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The filching from the world of one element of its every-day life had unexpectedly rendered it all phantasmagoric. As McCarthy shouted, and no sound came; as he moved from behind his desk, and no jar accompanied his heavy footfall, he appeared to lose blood and substance, to become unreal.
Still, the men of the Renaissance could not forget the creed which they had drawn in with their mothers' milk, but which the Church had not adjusted to the new conditions of the growing age. The result was a wild phantasmagoric chaos of confused and clashing influences.
To have abandoned hope is a terrible misfortune despair. This must not be confounded with an involuntary perturbation, a mere instinctive dread, a phantasmagoric illusion that involves no part of the will. It is not even an excessive fear that goes by the name of pusillanimity. It is a cool judgment like that of Cain: "My sin is too great that I should expect forgiveness."
I started this book taking the Crowd for my hero that faint bodiless phantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called the People. I have proceeded upon two premises. A spirit not connected with a body is without a technique, without the mechanical means of self-expression or self-fulfillment. It is a ghost trying to have a family.
A lifetime of petting, of indulgence, threw its soothing influence over her perturbation, convincing her that somehow all this storm and stress must be phantasmagoric a dream from which she was even now awakening into a clearer day of happiness. "For you love me, father," she concluded, and looked up daintily, with a pathetic, coquettish tilt of her fair head, to peer into his face.
Objects before perceived with difficulty, now glimmered ambiguously. Bedded in strange vapors, the great foot-light cast a dubious, half demoniac glare across the waters, like the phantasmagoric stream sent athwart a London flagging in a night-rain from an apothecary's blue and green window.
The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole. In halls such as these in a bridal chamber such as this I passed, with the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first month of our marriage passed them with but little disquietude.
In each, we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls.
Suddenly the north wind swept this phantasmagoric scene and scattered the mists which laid a dew full of oxygen on the meadows. Mademoiselle de Verneuil was now able to distinguish a dark mass of men on the rocks of Fougeres. Seven or eight hundred Chouans were running like ants through the suburb of Saint-Sulpice.
Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality. Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading, since her happy infancy.
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