United States or United States Minor Outlying Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A more spectral procession we could not have made, with our spectral boat gliding noiselessly through the water, with its spectral steersman, and its crowd of spectral passengers, though my fancy, instead of being a fancy, had been a reality. All things around me were sombre, shadowy, silent, as Hades itself. Suddenly our gondola made a rapid sweep round a tall corner.
Before me lay the quiet bay, with old Fort Sumter rising from the watery plain like a spectral giant, as though to remind one that this had been the scene of mighty struggles.
Figuratively we may say that every mind is a world of ghosts, ghosts incomparably more numerous than the acknowledged millions of the higher Shinto Kami and that the spectral population of one grain of brain-matter more than realizes the wildest fancies of the medieval schoolmen about the number of angels able to stand on the point of a needle.
He was gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck, and a head like a hammer; his rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burs; one eye had lost its pupil, and was glaring and spectral, but the other had the gleam of a genuine devil in it. Still he must have had fire and mettle in his day, if we may judge from the name he bore of Gunpowder.
His tall solitary figure was lit by the moonlight streaming through the pillars of the portico; his loose robes waved slowly about him in the wind, as he stood firm and erect before the door of the temple: he looked more like the spectral genius of departed Paganism than a living man.
And yet it is stated, by the Reviewer, that Mather was opposed to spectral evidence, and denounced it! He gave currency to it, in the popular faith, during the whole period, while the trials and executions were going on, more than any other man. He preached another Sermon, of the same kind, entitled, The Devil Discovered.
Will you come with me, or remain where you are?" The two exchanged glances, and then their eyes ranged along the unoccupied deck. I confess it was eery enough the silence, the desolate vista, the wind-filled sails above, the schooner flying through the water as though guided by spectral hands, and that single motionless figure crouched on the grating amidships.
Her chamber was illumined with an intense blue flame that lighted up every portion of the apartment with a radiance bright as day, and in the midst of this effulgence moved a figure clothed in white a beautiful, pale, spectral woman, whose large, motionless black eyes, deeply set in her death-like face, and whose long unbound black hair, fallen upon her white raiment, were the only marks of color about her marble form.
Above the flats of shimmering water, where the gold or crimson of sunset lay, rose constantly the tops of masts, shadowy and spectral, telling of the sunken hull, the pale corpses beneath those gleaming waves.
It was not in the posture, grand as that was, not in the sin-stamped brow, rough with wrinkles like a storm-chafed sea, not in the wiry hair, gray and half rising in haggard locks, like adders that in vain try to escape the foot that treads them down, nor in the mouth, for that was hid behind the impotent guard of the upraised arm and clenched fist, but in those painted eyes, into which, all-fascinated, we ever gazed, reading in them all that crouching terror, all the punishment of that spectral presence, all the poignant consciousness of his fate to whom such things could happen, to whom already his victims rise again,
Word Of The Day