United States or Botswana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I no longer dared to raise my eyes to the brilliant phantom which I had attached to my every step. This delirium lasted for two whole years. I spoke little; my taste for solitude redoubled. I showed all the symptoms of a violent passion. I was absent, sad, ardent, savage. My days passed on in wild, extravagant, mad fashion, which nevertheless had a peculiar charm.
He forgets them; forgets that weltering ocean of unpleasantness and remembers only its sporadic islets those moments of calm delight or fiercer joy which he would fain hold fast for ever. He does not come here on account of a certain fountain which ought never to be cleaned. He comes for the sake of its mirage, that sunny phantom which will rise up later, out of some November fog in another land.
"Do not believe it, Abel; no, that was only a phantom of your brain, the What-I-was that you remember so well. For do you not see that when I come she fades away and is nothing? Not that do not ask it. I know that I once refused to look into your eyes, and afterwards, in the cave at Riolama, I looked long and was happy unspeakably happy!
A head lifted from among the inert figures and sleepily regarded us before it dropped back into the shadows. The stranded ship, the recumbent men, the mountain flaming overhead it was like a phantom world into which had been suddenly thrust this ghastly and incredible reality. "Whatever possessed you to swim out here in the middle of the night?" I demanded, in a harsh whisper.
It being midday when the Major reached the bower of Cleopatra, he had the good fortune to find his Princess on her usual sofa, languishing over a cup of coffee, with the room so darkened and shaded for her more luxurious repose, that Withers, who was in attendance on her, loomed like a phantom page. 'What insupportable creature is this, coming in? said Mrs Skewton, 'I cannot hear it.
Sometimes he would talk with these wraiths, and Miss Mary standing still in the lobby, her heart tortured by his loneliness, would hear him murmuring in these phantom visitations. She would, perhaps, venture in now and then timidly, and take a seat unbidden on the corner of a chair near him, and embark on some topic of the day.
He could express it by nothing but his Tears, which ran like a River down his Cheeks as he looked upon her. He had not stood in this Posture long, before he plunged into the Stream that lay before him; and finding it to be nothing but the Phantom of a River, walked on the Bottom of it till he arose on the other Side.
"Now you know all," said Philip with a deep sigh, as the narrative was concluded. "What think you? Do you credit my strange tale, or do you imagine, as some well would, that it is a mere phantom of a disordered brain?" "That it is not so, Philip, I believe," replied Krantz; "for I too have had ocular proof of the correctness of a part of your history.
Happiness is the goal for which mankind is ever seeking, but of the many roads which the imagination traces as the surest and nearest to that desideratum, few, perhaps none, ever chance upon the right; too many pursue a shadow instead of a substance, influenced by a phantom of their own creation, engendered in most instances by pride, vanity, or ambition.
Galton's interesting inquiries into the power of "visualizing" would appear to prove that many people can at will sport on the confines of the phantom world of hallucination. There is good reason to think that imaginative children tend to confuse mental images and percepts. The Hallucinations of Insanity.
Word Of The Day