United States or Honduras ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Such was the life we lived. If we looked back at all to the life we had left, it was with that sort of sick horror which a prisoner may feel who has endured and survived a long term of imprisonment. It seemed to us that we had never really lived before. The past was a dream, and an evil dream. We had moved in a world of bad enchantment, like phantoms, barely conscious of ourselves.
Little by little, Zilah allowed himself to sink into that state where not only everything becomes indifferent to us, but where we long for another suffering, further pain, that we may utter more bitter cries, more irritated complaints against fate. It seems then that everything is dark about us, and our endless night is traversed by morbid visions, and peopled with phantoms.
But the work was I myself! I, in my solid, sober, healthful mind, before the brain had been perplexed by a phantom. Were phantoms to be allowed as testimonies against science? How strange is that contradiction between our being as man and our being as Author!
"And yet thou hast never loved me," said Cleonice; and there was something soft and tender in the tone of her voice, and the rough Spartan was again subdued. "I never loved thee! What, then, is love? Is not thine image always before me? amidst schemes, amidst perils of which thy very dreams have never presented equal perplexity or phantoms so uncertain, I am occupied but with thee.
Her thoughts wandered toward the future, that terra incognita which Mr. Lindsay's vague words "There are trials ahead of you" had peopled with dread yet intangible phantoms, whose spectral shadows solemnly presageful, hovered over even the present. Why was her own history a sealed volume her father a mystery her mother a wanderer in foreign lands?
He opened it, and a lock of long, curling hair fell from it, and twined about his fingers. The letter told him his mother was dead, and that, dying, she blest and forgave him. There is a dread, unhallowed necromancy of evil, that turns things sweetest and holiest to phantoms of horror and affright.
It seemed a very aged man, with flowing white beard, and sightless eyes; and Odysseus knew by these signs that he was in the presence of Teiresias, the famous prophet of Thebes, who alone among departed spirits preserves his understanding, while the rest are flitting phantoms, with no sense at all.
The crisis which, a few hours before, seemed to him a chaos, an eddying whirl in which he could see nothing distinctly and whose very confusion was a source of hope, appeared to him at that moment with appalling distinctness. An empty cash-box, closed doors, notes protested, ruin, are the phantoms he saw whichever way he turned.
The fleets of the British and the Germans stood like huge phantoms the first enshrouded in mystery somewhere in the Irish and North Seas; the second held in leash behind the Kiel Canal, awaiting the opportune moment to make its escape.
They fancied that the night was the time in which all ghastly and ugly phantoms began to move; that it was peopled with ghosts, skeletons, demons, witches, who held revels on the hill-tops, or stole into houses to suck the life out of sleeping men. The cry of the wild fowl, and the howling of the wind, were to them the yells of evil spirits.
Word Of The Day