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To let the reader into a secret, never known to Miss Jemima, Captain Higginbotham was much less influenced by Cupid than by Plutus in the offer he had made. The captain was one of that class of gentlemen who read their accounts by those corpse-lights, or will-o'-the-wisps, called expectations.
The lightning ran over the face of the river like will-o'-the-wisps; the whole heaven was streaked continuously with it. Suddenly the negroes leaped to their paddles and rowed with bent back, and wild staring eyes, as if possessed. They were covered by the muzzle of Durnovo's revolver.
It crawls forward in all weathers, like Richard Edgeworth's hygrometer. It does not stand at the boundary of our ignorance, it seems to me, but is one of the will-o'-the-wisps of its undisputed central domain of bog and quicksand. Yet I should not have devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the light it has thrown on human actions by its study of congenital organic tendencies.
Don't make a noise." "But " "No, no; don't stop. We don't know what it is. Perhaps it's one of those things Hicky talks about that he has heard sometimes." "Father says it's all nonsense, and there are no such things in the fens." "He'd better say there are no will-o'-the-wisps to lead people astray," whispered Tom. "He doesn't say that.
The result is that the only genuine ghosts are most unsatisfactory beings; they appear without purpose, and seem to be what, in fact, I believe they almost always are, irresponsible, purposeless will-o'-the-wisps.
Stepping quickly over the surrounding logs, he moved to the edge of the darkness and listened, then walked quickly into the blackness. The dim flicker of approaching torches, like will-o'-the-wisps, now flashed among the giant trees.
Some of them live in the mines, where they show the miners the richest veins of metal just like the German dwarfs; others live on the moors, or under the shelter of rocks; others take up their abode in houses, and, like the Danish and Swedish elves, are very cross if the maids do not keep the places clean and tidy others, like the will-o'-the-wisps, lead travellers astray, and then laugh at them.
They were as light as thistle-down, as unsubstantial as mists upon the mountain, as wayward and flickering as will-o'-the-wisps. But there was something immortal about them, and the man knew that the world would be nothing to him without their presence and comradeship. Most of these attendant sprites were gentle and docile; but there was one who had a strain of wildness in him.
Alec's comic distress was mercifully relieved for the time being by a dance of goblins on the lawn, where the children, with pumpkin lanterns on their heads, frisked about like will-o'-the-wisps, as a parting surprise. When Rose went to bed, she found that Uncle Alec had not forgotten her; for on the table stood a delicate little easel, holding two miniatures set in velvet.
Yeats says about his love of magic and of symbols is not because there is any truth or falsehood in these will-o'-the-wisps, but because he is such an artist that even when he writes in prose, his style is so beautiful, so harmonious that one is forced to listen. Literary art has enormous power in propelling a projectile of thought.
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