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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Ghosts

  • For spirits, freed from mortal laws, with ease
  • Assume what sexes and what shapes they please.
  • Pope.

  • Thou canst not say, I did it: never shake
  • Thy gory locks at me.
  • Shakespeare.

  • It was about to speak, when the cock crew,
  • And then it started like a guilty thing
  • Upon a fearful summons.
  • Shakespeare.

  • Many ghosts, and forms of fright,
  • Have started from their graves to-night;
  • They have driven sleep from mine eyes away.
  • Longfellow.

  • But, soft: behold! lo, where it comes again!
  • I’ll cross it, though it blast me.—Stay, illusion!
  • If thou hast any sound, or use a voice,
  • Speak to me.
  • Shakespeare.

  • I can call up spirits from the vasty deep.—
  • ——Why so can I, or so can any man;
  • But will they come, when you do call for them?
  • Shakespeare.

  • Avaunt! and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee!
  • Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
  • Thou hast no speculation in those eyes,
  • Which thou dost glare with!
  • Shakespeare.

  • Some have mistaken blocks and posts,
  • For spectres, apparitions, ghosts,
  • With saucer-eyes and horns; and some
  • Have heard the devil beat a drum.
  • Butler.

  • I am thy father’s spirit;
  • Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night
  • And, for the day, confin’d to fast in fires,
  • Till the foul crimes, done in my days of nature,
  • Are burnt and purg’d away.
  • Shakespeare.

  • They gather round, and wonder at the tale
  • Of horrid apparition, tall and ghostly,
  • That walks at dead of night, or takes his stand
  • O’er some new-open’d grave, and (strange to tell),
  • Evanishes at crowing of the cock.
  • Blair.

  • Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!—
  • Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn’d,
  • Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell,
  • Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
  • Thou comest in such questionable shape
  • That I will speak to thee.
  • Shakespeare.

  • O, answer me:
  • Let me not burst in ignorance! but tell,
  • Why thy canoniz’d bones, hearsed in death,
  • Have burst their cerements! why the sepulchre,
  • Wherein we saw thee quietly in-urn’d,
  • Hath op’d his ponderous and marble jaws,
  • To cast thee up again?
  • Shakespeare.