject of every bad boy's invention who loved to contrive ghostly lies. "As long as that house stands we shall have bad luck. Do you not see our pease and beans dying, our cabbages and lettuce going to seed and our gardens turning to dust, while every day you can see it raining in the woods? The rain ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... A ghostly gray haze of light filtered downward through the water from the hole. Ken counted twelve figures making their way to it. As he wondered about the rest of the crew, he saw three bulging, swaying shapes suddenly emerge from the split in the top of the Peary, and begin an easy rise ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... Rustician of Pisa as a person belonging to the same ghostly company as his own Cleishbothams and Dryasdusts. But in this we see ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... tent, and covered her head up in the bed-clothes; but in about ten minutes she came back, feeling a little ashamed of her timidity, and sat down by Gypsy before the fire. It was a strange picture—the ghostly white tents and tangled brushwood gilded with the light; the great forest stretching away darkly beyond; the fitful shadows and glares from the flickering fire that chased each other in strange, uncouth shapes, among the leaves, and the two children ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... few feet away, regarding him breathlessly, hatted, gloved, all in white, one hand resting lightly on the center-table, one folded about the crook of a dainty draggled parasol. The match threw a small and ghostly light, but he saw her, and ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... grown white—who has not disinterred mementos like these—from which the past smiles at you so sadly, shimmering out of Hades an instant but to sink back again into the cold shades, perhaps with a faint, faint sound as of a remembered tone—a ghostly echo of a once familiar laughter? I was looking of late at a wall in the Naples Museum, whereon a boy of Herculaneum eighteen hundred years ago had scratched with a nail the figure of a soldier. I ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was right in maintaining that Mozart's operas contain his best music. Where among all his purely instrumental works is anything to be found as inspired as the music in the scenes where the ghostly statue nods at Don Juan, and subsequently where it enters his room and clutches his hand in its marble grasp? I venture to add that even Beethoven, although he is not generally regarded as an operatic composer par excellence, and ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... the night sky. The northern night had set in to the fantastic measure of the ghostly dance of the polar spirits. The air was still, and the temperature had fallen headlong. The pitiless cold was searching all the warm life left vulnerable to its attack. The shadowed eyes of night looked down upon the world through a gray twilight ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... we get after seeing a stirring drama. What has just interested us is not so much what we have been told about others as the glimpse we have caught of ourselves—a whole host of ghostly feelings, emotions and events that would fain have come into real existence, but, fortunately for us, did not. It also seems as if an appeal had been made within us to certain ancestral memories belonging to a far-away past—memories so deep-seated ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... the hind axle, and these lights could be seen far ahead on the road, as if a party of fireflies had started in single file on an excursion. The trees by the side of the road stood out weird and ghostly looking in the darkness, and the rumble of the carts ahead and behind formed a musical accompaniment to the picture ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... It appeared ghostly in the dark, the big steel girders taking on weird and fantastic shapes. A train rushed across its span, roaring and throwing a shower of sparks ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... off the earth as much as Goldsmith or Horace. The times in which he lived, and in which very many of us lived and were young, are changing or changed. I saw Hood once as a young man, at a dinner which seems almost as ghostly now as that masquerade at the Pantheon (1772), of which we were speaking anon. It was at a dinner of the Literary Fund, in that vast apartment which is hung round with the portraits of very large Royal Freemasons, now unsubstantial ghosts. There at the end of the room was Hood. ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... carried by human bearers, pass down the middle of the street, at an hour past midnight; the removal of a body from a house where it had died, she supposed, to another whence it was to be buried. This coffin and the ghostly one she took to be ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... swiftly into a gurgle, and the shadow of a man's torso, monstrous beneath a huge inverted bottle, wavered and danced on the frown of the cliff at our backs. Palitlum released his lips from the glass with a caressing suck and glanced regretfully up into the ghostly vault of the sky where played the wan white light of the ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... the trilling band, but slumbrous waits The tardy god of day. Ah! sluggard, wake! Open thy blind, and rub thy heavy eyes! For once behold a sunrise. Is there aught In thy dream-world more splendid, or more fair? With crimson glory the horizon streams, And ghostly Dian hides her face ashamed. Now to the ear of him who lingers long On downy couch, "falsely luxurious," Comes the unwelcome din of college-bell Fast tolling. . . . . . "'T is but the earliest, the warning peal!" He sleeps again. Happy if bustling chum, Footsteps ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... three ragged children, nestling about him. An homeless outcast, necessity forces him to send them out to prey upon the community by day, and to seek in this wretched hovel a shelter at night. Yonder the rags are thrown back, a moving mass is disclosed, and there protrudes a disfigured face, made ghostly by the shadow of the detective's lantern. At the detective's feet a prostrate girl, insensible of gin, is seized with convulsions, clutches with wasted hands at the few rags about her poor, flabby body, then with fingers grasping, and teeth firmly set, her whole frame writhes ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... comrade, in a sort of droll assurance that it could be no voice from the grave, no ghostly inhabitant of a cave, who could require to have such a matter explained. He then condescendingly told her that when the eggs of the eider-duck are taken she lays more; and this twice over, before giving up in despair. Of course, this ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... lesser elevation and the open waters of the Gulf. The watery floor of Toba Inlet lay hushed between, silvered by a moon-path, shimmering under the same pale rays that struck bluish-white reflections from a glacier high on the northern side. It was ghostly still at the mouth of the valley whence the Toba River stole down to salt water, with somber forests lining the beach and clinging darkly on the steep slopes. A lone light peeped from the window ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... slowly walk and grave; By rocks that swarm with ghostly legions, Where Anthony saw surging on the waves The purple breasts ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... the church This Ghost would search, And whenever it would see The passers-by Take wings and fly It would laugh in ghostly glee, Hee, hee!—it would laugh in ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... did not understand; she thought she was again on board the Aroostook, and that the lights she saw were the lights of the shipping in Boston harbor. The illusion passed, and left her heart sore. She issued from the glare of the station upon the quay before it, bewildered by the ghostly beauty of the scene, but shivering in the chill of the dawn, and stunned by the clamor of the gondoliers. A tortuous course in the shadow of lofty walls, more deeply darkened from time to time by the arch of a bridge, and again suddenly pierced by the brilliance of ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... in his pony trap and pulled up opposite the statue. He called to Father McCormack, who had satisfied himself about Mary Ellen's appearance, and was prowling round the statue, making mild jokes about its ghostly appearance. Doyle detected a note of urgency in the Major's voice, and hurried across the square, reaching the pony trap ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... stands confest— A very Niobe—sad, hapless name! In figure, features, and in all the same: The same in all as Vengeance fierce pursued Far to a wild and cheerless solitude. For Salmo's bard has sung (by Heaven's decrees) In awful pomp she mounted on the breeze— Borne by the buoyant wind—a ghostly form— She sail'd along the region ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... distinguished by scholarship, he is only one in a numerous company of high-minded men who live devout and disinterested lives. But no man conveys, both in his writings and in personal touch, a more telling sense of ghostly earnestness, a feeling that his whole life is absorbed into a Power which overshadows his presence and even sounds in his voice, a conviction that he has in sober truth forsaken everything for the Kingdom ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... honoured with a Christian name, Buy what is woman born, and feel no shame? Trade in the blood of innocence, and plead Experience as a warrant for the deed? So may the wolf whom famine has made bold, To quit the forest and invade the fold: So may the ruffian, who, with ghostly glide, Dagger in hand, steals close to your bedside; Not he, but his emergence forced the door— He found it inconvenient to be poor. Has God then given its sweetness to the cane— Unless his laws be trampled on—in vain? ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... eyes as the ghostly procession drew near. The song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil the rich illusion ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... witchery that has made "blue skies bluer and green things greener," for us all. There was the early rising in the dewy mornings when the river-valley was filled with silvery mist, through which the trees loomed gray and ghostly; there was the quivering heat of noonday, that played strange tricks on the southern horizon, when even the staid old Tiger Hills seemed to pulsate with the joy of summer; and, then the evenings, when the day's work was done, and the ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... with His grace they are not assisted, but permitted, and that grievously, to transgress. Ask the very soul of Peter, and it shall undoubtedly make you itself this answer: My eager protestations, made in the glory of my ghostly strength, I am ashamed of; but those crystal tears, wherewith my sin and weakness were bewailed, have procured my endless joy: my strength hath been my ruin, and my fall my stay." And our own Samuel Rutherford is not likely to be left far behind by the best of them when the ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... thinking that it would not be seemly in the ghost of Hamlet's father to rush on to the stage before his time. But King Richard paid no attention to this call, if indeed he heard it, and, after waiting some moments, Ben, with his ghostly covering still flung over his arm, was obliged to go to the assistance of the two warriors, thereby causing a fresh burst of applause. He rolled Dickey over and over until Paul could drag him off by the shoulders, and then pulling Johnny out by the feet, he aided him in repairing the damages done ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... stomach. Sitting in his underthings on the edge of the bed, he held the wine-coloured creature in the crook of his arm for a long time, the look in his round eyes, half eagerness, half pain, of one pursuing the shadow of some ghostly and elusive memory. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... the man was almost winded, and his breath was coming in quick gasps, a faint, far-off cry floated down to him through the ghostly aisles of the naked wind-swept forest. At first it was so faint as to be almost unintelligible, but as they pressed on, it grew louder and clearer, until the man recognized the pitiful ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... from the hill-top to which we have removed, we notice more how the appearance of the mountains changes with the changes of the sky. This morning they were all rose-color; and are now so ghostly, the snow like shrouds about them. Before, we had only single chains and solitary peaks; here, we look into the bosom of a mountainous country, and every change in the light reveals something new. Where ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... in his room, but the street light glowed through the windows. Once again the waving fronds of the ailanthus tree flung ghostly shadows on the walls. There was a faint sweet odor of blossoms, so soon to become rank ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Raynal's, and wits as quick as Riviere's, would have fled then and there to the nearest public, and told over cups how they had heard the dames of Beaurepaire, long since dead, holding their revel, and the conscious old devil's nest of a chateau quivering to the ghostly strains. ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... And on this ghostly sigh, on this breath, with the feeble click of beads in the nun's hands, a silence fell upon the room, vast as the stillness of a world of unknown faiths, loves, beliefs, of silent illusions, of unexpressed passions and secret motives that ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... a sigh of thankfulness, and watched it grow. It spread rapidly. The walls of the ravine showed ghostly grey, then faintly pink. Through the dimness the boulders scattered about the stream stood up like mediaeval monsters, and for a few panic-stricken seconds Muriel took the twining roots of a rhododendron close at hand for the coils of a gigantic snake. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... things divine, so Abt Vogler interprets music on the other side—that of immediate inspiration, to which the constructive element—real though slight—is subordinate. In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires. Never were a ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life more actually than by Browning's verse. They climb and crowd, they mount and march, and then pass away; but the musician's spirit is borne onward by the wind of his own mood, and it cannot stay ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... how he had found a megaphone in the little "lumber loft" of the cook shack, and how, with this, he had improvised the ghostly sounds. He had also found in that loft the snowshoes on which he had ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... hear the water hiss—if you had imagination enough. Once having touched the water, the sun went down behind it, as swiftly as a man in a hurry going down a ladder. As he vanished a ghostly and golden twilight spread over the sea, a light exquisite but immensely forlorn. Then the sea became a violet shadow, the west darkened as if to a closing door, and the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... English outpost at the Point of Orleans; and, about eleven o'clock, the sentries descried through the gloom the ghostly outlines of the approaching ships. As they gazed, these mysterious strangers began to dart tongues of flame; fire ran like lightning up their masts and sails, and then they burst out like volcanoes. Filled as they were with pitch, tar, and every manner of combustible, mixed with fireworks, bombs, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... pointed to the stream, down which the punt was slowly drifting. The moon had gone behind a cloud, and Francis' figure, as he stood there, was undefined and ghostly. A thought seemed to flash into ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... just sufficient light struggling through the clouds to make Panley Common visible as a black expanse, against the lightest tone of which a piece of ebony would have appeared pale. Not a human being was stirring within a mile of Moncrief House, the chimneys of which, ghostly white on the side next the moon, threw long shadows on the silver-gray slates. The stillness had just been broken by the stroke of a quarter past twelve from a distant church tower, when, from the obscurity of one of these chimney shadows, ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... a week I have fulfilled my accursed doom! I have duly committed a crime a day! Not a great crime, I trust, but still, in the eyes of one as strictly regulated as I used to be, a crime. But will my ghostly ancestors be satisfied with what I have done, or will they regard it as an unworthy subterfuge? (Addressing Pictures.) Oh, my forefathers, wallowers in blood, there came at last a day when, sick ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... skylight. Next, it was hideously empty; a pine table and two hard-backed chairs, set face to face at each end of it, being the only articles in the room. Lastly, it was surrounded by several closed doors with blurred and ghostly ventilators over their tops which, being round, looked like the blank eyes of a row of staring mummies. Altogether it was a lugubrious spot, and in the present state of my mind made me feel as if something ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... or sound, they suddenly discovered their craft to be surrounded by moving shadows. These were canoes headed across the stream, and instantly Donald turned his craft in the same direction, as though it belonged to the ghostly fleet. It was a terrible situation, and one in which the slightest mistake would prove fatal. Donald noticed Bullen's start on the discovery of their danger, and blessed him for the coolness with which he continued the noiseless dip of his paddle. His hope was to ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... him—he was just about, I say, to show to the Count the folly and danger of renewing an old liaison with a woman such as he had described Mrs. Cat to be, when his Excellency, starting up, and interrupting his ghostly adviser at the very beginning of his sentence, said, "Egad, l'Abbe, you are right—it IS my son, and a mighty smart-looking creature with him. Hey! Mr. What's-your-name—Tom, you rogue, don't you know your own father?" And so saying, and cocking his beaver ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... day; great black lurid thunderclouds lay piled along the horizon, and came up slowly and awfully against the wind. I looked upon them with terror; they seemed so near the earth, and so like living, watching things. They hung out of the sky, extending long ghostly arms downwards, and their gloom and density seemed supernatural. The soldiers took us out, our hands bound behind us, into a quadrangle at the back of their barracks. The scene is sharply impressed on my mind. A palisade of two sides of a square, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... face; when questioned he shivered but gave no answers. He hurriedly took his departure and, from stray bits of paper in the fire-grate in his room, it was surmised he had burnt his copious notes about the keep, no doubt being terrified by some ghostly ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The faded pageantry of Ratisbone and Frankfurt was all that remained of the glories of the realm of Charlemagne: the medley of States which owned him as elected lord cared not for the decrees of this ghostly realm; and Goethe might well place in the mouth of his jovial toper, in the cellar ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... sharp gust, rattling the insecure windows and sighing forlornly about the corners of the house. The door unlatched itself, swung inward hesitatingly, and hung wavering for a moment on its sagging hinges. A formless cloud of gray fog blew into the warm, steamy room. But whatever ghostly visitant had paused upon the threshold, he had evidently decided not to enter, for the catch snapped shut with a quick, passionate vigor. The echo of the slamming door rang eerily through ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... up to those tremendous buildings feeling like pygmies, sort of awe-struck, and talking in whispers. I tell you, it was ghostly walking down that dead and deserted street, and every time we passed through a shadow, we shivered, and not just because shadows are cold on Mars. We felt like intruders, as if the great race that had built ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... his head from the letters which lay before him; and, seeing a dusky figure standing between two whole-length portraits of his ancestors, he almost began to imagine that some one of the house of Walladmor had returned from the grave to give him ghostly admonition. ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... dirty bagging, mingled with commonplace figures in Western dress. But huddled in elbow-high with this busy town of modern France (which might have been Marseilles or Bordeaux) was something alien, something remote in spirit; a ghostly band of white buildings, silent and pale in the midst of colour and noise. Low houses with flat roofs or miniature domes, small, secret doorways, tiny windows like eyes narrowed for spying, and overhanging upper ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... such in his doctrinal teaching on the dogma of the Real Presence. It must be remembered that to contemporary England Wycliff's fame came from two of his opinions, viz. his denial of a real objective Presence in the Mass (for Christ was there only by "ghostly wit"), and his advice to King and Parliament to confiscate Church lands. But whenever Ball or anyone else is accused of being a follower of Wycliff, nothing else is probably referred to than the professor's well-known ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... All desert, but he feels it not! Ah! soon alive, to miss and mourn The form beyond the ocean borne Shall start the lonely king! And thought shall fill the lost one's room, And darkly through the palace gloom Shall stalk a ghostly thing. [26] Her statues meet, as round they rise, The leaden stare of lifeless eyes. Where is their ancient beauty gone?— Why loathe his looks the breathing stone? Alas! the foulness of disgrace Hath swept the Venus from her face! And visions in the mournful night Shall dupe the heart to false ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Morton. You entered with such a ghostly tread, that I scarcely heard you," said Mr. Stevens, with a start; "what has procured me the honour of a visit ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... something stirred - Something that had not seen or heard - And two drew near to the window-pane, Kissed in the moonlight and kissed again, And looked, through my face, to the moon-shroud, spread Over the garlanded garden bed; And—"How ghostly ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... though treading solid ground. When the voyagers caught sight of Him as He approached the ship in the faint light of the near-spent night, they were overcome by superstitious fears, and cried out in terror, thinking that they saw a ghostly apparition. "But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... mid-wife en croupe. Daring the short space of his absence, the Tweed, which they must necessarily ford, rose to a dangerous height. Brownie, who transported his charge with all the rapidity of the ghostly lover of Lenore, was not to be stopped by this obstacle. He plunged in with the terrified old lady, and landed her in safety where her services were wanted. Having put the horse into the stable (where it was afterwards found in a woeful plight), ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... there that he of a thousand eyes and great fame won (ascetic) success by performing sacrifices. There the Lord of all creatures, the eternal Creator of all the worlds, endued with supreme energy surrounded by his ghostly attendants, is adored. There Nara and Narayana, Brahman, and Manu, and Sthanu as the fifth, are (ever present). And there the celestial stream Ganga having three currents,[47] issuing out of the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... gentleness; he had by all odds the largest, flattest feet that Kendric had ever seen attached to a man and yet on them he moved quickly and lightly and not without grace; he held the New Moon in a sort of ghostly fear, his eyes all whites when he vowed she was "ha'nted," and yet he loved her with all of the heart ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... replied Rodin, with a bitter smile. "Thanks to the ghostly counsels of the angelic Abbe Gabriel, I have reached a sort of resignation. Still, there are certain memories which affect me with the most acute pain. I told you," resumed Rodin, in a firmer voice, "or was going to tell you, that the very day after that on which I informed ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... pattern of ivy showed like a delicate lacework on the small greenish panes. Another dropped; then another. Gradually he began to listen for the sound and to miss it when there came a long silence. One might easily imagine it to be the tapping of ghostly fingers—of the fingers of pretty Janet Merryweather—some quarter of a century earlier. Her daughter was hardly more than twenty now, he supposed, and he wondered how long the mad idyllic period had lasted before her birth? Turning to the books on the table, he opened one ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... they, but only the better to pounce down,—draw their nutriment from unguarded material cuticles; and just when, maddened, you strike, and exulting exclaim, "Caught, by Jove!" wh-irr flies the diaphanous, ghostly larva, and your blow falls ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of a charm. And verily, this is enchantment; I am bewitched, by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flittering of the marvellous sleeves—apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this. And with the consciousness ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... means justify you in addressing yourself to him." This was very hard upon Lady Lufton. She was endeavouring with all her woman's strength to do her best, and endeavouring so to do it that the feelings of the sinner might be spared; and yet the ghostly comforter whom she had evoked to her aid, treated her as though she were arrogant and overbearing. She acknowledged the weakness of her own position with reference to her parish clergyman by calling in the aid of Mr. Crawley; and, under such circumstances, he might, ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... rose like gold, and went up into the heavens like silver, flooding the moors with a pale ghostly light, taking the colour out of the heather, and painting black shadows under the stone walls. Tommy opened his eyes, and ran to the window. "The moon has risen," said he, and crept softly down the ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... architecture of the churches for which they were intended, is in refinement of realization, I suppose, quite unrivalled, especially in passages requiring pure gradation, as the hollows of vaultings. That of Veronese would look ghostly beside it; that of Titian lightless. His landscape is occasionally quaint and strange like Giorgione's, and as fine in color, as that behind the Madonna in the Brera gallery at Milan; but a more truthful fragment occurs in the picture ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... steam. Bill caught the deep boom of breakers. The Spot Cash was somewhere inshore. The water was shallowing. She was fairly on the rocks. Again Bill shouted a warning to the boys to save themselves when she struck. He caught sight of a low cliff—a black shadow above a mass of moving, ghostly white. The schooner was lifted by a great sea and carried forward. Skipper Bill waited for the shock and thud of her striking. He glanced up at the spars—again screamed a warning—and stood rigid. On swept the schooner. She was a long time in the ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... still dream, ye voiceless, slumbering ones, Of glories gained through struggles fierce and long, Lulled by the muffled boom of ghostly guns That weave the music of a battle-song? In fitful flight do misty visions reel, While restless chargers toss their bridle-reins? When down the lines gleam points of polished steel, And phantom ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... I had forgotten the wind, down in the cabin, but in the open here I felt its weight. It grew all the while; its voice drowned the world now, and there was spindrift through it, picked from the back shore of the island and flung all the way across. Objects were lost in it; ghostly things, shore lights, fish-houses, piers, strained seaward. I heard the packet's singing masts at the next wharf, but I saw no packet. The ponderous scow below me became a thing of life and light, an eager bird fluttering ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Lady of the images, supine, Deathstill, lifesweet, with folded palms she lay: And kneeling there as at a sacred shrine A young man wan and worn who seemed to pray: 40 A crucifix of dim and ghostly white Surmounted the ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... fructifies in little black velvet spots. Then one of lilac flecks the pink tones of the granite, to help the effect. Soon another kind follows—a pale olive-green lichen that fruits in bumps of rich brown velvet; then another branching like a tiny tree—there is a ghostly kind like white chalk rubbed lightly on, and yet another of small green blots, and one like a sprinkling of scarlet snow; each, in turn, of a higher and larger type, which in due time prepares the way for mosses ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... heaven from rending it to tatters. In the distance, to the right, Fort Sumter, looking remote and inaccessible,—the terrible rattle which our foolish little spoiled sister Caroline has insisted on getting into her rash hand. How ghostly, yet how real, it looms up out of the dim atmosphere,—the guns looking over the wall and out through the embrasures,—meant for a foreign foe,—this very day (April 13th) turned in self-defence against the children of those who once fought for liberty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... behind the Mansion House; and the Bremen Coffee House,—why so called no one can now tell,—is one of those strange houses of public resort in the City at which the guests seem never to eat, never to drink, never to sleep, but to come in and out after a mysterious and almost ghostly fashion, seeing their friends,—or perhaps their enemies, in nooks and corners, and carrying on their conferences in low, melancholy whispers. There is an aged waiter at the Bremen Coffee House; and there is certainly one private sitting-room up-stairs. ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... was that of Torre del Greco. Though for thirty hours the place had been deserted, a few ghostly figures could be seen at intervals when the vivid flashes of lightning illuminated the gloom-covered scene, wandering desolately about, hungry and thirsty, their throats parched by smoke and dust, yet ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Park and stopped before the old brown house hidden in creepers in which Laura lived. So changed by this time, however, was Gerty's mood that, after leaving her carriage, she stood hesitating from indecision upon the sidewalk. The few bared trees in the snow, the solemn, almost ghostly, quiet of the quaint old houses and the deserted streets, in which a flock of sparrows quarrelled under the faint sunshine, produced in her an odd and almost mysterious sense of unreality—as if the place, herself, the waiting carriage, and Laura buried away in the dull ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... sitting perfectly still, with her eyes fixed on the orderly row of papers on the Governor's desk. She wore a white dress with a black ribbon at her waist, and in the dim light, with her pale face and her cloudy hair, she had a ghostly look as if she would turn to mist at a touch. When Corinna entered, she rose and held out her hands. "You are so good," she said. "I never dreamed that any body could be so good and ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... not at all ghostly and they did not care to intrude, they were about to retire as softly as they had come, when Joe was startled by hearing his own name. Jim's hand shot out and clenched his friend's arm, and they ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... There was no other room in their house from which the sound could proceed. She was not devoid of the superstitious feelings of the age, and had heard before of ghostly tappings that were said to be a harbinger of ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... vale, my friend and I Beheld the old and quiet town; The ghostly sails that out at sea Flapped their white wings of mystery; The beaches glimmering in the sun, And the low wooded capes that run Into the sea-mist north and south; The sand-bluffs at the river's mouth; The ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... little apartment in the Rue Spontini. Robert Le Menil made a sign to a coachman, and entered the carriage with Therese. Close together, they rolled among the vague shadows, cut by sudden lights, through the ghostly city, having in their minds only sweet and vanishing impressions while everything around ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... thou, ghostly visitant of flame? Wouldst thou 'neath closer scrutiny resolve In myriad suns that constellations frame, Around which life-blest satellites revolve, Like those unnumbered orbs which nightly creep In dim procession o'er the azure ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... took in washing from the camps: there was nothing else to do, with Gray Billy Batch lost in Rattle Water, and now decently stowed away by the Reverend John Fairmeadow. It was lonely in Gray Billy Batch's cabin, now, of course; it was sometimes almost intolerably so—and ghostly, too, with echoes of long-past footsteps and memories of soft motherly words. Pattie Batch, however, a practical little person, knew in her own mind, you must be informed, exactly how to still the haunting echoes and transform ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... the Black Watch's ghostly piper that plays proudly when the men of the Black Watch do well, and prouder when ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... benches than I ever saw provided by a soft-hearted municipality. This precinct had a warm, lazy, dusty, southern look, as if the people sat out-of-doors a great deal and wandered about in the stillness of summer nights. The figure of the elder town at these hours must be ghostly enough on its neighbouring hill. Even by day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect—as if it were an enormous model placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... through the familiar streets each approaching face, each distant figure seemed hers. The obsession was intolerable. It would not last, of course; but meanwhile he had the exposed sense of a fugitive in a nightmare, who feels himself the only creature visible in a ghostly and besetting multitude. The eye of the metropolis seemed fixed on him ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... gave no answer back to him. His heart grew colder and colder, when suddenly the cloud above him was rent in a dozen places, and lightning flashed through the valley, and the thunder rolled over the echoing mountains. In the lurid glare of the lightning Cuglas saw a hundred ghostly forms sweeping towards him, uttering as they came nearer and nearer shrieks so terrible that the silence of death could more easily be borne. Cuglas turned to escape, but they hemmed him round, and pressed their clammy hands ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... grey promise of meadowland, a sable thicket, far in the distance a great blurred mass rearing a sombre head, a chain of silent villages seemingly twined about our road, and once in a long while the broad, brave flash of laughing water—these and their ghostly like made up our changing neighbourhood. Then came a link in the chain that even Wizard Night could not transfigure—sweet, storied Coarraze, fencing our way with its peculiar pride of church and state; three miles ahead, hoary Betharram, defender of the faith, lent us its famous ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... of remark how, building on the simplest supposition, we seldom prophesy aright. For all my fine-spun theories the manner of the thing that happened was all unlike the forecast. Suddenly, and in silence, out of the ghostly shadows of the trees and into the wan moonlight of the open space beneath my window, with neither shout nor crash of sentry-gun to give me warning, came three figures riding abreast—a man in trooper trappings on either hand, and on the led horse ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... room is a suite of apartments, ruinous and roofless in his day, but which Colonel Wildman has restored, and furnished most appropriately with old tapestry and antique tables and chairs. These rooms wear a ghostly aspect, and we were not surprised to learn that one, at least, had the reputation of being haunted. The great drawing-room, once the dormitory of the monks, is now a splendid apartment richly decorated; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... as plainly as he had ever seen him. The face, though, was white and bloodless. The ghostly figure moved with a heavy step, coming straight up the walk toward the building. Frank sat rooted to his chair. In the shadow of the piazza the figure seemed to turn, and was then lost to view. Merriwell threw up ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... reveille gun has been fired and those merciless fifers and drummers are rapidly finishing the reveille. And, horror of horrors! mayhap his fancies picture him standing tremblingly on post at midnight's solemn hour, his gun just balanced in his hands, while numbers of cadets in hideous sheets and other ghostly garb approach or are already standing around torturing him. And again, perchance, he challenges some approaching person in one direction, and finds to his dismay the officer of the day, the officer of the guard, and a corporal are crossing and recrossing his post, or ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... to compare to riding across the desert at dawn? At dawn, when to your right and to your left march phalanxes of ghostly shapes, which maybe are the shadows of the night, or maybe, as says the legend, the ghosts of the many long-dead kingdoms buried in oblivion and the relentless sands; when the whistling of the wind is ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... Countess, and both together made such an uproar, that the cock flew up into the tree of life for safety, and St. Peter himself turned the key and hid himself; and as nobody could get into t'other world, half the Guards are come back again, and appeared in the park to-day, but such dismal ghostly figures, that my Lady Townshend was really frightened, and is again ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... head inside the cover staring at that white ghostly oval. He wondered she had not rushed out on deck. She had remained quietly there. This was pluck. Wonderful self-restraint. And it was not stupidity on her part. She knew there was imminent danger and probably had some notion of ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... breath and pounding hearts, for shadowy forms to appear. They were not unaccustomed to danger and the suspense of an ambush. But in the forest they had solid ground beneath their feet. Trees and other tangible objects were all about them. But here everything seemed unreal, almost ghostly. The darkness of the forest was no blacker than the night here in the open. And yet there was no shady covering of leaves to shut out the light—only a strange, weird, unearthly canopy of mist. In the ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... and with it, its every citizen. This change made itself quickly obvious, and even odious, in all the secular relations of life. The American became a sort of braggart playboy of the western world, enormously sure of himself and ludicrously contemptuous of all other men. And on the ghostly side there appeared the same accession of confidence, the same sure assumption of authority, though at first less self-evidently and offensively. The religion of the American thus began to lose its inward direction; it became less and less a scheme of personal ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... up van Manderpootz and his subjunctivisor—the worlds of "if," the weird, unreal worlds that existed beside reality, neither past nor future, but contemporary, yet extemporal. Somewhere among their ghostly infinities existed one that represented the world that would have been had I made the liner. I had only to call up Haskel van Manderpootz, make an ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... minute's sleep. Oh! what a terrible thing it is to suffer like that with all he has to worry him! for everything is upside down; it is all a most dreadful mess. Upon my word, I believe those generals are out of their senses; such ghostly faces and frightened eyes! And people coming all the time, and doors banging and some men scolding and others crying, and the whole place like a sailor's boarding-house; officers drinking from bottles and going to bed in their boots! The Emperor is the best of the whole lot, and the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... good Christian man; for after that I had much exhorted him to take his communion and rites of the Church as a thing most necessary, and by whose means God giveth unto His chosen people health, both bodily and ghostly, he answered me, by broken words, that he was well content so to do: and in token thereof, and in repentance for his sins, he lift up his eyes and knocked himself upon the heart; and after I had suffered him to pause a good while, I caused the Sacrament to be brought, ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... and daughters of the hills who inhabited this mountain home two centuries ago. The country around them was alive with ghostly legend. They had seen the lights dance across Deer Garth Ghyll, and had heard the wail that came from Clark's Loup. They were not above trembling at the mention of these mysteries when the moon was ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... that boy of other days in his quick pride, neither had he lost the tenacity of purpose which had kept him dragging one sore, bare foot after the other to get to his mother when the gulches he had to pass were black and full of ghostly, fearsome things that the hired man had seen when staying out late o' nights. This trait now kept him trudging grimly from one office to another, offering himself a target for rebuffs that to him had the sting ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... heart of him went out to her, claiming her for his own. But it is at just such crises that habit reveals itself as the hand of steel in a silken glove; and before she could open her lips, Jock Lenox had stretched out a ghostly arm from his grave in Aberdeen, and shut to the door ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... once more planted herself before him, her slim figure looking ghostly between the fading light of the departing day and the yellow flame ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... he took me out of the basket The old house stood on a high hill, and we could see the stars of heaven through the ruined door and one of the back windows. Uncle Eb lifted the leaning door a little and shoved it aside. We heard then a quick stir in the old house—a loud and ghostly rattle it seems now as I think of it—like that made by linen shaking on the line. Uncle Eb took a step backward as if ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... Pole. I wandered around the house for awhile, but every time I turned a corner there was a memory waiting to greet me. Now the merriest of them seemed to be covered with a chilly shadow, and every one was pale and ghostly. All night I lay awake, playing at the old game of mental solitaire and keeping tryst with the wind which seemed to tap with unseen fingers ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... ghostly phenomena, that commonly known as "haunted houses" appeals most to the ordinary person. There is something very eerie in being shut up within the four walls of a house with a ghost. The poor human being is placed ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... the corner of the Chateau and saw the long ghostly facade white in the moonlight, I felt less confident. The eeriness of the place smote me. In that still, snowy world it loomed up immense and mysterious with its rows of shuttered windows, each with that air ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... moon had but lately risen, and, hanging low in the eastern sky, her level rays fell full on the chevalier's face. It was white enough, but that might have been the effect of her sickly light reflected from the ghostly snow; the daredevil in his eyes said plainly ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... infinite softness. Doubtless the child whose hand pressed my own also heard them; and then, elevated by their enchantment above the material world, the poor old man and the artless young girl both knew that a tender ghostly Presence was making sweetness ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... old, white-haired father—were all about me in the moonlight and amongst the tangled greenery. I dared not move; I scarcely breathed; the very weeds with their pale, dusky leaves were like things that had a ghostly life. And while I was in this morbid condition of mind, with that irrational fear momentarily increasing on me, I saw at a distance of about thirty yards a dark object, which seemed to move, fluttering in an uncertain ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... would commence their outcries, and from all parts they would assemble and flit about almost within reach of one's hand, making an awful noise, and in the dark shade of the forest their white gorgets had quite a ghostly look. The eggs are always three in number, of a beautiful shining blue-green, sometimes of a very long oval type. I have found the nests at Murree from the 3rd May to quite ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... on Midsummer Eve of this year, and as the hour grew later, and nine o'clock drew on, the irradiation of the daytime became broken up by weird shadows and ghostly nooks of indistinctness. Imagination could trace upon the trunks and boughs strange faces and figures shaped by the dying lights; the surfaces of the holly-leaves would here and there shine like peeping eyes, while such fragments of the sky as were ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... stretch westward in bars of darkness over the burnished grass. From morning to midday the shadows shrink, ever hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow gigantic or draw together into mere blots of darkness. When day declines, the shadows come forth again, joining ghostly hands from stone to stone, from circle to circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at last into the universal realm of night. Thus they weave their ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... The night was almost ghostly in its stillness. He went down the winding path that he knew so well without a halt. Far away the light of a steamer travelled over the quiet water. The sea murmured drowsily as the tide rose. It was not ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... And the ghostly procession thrice tracks the four ambulatories of the cloisters, solemnly chanting ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... first terror was almost overwhelming, and her impulse was to shriek aloud. But the shock of that ghostly appearance passed, not because the danger appeared to lessen, but because her nerves were healthy, and she somehow possessed sympathy with the red men. Mechanically she noticed, too, that they were blanketed, as in peace. They had donned no feathers or paint. Nor could she see aught of any firearms. ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... ghostly shadowed, Hosts of wasted, haggard forms; And their wild eyes glared and glittered Like heaven's fire in dark-browed storms, And with outstretched arms toward me They came rushing ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... James. Dancing Point reached sharply out as if to intercept us. But the owner of those strong dark hands that happened to be at the wheel knew the story of Dancing Point—of how many an ebony Tam O'Shanter had seen ghostly revelry there; and Gadabout was held well out in ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... they have achieved, they believe (at any rate with a few of their querists), by simply showing, or rather reminding them, that since no historical fact can stand as such against the "assumption" of the "Adepts"— historians being confessedly ignorant of pre-Roman and Greek origins beyond the ghostly shadows of the Etruscans and Pelasgians—no real historical difficulty can be possibly involved in their statement. From objectors outside the Society, the writers neither demand nor do they expect mercy. The "Adept" has no favours to ask at the hands of conjectural science, nor does he exact ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... some very unpleasant dreams. The waning moon rose late. Its light struck a ghostly white beam across my cabin, and made an ominous shape on the planking by my bunk. Then the staghounds woke, and began howling and baying; so that I dreamt fitfully, and scarcely slept until the approach ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... a terrible fit of the toothake, and she walked with a long night-shift at dead of night like a ghost, and I thought she was one. She prayed for nature's sweet restorer—balmy sleep—but did not get it—a ghostly figure indeed she was, enough to make a saint tremble. It made me quiver and shake from top to toe. Superstition is a very mean thing, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... this part of the country before," said Tom Ross, looking around curiously at the ghostly tree trunks. ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... would put her shoes off her feet in approaching the weeping Magdalene. They make much of her indeed, but they show her little reverence. There is in them, notwithstanding their fervour of amorous words, a coldness like that which dwells in the ghostly beauty of icicles ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... butterflies and the flaming birds-of-paradise, of the echoing aisle ways between interwoven jungle growths, of the arching aerial roofs of verdure and the shadowy hanging-gardens from which by day parakeets chattered and monkeys screamed and by night ghostly armies of fireflies glowed. He was no longer impressed by that world of fierce appetites and fierce conflicts. He seemed to have attained to a secret inner calm, to an obsessional impassivity across ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... they ere death— Flirt wanly, dance in ghostly-wise, With ghosts of tunes for melodies, And vanish at ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... they drew nearer, until the laboring men ashore were scarcely a stone's throw away, the weirdness of the scene impressed itself more upon Carrigan. Never had he seen such a crew. There were no Indians among them. Lithe, quick-moving, bare-headed, their naked arms and shoulders gleaming in the ghostly illumination, they were racing against time with the boiling tar and pitch in the cauldron. They did not see the approach of the canoe, and Bateese did not draw their attention to it. Quietly he drove ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... no longer acknowledged as my lady, was at an hour's notice packed off in the Dilly for Dover, and her jewels, in half the time, packed up in their casket and despatched to Lafitte's, in order to raise the ways and means for the peer and his ghostly confessor! ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... leaves now and again as though they trembled in sympathy to some swift lunge or quickly parried thrust. The moon shone clearly for a space, touching the swords into two streaks of flashing light, and painting the men's set faces with a cold hue, ghostly, and deathlike. The Baron had a reputation as a swordsman, had stood face to face with an antagonist many times before, and more than once had seen his adversary turn sightless eyes to the morning sky. It was therefore, perhaps, only natural that he should have contemplated his ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... hour later ghostly noises began to come from that room and mysterious whisperings fell out of the window and bumped ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... chairs, and from its corner the tall clock looked down on them solemn and voiceless. There was no denying that it was scary, as Belle expressed it. What light there was seemed unreal, and the closed rooms when they peeped in were cheerless and ghostly. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... unsubstantial entities, of which it was almost disgraceful not to have seen one or two. Had not the Witch of Endor called up the shade of Samuel the prophet? Had not the spirit of Mis' Molly's dead son appeared to her, as well as the ghostly presence of ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... to the foot of a big hollow tree, from which he pulled a large bundle. This he opened and showed a number of ghostly uniforms. He distributed these among the boys, who at once donned them, making a weird looking band in ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... the wood was aboard we resumed our journey. The river was like glass. In the white moonlight the palms on the edge of the banks stood mirrored in the still water. We sat forward and as we rounded the curves the long silver reaches of the great stream stretched ahead of us, and the ghostly outlines of hills rose in the distance. Here and there prairie fires burned, and the red glow ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... perceive it as if bodily peeping over his shoulder, next his cheek; it dogged him by day, and was his incubus by night; and often he would start and wrestle, for the desperate grasp of the dying appeared to be clutching at his throat: so, in his ghostly fears, and bloody conscience, he had girded round his neck a piece of thin sheet-iron in his cravat, which he wore continually as armour against those clammy fingers: no wonder that he held his head ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... an hour, I think, they sat there, two ghostly figures formless against the woods; then one rose, and presently I ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... to her feet, and stood leaning against him—a glimmering, ghostly figure, whose tattered garments were happily ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... monotonous work, and unprofitable, for, though Tom sent the airship back and forth for many miles along the wonderful river that formed the path from the Great Lakes to the sea, he had no glimpse of ghostly wings of other aircraft, nor did he hear the beat of propellers, nor the throb of motors, as his own ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton |
