"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lost touch. Overtaken by the Syracusans, Demosthenes attempted to fight a rearguard action, but in vain, and he was forced to surrender at discretion with his whole force. Next day, Nicias with the van was overtaken, and, after a ghastly scene of confusion and slaughter, the remnants of the vanguard were forced to surrender also. Nicias and Demosthenes were put to death; great numbers were seized as private spoil by their captors, the rest of the prisoners—more ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... me by thy petty malice," answered Front-de-Boeuf, with a ghastly and constrained laugh. "The infidel Jew—it was merit with Heaven to deal with him as I did, else wherefore are men canonized who dip their hands in the blood of Saracens? The Saxon porkers whom I have slain—they were the foes of my country, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... desire to see myself, to realise at once in its full horror the ghastly change that had come upon me. I tottered to the mantel, and felt along it for matches. As I did so, a barking cough sprang up in my throat, and I clutched the thick flannel nightdress I found about me. There were no matches there, and I suddenly realised that ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... likewise fallen upon and their "joint" subdivided and hacked to pieces with knives made from shells. The bodies were not cooked all through, so that the condition of some of the revellers, both during and after the orgy, may best be left to the imagination. A more appalling, more ghastly, or more truly sickening spectacle it is impossible for the mind of man to conceive. A great corroboree was held after the feast, but, with my gorge rising and my brain reeling, I crept to my own humpy and tried to shut out from my mind the shocking inferno ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... the quarryman comes to tend his fire, and starts to see on the now redhot and glowing stones, sunk below the rim, the presentment of a skeleton formed of the purest white ashes—a ghastly spectacle in the grey of the dawn, as the mist rises and the peewit plaintively whistles over the ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... and that at last a great giant iceberg walls up the way in front, and we feast our eyes on the long-desired sight till after that the setting sun has tinged it purple (a sure sign of a fine day), its ghastly pallor shows us that the night is upon us. It is cold, and we are not sorry at half-past nine to find ourselves at Bourg d'Oisans, where there is a very fair inn kept by one Martin; we get a comfortable supper of eggs and go ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... sought a mean existence as teacher of English in a school of a remote seaside village. His spirit broke when the message came of the death of the girl in America who was waiting for him. Isolation from his kind and bitter hours left for thought made life alone too ghastly. He tried to make it more endurable by taking the pretty daughter of the head man of ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... Autolycus cured Ulysses, who had been injured while hunting the wild boar, by stanching the blood flowing from a wound in his leg, by means of a verbal charm. "With nicest care the skilful artists bound the brave, divine Ulysses' ghastly wound; and th' incantations stanch'd the gushing blood."[108:1] We have also the testimony of the Grecian lexicographer, Suidas, that various maladies were cured by the repetition of certain words, in the time of ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... you hosts, Of ghosts, And that without reflectors; And creepy things With wings, And gaunt and grisly spectres! He can fill you crowds Of shrouds, And horrify you vastly; He can rack your brains With chains, And gibberings grim and ghastly. Then, if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, Spirit philology, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... months of slavery and wretchedness. Our position seemed absolutely hopeless, and I began to fear that we should never escape from the City of Blood. The scenes we witnessed there were so revolting, that I cannot now reflect upon them without a shudder. The ghastly "customs," the absence of all protection for life and property, the grinding oppression, the nameless horrors of all kinds, were terrible. Blood was continually flowing, for every anniversary demanded fresh holocausts, and the "Golgotha" presented a sight of indescribable ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... romance that had gathered round him fled away, leaving the saddest of all sad facts in living guise before me. Not only did the manhood seem to die out of him, but the comeliness that first attracted me; for, as he turned, I saw the ghastly wound that had laid open cheek and forehead. Being partly healed, it was no longer bandaged, but held together with strips of that transparent plaster which I never see without a shiver and swift recollections of scenes with which it is associated ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... chained by what now happened before their eyes. The group of servants parted and a woman staggered on to the bridge. Antoinette de Mauban was in a loose white robe, her dark hair streamed over her shoulders, her face was ghastly pale, and her eyes gleamed wildly in the light of the torches. In her shaking hand she held a revolver, and, as she tottered forward, she fired it at Rupert Hentzau. The ball missed him, and struck the woodwork over ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... arose in the morning my strange lodger seemed to be sleeping quietly. His face looked pale and ghastly in the light of day. I stepped close to his bed and, laying my hand upon his brow, was horrified to discover that he was dead. What was I to do? I sat down to think, trembling with fright. I must call in a policeman and tell him all I knew about my strange visitor. No, not all; ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... years, I have discovered to my surprise, and—let me confess it—dismay, that my point of view has strangely altered. I still consider that I have been the victim of one of the cruellest deceptions which a woman could endure; I still believe that in that first ghastly hour of discovery, flight was justified and natural, but—Well, Evelyn, dear! I have been living for months in very close intimacy with a little girl who thinks no evil, and is always ready to find a good explanation for what may on the surface appear to be unkind, ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the Ocean—quarto-sized and printed in agate. It was filled with mutiny, murder, storm, open-boat cannibalism and agonies of thirst, handspike and cutlass inhumanities. No shark, pirate nor man-killing whale had been missed; no ghastly wreck, derelict nor horrifying phantom of the sea had escaped the nameless, furious compiler. For four days and nights, Andrew glared consumingly into this terrible book, and when he came to the writhing "Finis," involved in a sort of typhoon tailpiece—he was whipped, and never could ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... league nor amity. May from my bones a new Achilles rise, That shall infest the Trojan colonies With fire, and sword, and famine, when at length Time to our great attempts contributes strength; Our seas, our shores, our armies theirs oppose, And may our children be for ever foes!' 210 A ghastly paleness death's approach portends, Then trembling she the fatal pile ascends; Viewing the Trojan relics, she unsheath'd Aeneas' sword, not for that use bequeath'd: Then on the guilty bed she gently lays Herself, and softly thus lamenting prays; 'Dear relics! ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... by daylight, but at twilight he would go out muffled up invisibly, whether the weather were cold or not, and he chose the loneliest paths and those most overshadowed by trees and banks. His goggling spectacles and ghastly bandaged face under the penthouse of his hat, came with a disagreeable suddenness out of the darkness upon one or two home-going labourers, and Teddy Henfrey, tumbling out of the "Scarlet Coat" one night, at half-past nine, was scared shamefully by the stranger's skull-like head (he ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... was thus gracefully employed, the agonized artist, his face suffused with blushes and fairly ghastly with an enforced smile, was painfully struggling to abstract himself, by changing the places of things, shifting the position of his easel, prying in a lost way into lumbered corners, and pretending to be in search ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... through act of mine any man pitied Dick. Truly, I would. Of all things ghastly, I can think of none so ghastly as Dick being pitied. He has never been pitied in his life. He has always been top-dog—bright, light, strong, unassailable. And more, he doesn't deserve pity. And it's ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... his head. The woman breathed an invocation to the Deity and sank back against the wall, her face ghastly beneath ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... straight towards that oaken beam, A trampled pathway ran; A ghastly shape was swinging there— It was ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... two men from Scotland Yard. Kerry stood awhile, chewing and staring at the ghastly face of ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... with two scouts and half a dozen troopers, had pushed out to overtake the regiment two hundred miles away. Forty-eight hours later, as the wagon-train with its guard was slowly crawling southward, it was met by a courier with ghastly face. He was one of three who had started from the ruined agency together. They met no Indians, but at Box Elder Springs had come upon the bodies of a little party of soldiers stripped, scalped, gashed, and ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... sense that the truth doubtless transcends and embraces all spiritual light hopefully discerned; but the moment that a man condemns those who do not exactly agree with himself, he sins against the Spirit. Is it not a ghastly and inconceivable thought that Christ should have authorised that men should be brought to the light by persecution? Or that any of his words could be so foully distorted as to lend the least excuse to such a principle of action? It matters not what kind of persecution ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... discovered on the floor and the door of the chamber, down the stairs, and along the passage leading to the street, whence they could be distinctly traced to the waterside, not so very far away. Imagination, working upon these ghastly survivals of the hours of darkness, quickly reconstructed the crime which it was evident had been committed. The boatswain was known to have had money on him; but the youth, it was recalled, had begged his bed. It was ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... in which proud Troy shall yield, And spread its smoking ruins o'er the field; Yet Hecuba's, nor Priam's hoary age, Whose blood shall quench some Grecian's thirsty rage, Nor my brave brothers that have bit the ground, Their souls dismiss'd through many a ghastly wound, Can in my bosom half that grief create, As the sad thought of your impending fate; 20 When some proud Grecian dame shall tasks impose, Mimic your tears, and ridicule your woes: Beneath Hyperia's ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... from her armchair, but sank back in it trembling very much. "So you are come, sir, are you?" she said, with a fond shaking voice. "Bring back the——Ah!" here she screamed, "Gracious God, who is it?" Her eyes stared wildly: her white face looked ghastly through her rouge. She clung to the arms of her chair for support, as the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and a feeling of illness; but we went down and took our breakfast below with the rest. At least I took mine as usual, though she did but toy with her food. Then all of a sudden she put her hand to her side and turned ghastly white, and fell off her chair. A scullery wench set up a cry, 'The plague! the plague!' and forthwith they all fled this way and that—all save me, who could not leave her thus. I made her swallow some hot cordial which I ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... health had been just struck down by a violent kick from a horse, and was not expected to live more than a few hours. The blow had broken his skull bone, and cut out a piece as large as the palm of his hand, presenting a ghastly and horrible sight. ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... Sought comfort in each other's eye; Then turned their ghastly look each one, This to her sire, that to her son." Scott's Lady of the Lake, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... multitude of women shaking at him the bloody severed limbs of their sons and husbands; a child burned alive in its cradle; the head of a decapitated criminal, and the visions that filled its brain,—such are some of the ghastly imaginings of this diseased and uneducated nature. Compare such works as these with Dore's crudest conceptions, and the difference between the inventions of genius and those of a morbid intellect ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... was upon his windpipe, and he was being borne to the earth. He battled furiously but futilely—with the grim tenacity of a bulldog those awful fingers were clinging to his throat. Swiftly and surely life was being choked from him. His eyes bulged, his tongue protruded, his face turned to a ghastly purplish hue—there was a convulsive tremor of the stiffening muscles, and the ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... woman was ghastly pale, and her sleep must have been very light, for suddenly she opened her eyes, and seeing the officers, uttered the cry, which at first only caused her lord and master to growl out an oath and turn over; whereupon she clutched at him wildly and cried to the men to leave them; they ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... And he would not move until Mr. Stevenson and I went in advance. By this change he sought to transfer the responsibility to us. Finally he rode up to us and said in a whisper, "We will camp here." The whole expression of the old man's face was that of ghastly terror. I was much annoyed, for I thought that, at the eleventh hour, his fear had overcome his desire to gratify us. Just then a Mexican lad on horseback approached; we were all mounted. I asked the lad, "Is there a lake near by?" He replied, ...
— The Religious Life of the Zuni Child - Bureau of American Ethnology • (Mrs.) Tilly E. (Matilda Coxe Evans) Stevenson
... the guillotine, calling up thoughts of severed heads from memory's cloisters. On the left you see a ghastly head; on the right the decapitated trunk. By the victim stand the bloody actors in the tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen! When I review the awful guilt of Marat and Robespierre, humbly do I give thanks that I have been kept from yielding, like them, to fierce ambition and lust of power, and ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... noble. The long speech of York, in Act I, coming, as it does, after a clash of minds turbid with passion, is most noble. It gives a terror to what follows. The calm mind makes no mistake. The judgment of a man without heart seems as infallible as fate, as beautiful, and as ghastly. All happens as he foresees. All the cruelty and bloodiness of the latter half of the play come from that man's beautifully clear, cool brain. He stands detached. One little glimmer of heart in him would alter everything. The glimmer never comes. Humphrey ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Waldron. As he re-entered the wood he met wounded men streaming through it, a few marching alertly upright, many more crouching and groaning, some clinging to their less injured comrades, but all haggard in face and ghastly. ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... believe that it was Dion who was speaking to her. Often she had heard him speak violently, irritably, even cruelly and rudely. But there was a sort of ghastly softness in his voice. His hand still held hers, but its grasp had relaxed. In his touch, as in his voice, there was ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... to gratify the spite of some one in authority. However this may be, the hanging of the Episcopal minister of Trinity-Gask was the last exercise of criminal jurisdiction on the part of the Steward of Strathearn. This was the last time the "kind gallows of Crieff" bore its ghastly fruit. The Highlanders' salutation to ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... the sea, the frosty bitter wind cut through to the bones. The men were badly provided against the weather; and hardy as they were, the weather killed them that night. In the morning, the boat drifted on shore, manned like a spectre bark, by the ghastly figures of the dead—freighted horribly with the corpses of ten men all frozen to death. They are now buried in Mawgan church-yard; and the stern of the boat they died in tells their fatal story, and points to the last home ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... will overpower your will. Nothing but complete sacrifice will satisfy you or Him, and I believe in you profoundly. I am sure that, whatever be the ghastly struggle, you will go through with it, and find your strength in Him. I pray ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... had been cut entirely off, and that his left arm was also much hacked, apparently by a sword. The guard conducted their doomed prisoner directly by us on the left, and when within three yards of us the appearance of his scarred cheek was ghastly; but as he turned his head to speak, a placid smile, as of heroic resignation to his fate, lit up the other side of his face, forming a contrast almost unearthly. We eagerly stepped forward to address ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... a ghastly array. On litters, stretchers, beds, chairs, lie the deformed, the sick, the moribund, awaiting their turn to be sprinkled with the miraculous waters or blessed by the bishop. These poor people, many of ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Cecil as they had charged together, and her mare, enraged and intoxicated with noise and terror, had torn away at full speed that had outstripped even the swiftest of her Spahis. A little farther on a dog's moan caught her ear; she turned and looked across. Upright, among a ghastly pile of men and chargers, sat the small, snowy poodle of the Chasseurs, beating the air with its little paws, as it had been taught to do when it needed anything, and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... time were very dark, and at several points we could see burning farm homesteads and villages, which to the thoughtful mind denoted the awful destruction and suffering envolved by the ghastly outrage upon humanity, being perpetrated by ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... ahead and led the pursuit in turn. The Spaniards fought with desperate courage, still suffering ghastly losses. But, do what they could to bear up against the English and the wind, they were forced to leeward of Dunkirk, and so out of touch with Parma. This was the result of the Battle of Gravelines, fought on Monday ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... notes of many a bird. Deep in the thickets of the wood With Lakshman and his spouse he stood, There in the horrid shade he saw A giant passing nature's law: Vast as some mountain-peak in size, With mighty voice and sunken eyes, Huge, hideous, tall, with monstrous face, Most ghastly of his giant race. A tiger's hide the Rakshas wore Still reeking with the fat and gore: Huge-faced, like Him who rules the dead, All living things he struck with dread. Three lions, tigers four, ten deer He carried on his iron spear, Two wolves, an elephant's head beside With mighty tusks which ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... there's no known or unknown form of torture I wouldn't undergo to get the old fool to introduce me to the man who composed the sonata; starting with the torture of the old fool's company, which would be ghastly." ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Frayne start and shiver as a little scream escaped her. I didn't wonder. Even I, knowing that it was an illusion and a snare, felt my flesh creeping as I looked at the ghastly ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... we reached the summit of Mount Sneffels! It was in an awful mood of mind, that despite my fatigue, before I descended into the crater which was to shelter us for the night, I paused to behold the sun rise at midnight on the very day of its lowest declension, and enjoyed the spectacle of its ghastly pale rays cast upon the isle which ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... of the owner of the castle he smiled as though he had met a comrade. His was the only familiar face among all those people who were speaking his language. He was ghastly in hue, with sunken features and an impalpable glaze spreading over his eyes. He had no visible wounds, but from under the cloak spread over his abdomen his torn intestines exhaled a fatal warning. The presence of ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... falling and the German flares were commencing to fly. On the way back we met two Algerian troopers and in the gleam of a star shell and the fading twilight they looked more like two escaped denizens of the chamber of horrors than anything I could well imagine. Indeed, their appearance was so ghastly under the weird light of the flares and the fading day, that I involuntarily shivered, hardened though I was by that time to grim sights. Each of them carried on his shoulder the hind-quarter of a cow that had been killed by a shell at a nearby farm, and the dripping blood from the ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... the same hue as the ground. He started up in terror; a long vivid flash lingering more than a minute in the air, disclosed the object against which he had fallen; and paralyzed with horror, pale, ghastly, as if suddenly turned to stone, he remained. He uttered no word nor cry; but flash after flash played around him, and still beheld him gazing in stupefied and motionless horror on the appalling sight ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... might almost be called a bit of plain. Under the trees there the best strawberries grow, and there stood the temple of mysterious and blood-stained rites. Prowling continually round and round one of the trees, the ghastly priest was for centuries ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... I shall never forget. My heart misgave me as she opened the missive, for I could well divine its contents; and I almost reproached myself for being the messenger of such evil tidings. I watched her closely as she read. She was naturally somewhat pale, but I saw her face grow ghastly white before she had read two lines. When she had finished the perusal of the fatal letter, she pressed her hand upon her breast, murmured "Oh God!" and would have fallen to the floor if I had not caught her in ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... feeling rather sorry for the poor chap," remarked Tony. "I should feel ghastly if I had fallen in love with you after you had become engaged to another man, and ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... committed by the other side; and certainly parallels could be found in the French invasion of Algeria fifty years later and in many other wars of the nineteenth century. When men have been fired with the diabolical passions that war arouses, and have grown accustomed to the ghastly sights on battlefields, they cease to be reasoning beings; they become fiends. But unfortunately it is necessary to explain what really occurred, as it is to Vinegar Hill and its terrible associations that the Nationalists of to-day refer with triumph. Songs in praise of the ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... the unpleasant trail of a defeated army. Turks had fallen by the way and the natives would not bury them. Our aircraft had bombed the road, and the dead men, cattle and horses, and smashed transport were ghastly sights and made the air offensive. There they lay, one long line of dead men and animals, and if a London fog had descended to blind the eyes of our Army the sense of smell would still have carried a scout on the direct line ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... moved to pronounce his name, but some swift intuitive warning restrained the utterance. Suddenly a new horror, a ghastly possibility, thrust itself for the first time before her, and she felt as though some hand of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of the Triple Bough And the ghastly Dreams that tend you, Your growth began with the life of Man And only his death can end you: They may tug in line at your hempen twine, They may flourish with axe and saw, But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs In the living rock ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... bayonet-thrust or stroke of sword. More than one in his death agony slew the foe at whose hand he himself had received the mortal wound; and their bodies stiffened as they lay, locked in the death grip. Again the clouds came over the moon; a thick fog crept up from the river, wrapping from sight the ghastly havoc of the battlefield; and long before midnight the fighting stopped perforce, for the fog and the smoke and the gloom were such that no one could see a yard away. By degrees each side drew off. [Footnote: Keane writes: "The enemy ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... on her face, which had turned to a ghastly pallor. The barmaid, concluding that she was ill, served her promptly and ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... Vale of Tears afar, The spectral camp is fled; Faith shineth as a morning star, Our ghastly fears are ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... heard the approaching step, and turned round sharply. The detective saw that his face was ghastly pale in the moonlight, and his brows wrinkled ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... to bed, with the 'day of great importance' tingling in his ears. He could not go to sleep for reflections on the subject, and even after shutting his eyes it hovered over him in ghastly dreams. There was an immense table in an immense hall, with ten thousand parsons on the one side, and ten thousand old maids on the other. At the head presided Mrs. Marsh, with the bishop in waiting behind; while he himself was sitting in an arm-chair, suspended by ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... violent, is combined with the fantastic story of Erisichthon, 'a churlish husband-man,' who in the nymphs' despite cuts down the sacred tree of Ceres, into which the chaste Fidelia had been transformed. For this offence the goddess dooms him to the plague of hunger. The ghastly description of this monster, who may be compared with Browne's Limos, was probably suggested by some similar descriptions in the Faery Queen (I. iv. and III. xii). Erisichthon is put to all manner of shifts to satisfy the hunger with which he is ever consumed, and is at last forced to ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... and a nobler neck never fell before low beast—I strode away towards Westminster, cured of half my indignation at the death of Charles the First. Many people hurried past me, chiefly of the more tender sort, revolting at the butchery. In their ghastly faces, as they turned them back, lest the sight should be coming after them, great sorrow was to be seen, and horror, and pity, and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... taking place sometimes at places and on days regularly set apart for the really bloody work. The fighters were partially protected by a sort of armour, and the wounds inflicted were generally more ghastly than dangerous; though a son of Bismarck was said to have been nearly killed at Bonn a few years before, and there was sometimes serious maiming. Perhaps one may say it was nothing but very rough play, but it was the play of young savages, whose ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... soul, at enmity with gods and men, could find no rest; so violently was his mind torn and distracted by a consciousness of guilt. Accordingly his countenance was pale, his eyes ghastly, his pace one while quick, another slow [citus modo, modo tardus incessus]; indeed, in all his looks there was an air of distraction."—Sallust, Catilina, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Timorous, how many professed pilgrims hast thou befooled and turned back! How often does she attack and affright many real pilgrims! I am sure she has often made my poor heart ache with her ghastly looks and terrifying speeches. O may we ever say to her, in our Lord's words, 'Get thee behind me, Satan; thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... literature, and is worthy to be ranked with the works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in fiction,—an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... bridal chamber, Death! Come to the mother, when she feels, For the first time, her first-born's breath; Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, 5 And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake's shock, the ocean's storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm With banquet song, and dance, and wine,— 10 And thou art terrible!—The tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... much immediate effect on the lower forms of life—including human beings, if you'll pardon the expression. But here, it causes a ghastly carnage, so ghastly it sickens me even to think ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... all the following night armed bands wandered about the streets of Laon searching everywhere for relatives, friends, or servitors of the bishop, for all whom the angry populace knew or supposed to be such, and wreaking on their persons or their houses a ghastly or a brutal vengeance. In a fit of terror many poor innocents fled before the blind wrath of the populace; some were caught and cut down pell-mell amongst the guilty; others escaped through the vineyards ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... ghastly women, squeezing each other tightly, followed the maneuvers of the boat. The music of La Grenonillere continued to sound in the distance, and appeared with its cadences to accompany the movements of the somber fisherman; and the river which now concealed a corpse, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... feet. Young Cameron's face became ghastly pale. His hand clutched the top of Mr. Rae's desk. Twice or thrice he moistened his lips preparing to speak, but uttered not a word. "Good God, my boy!" said the Captain hoarsely. "Don't stand like that. Tell ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... thin, pale girl all in black, who only two months before had lost both daughter and husband; for the child had died scarcely a week or two before her father, Anthony Babington, had died miserably on the gallows near St. Giles' Fields, where he had so often met his friends after dark. It was a ghastly tale, told in fragments to Robin here and there during his journeyings by men in taverns, before whom he must keep a brave face. And a few farmers were there, old Mr. Merton among them, come in to welcome the son of the Squire of Matstead, returned under a feigned name, unknown even to his ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... madness, some ghastly joke again. By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It was my brother Henry. He is my double. He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn. Slander, the viper, has wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. I ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... orders to shoot her if she should spring upon me, but on no account to fire before me. Kleinboy was to stand ready to hand me my Purdey rifle, in case the two-grooved Dixon should not prove sufficient. My men as yet had been steady, but they were in a precious stew, their faces having assumed a ghastly paleness, and I had a painful feeling that I could ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, 'with a ghastly affectation of life,' after all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... reply, but pointed to a corner near the door. I looked in the direction indicated, and by the dim light of the lamp saw to my horror—a rattlesnake. I looked around for Dick; he was leaning against the wall, his face ghastly pale. Before I was aware of it Dick had kicked in the strong door. Osborne must have had the same idea for he too rushed for the door. They both reached the threshold at the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... delusion of the cup, and yet I wondered, too, if perchance I might not have caught something of that American spirit of equality which is said to be peculiar to republics. Needless to say I had never believed in the existence of this spirit, but had considered it rather a ghastly jest, having been a reader of our own periodical press since earliest youth. I mean to say, there could hardly be a stable society in which one had no superiors, because in that case one would not know who were one's inferiors. Nevertheless, I repeat that I had felt a most novel enlargement ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the way into the "best room," a sunny, square room, carpeted with a faded and patched rag carpet, and papered with a horrible white-and-green-striped wallpaper, where a few ghastly effigies of dead members of the family hung in variously sized oval walnut frames. The house resounded with singing, laughter, whistling, tramping of boots, and scufflings. Half-grown boys came to the door and crooked their fingers at the children, who ran out, ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... the name of the murderess. "Scene on the scaffold!" It was a little after nine o'clock; the enterprising paper had promptly got out its gibbet edition. A morning of midwinter, roofs and ways covered with soot-grimed snow under the ghastly fog-pall; and, whilst I lay there in my bed, that woman had been led out and hanged—hanged. I thought with horror of the possibility that I might sicken and die in that wilderness of houses, nothing above me but "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." Overcome ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... feverish brightness of her eyes, she would have looked like a corpse. Her wrinkled forehead, her hollow cheeks, her white lips told their terrible tale of the suffering of years. The ghastly appearance of her face was heightened by the furnishing of the room. This doomed woman, dying slowly day by day, delighted in bright colors and sumptuous materials. The paper on the walls, the curtains, the carpet presented the hues of the rainbow. She lay on a couch covered ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... their solicitude, for the thought of death is always the least supportable when it draws near to the merely sensual and selfish. Sometimes they held him up; sometimes, with mistaken helpfulness, they beat him between the shoulders; and when the poor wretch lay back ghastly and spent after a paroxysm of coughing, they would sometimes peer into his face, doubtfully exploring it for any mark of life. There is no one but has some virtue: that of the clerk was courage; and he would make haste to reassure them ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her tears.... She knew she should have been glad, relieved. With Bonbright she had lived in daily dread. She had not loved him, and the fear that his restraint would break, that he would force his love upon her, had made her days a ghastly dream.... She should be crying out with the joy and relief of his removal. But she felt no relief, felt no joy.... She could not ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... I had conversed too long with abstracted truth to trust myself with the immortal thoughts of love. THAT S. L. MIGHT HAVE BEEN MINE, AND NOW NEVER CAN—these are the two sole propositions that for ever stare me in the face, and look ghastly in at my poor brain. I am in some sense proud that I can feel this dreadful passion—it gives me a kind of rank in the kingdom of love—but I could have wished it had been for an object that at least could have understood its value and pitied its excess. You say her ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... know how long it took—the time had come when Polly's head was to cease from staring down in a ghastly one-eyed way at her body, and it was to come down and crown ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... no longer now The song-birds singing at her heart, but there A thousand gnashing furies made their lair, And urged her on; her nearest pathway lay Over a little hill, and on its brow A group of trees, whereof each blackened bough Bore up to heaven as if in protest mute Its clustering load of ghastly charnel fruit,[12] The swaddled forms of all the village dead— Maid, lusty warrior, and toothless hag, The infant and the conjurer with his bag, Peacefully rotting in their airy bed. As on a battle ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... surprised, dumfounded, overwhelmed. The only thought that now ran through his addled brain was that he simply had to do something. He couldn't stand there forever, like a fool, waving a pistol. In a minute or two they would all be laughing at him. It was ghastly. The wave of self-pity, of self-commiseration submerged him completely. Why, oh why, had he got himself into this dreadful pickle? He had merely come to talk it over with Nellie, that and nothing more. And now, see ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... Hela (see note, canto I: 23) was hideous in appearance. Half of her body was livid in color and the other half bore the ghastly pallor of death. ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... and in this awful hour, with that ghastly form before me, truth and not false delicacy must prevail. I say then that the Countess of Hurstmonceux hunted me down and run me to earth, but all in such feminine fashion that I scarcely knew I was hunted. I was flattered by her preference, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... contrary, he is writing a fifth and sixth, and has carried his plan as far as a fiftieth and sixtieth volume of the book called 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy;' but they are rather to be attributed to his ghastly ghost, which is said to walk the purlieus of Covent ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... never been able to learn the ghastly details of her death. The police and an examining magistrate were said to be investigating the case, but nothing ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... dead of night From forth dull sleep by dreadful fancy waking, That thinks she hath beheld some ghastly sprite, Whose grim aspect sets every joint a-shaking: What terror 'tis! but she, in worser taking, From sleep disturbed, heedfully doth view The sight which makes supposed ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... they laid themselves down, the cold earth feeling agreeable to their fevered skins; and when the earth around them grew heated, they got friends to dig a few inches deeper, again and again, seeking a cooler and cooler couch. In this ghastly effort many of them died, literally in their own graves, and were buried where they lay! It need not be surprising, though we did everything in our power to relieve and save them, that the natives associated us with the white men who had so dreadfully afflicted them, and that their blind thirst ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... too rude a jest to share with her. Had poor Viola once grasped Harold Lind's estimation of her she would have as soon gazed upon herself in her coffin. Harold's comprehension of the essentials was beyond Jane Carew's. It was fairly ghastly, partaking of the nature of X-rays, but it never disturbed Harold Lind. He went along his dance-track undisturbed, his blue eyes never losing their high lights of glee, his lips never losing their inscrutable smile at some happy understanding between life and himself. ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Mr. Merrick recoiled. The face was seared with livid scars, the nose crushed to one side, the mouth crooked and set in a sneering grin. One eye was nearly closed and the other round and wide open. A more forbidding and ghastly countenance Mr. Merrick had never beheld and in his surprise ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... thee, to thousands, of whom each And one as all a ghastly gap did make In his own kind and kindred, whom to teach Forgetfulness were mercy for their sake; The Archangel's trump, not Glory's, must awake Those whom they thirst for; though the sound of Fame May for a moment ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... you were all in the wrong, and I feel greatly annoyed to find my young gentlemen conducting themselves like the disreputable low boys who frequent the fairs and racecourses of the county. Look at yourselves. Did you ever see such a ghastly sight? Burr major, your face is horrible. As for you, Dicksee, I am ashamed of you. Suppose any of your relatives presented themselves at this moment, and wanted to see you. What could I say? There, ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... there, he was aware of a man in black beside him, like himself, ghastly to see, with shadows and fires for eyes, and thin, parted lips that showed wolfish teeth, strong, stern, with ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... worst corner in the way of trenches I had seen since we came to Flanders. Behind the ditch rows of crosses, black and white, stood up a few feet away, ghastly reminders in the half darkness of the toll that had been paid to take and hold the trenches. The defenders here were buried ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... a few stars. Cautiously he ventured to shine his compass close to the ground. He was still headed right. The ghastly sink ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... make confidences until their secrets become insupportable. However, Aunt Rebecca was now wide awake, and had trumpeted a pretty shrill reveiller. And Gertrude had started up, her elbow on the pillow, and her large eyes open; and the dream, I suppose, was shivered and flown, and something rather ghastly at ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... wind, the moon rose. Far indeed from being visible, she yet shed a little glimmer of light over the plain, revealing a world as wild as ever the frozen north outspread—as wild as ever poet's despairing vision of desolation. I see it! I see it! but how shall I make my reader see it with me? It was ghastly. The only similitude of life was the perplexed and multitudinous motion of the drifting, falling flakes. No shape was to be seen, no sound but that of the wind to be heard. It was like the dream of a delirious child after ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... above this scene of desolation. On that night, it was chilling, with a superstitious awe, the hamlets of New England and the gilded chambers of Versailles; but it is characteristic of La Salle, that, beset as he was with perils, and surrounded with ghastly images of death, he coolly notes down the phenomenon,—not as a portentous messenger of war and woe, but rather as an object of scientific curiosity. [Footnote: This was the "Great Comet of 1680.". Dr. B. A. Gould writes me: "It appeared in December, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... each way that, when described, it was too late to alter the helm. Its giant shape filled the foreground, towering high above the masts, grim and gaunt and ghastly, immovable as the adamantine buttresses of a frowning seaboard, while the liner lurched and staggered like a wounded thing in agony as her engines slowly drew her back from the rampart against which she ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... sister, and old David Deans, the patriarch of St. Leonard's Crags, and Butler, and Dumbiedikes, eloquent in his silence, and Mr. Bartoline Saddle-tree and his prudent helpmate, and Porteous swinging in the wind, and Madge Wildfire, full of finery and madness, and her ghastly mother.—Again, there is Meg Merrilies, standing on her rock, stretched on her bier with "her head to the east," and Dirk Hatterick (equal to Shakespear's Master Barnardine), and Glossin, the soul of an attorney, and Dandy Dinmont, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... clear and typical case of opium or morphine poisoning. To this conclusion all his symptoms seemed to point with absolute certainty. The coated tongue, which he protruded slowly and tremulously in response to a command bawled in his ear; his yellow skin and ghastly expression; his contracted pupils and the stupor from which he could hardly be roused by the roughest handling and which yet did not amount to actual insensibility; all these formed a distinct and coherent group of symptoms, not only pointing plainly to the nature of the drug, but also ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... command the principal streets, and barricades erected at various important points. Just at daylight, Renneberg himself, in complete armor, rode into the square, and it was observed that he looked ghastly as a corpse. He was followed by thirty troopers, armed like himself, from head to foot. "Stand by me now," he cried to the assembled throng; "fail me not at this moment, for now I am for the first time ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to play that they were living in the lower regions. Thereupon the whole party followed him down into the hold. The hatches and all the other openings were closed, and then Blackbeard began to illuminate the scene with fire and brimstone. The sulphur burned, the fumes rose, a ghastly light spread over the countenances of the desperadoes, and very soon some of them began to gasp and cough and implore the captain to let in some fresh air, but Blackbeard was bound to have a good game, and he proceeded to burn more ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... while the husbandman sleeps Taketh unwearied pains, a vigilant guard he keeps Tirelessly watching, and tending each evil plant. These are his pleasure gardens, leased to him through time Where he walketh to and fro, chanting a demon song; Tending with ghastly fingers, the scarlet buds of wrong, And drinking greedily in the ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... But I begin to fancy it will never happen. My resolutions, where are they, what comes of them? Nothing. I have tried everything except the opera. Everything else has been rejected. For a week I have not gone to bed at all. I wait and see those ghastly gray fingers smoothing my pillow. I am not wanted. I am crowded out. My hands tremble and I cannot write. My eyes fail and I cannot see. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... spots which the Frenchmen visited bore evidences of a ghastly tragedy. So numerous were the human bones bleaching on the sandy soil that they called it Massacre Island (to-day Dauphin Island). It was surmised—and with some plausibility—that here had perished some portion of the ill-fated following of Pamphile de Narvaez. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... only watch and pity, and keep the bairns in the chambers that looked on the sea, so that their young eyes should not gaze on so ghastly ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... instance, we took nine days to get here from Paris, spending only one day at Chambery, for the sake of Les Charmettes and Rousseau. Robert played the 'Dream' on the old harpsichord, the keys of which rattled in a ghastly way, as if it were the bones of him who once so 'dreamed.' Then there was the old watch hung up, without a tick in it. At St. Jean de Maurienne we got into difficulties with diligences, and submitted ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... position, and people were not slow in coming to the conclusion that he required the stimulus and the strength of a solid majority behind him to bring out his peculiar talents. At all events, his first speech following the introduction of the Home Rule Bill was a ghastly failure. It was listened to in almost unbroken silence from the beginning to the end—not that the speech had not plenty of cleverness in it, the small cleverness of small points—but it was badly delivered. It did not seem to rise to the heights expected on such an occasion; in short, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor |
