It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon when the book came under my hand; and mixed with my interest in the story was an anxiety lest the pictures on the walls should leave their nails and come and lay themselves at my feet; that was what the pictures had been doing in Rochester and other places where the
disembodied spirits were beginning to make themselves felt.
And it was
disembodied. To that intelligence there could be no objective knowledge of a body.
Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at the threshold of her chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note some of the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom, with little restraint as to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as they could be audible to nobody save a
disembodied listener like ourself.
Whereas I now found Barnard to be a
disembodied spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for Tom-cats.
Silent as a
disembodied spirit he advanced toward the tree.
But listen,' said she, smilingly putting up her finger to check my impatient reply: 'in six months you shall hear from Frederick precisely where I am; and if you still retain your wish to write to me, and think you can maintain a correspondence all thought, all spirit - such as
disembodied souls or unimpassioned friends, at least, might hold, - write, and I will answer you.'
You feel like a
disembodied spirit, immaterial; and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing; and you feel an intimate communion with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the iridescence of the river.
But even in its utmost agony--even in those terrible throes that love must suffer before it can be
disembodied of selfish desire--my love for you sufficed to withhold me from suicide, without the aid of any other motive.
So strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of
disembodied beings.
With the noiselessness of
disembodied spirits we moved stealthily along the deserted streets, but not until we were within sight of the plain beyond the city did I commence to breathe freely.
He speaks no English and vanishes as quickly and as mysteriously after he has performed some valorous deed, as though he were a
disembodied spirit.
Naturally superstitious, they fully believed that they had seen the
disembodied spirit of the dead man, and now they cast fearful glances about them in expectation of the ghost's early return to the scene of the ruin they had inflicted upon him during their recent raid upon his home, and discussed in affrighted whispers the probable nature of the vengeance which the spirit would inflict upon them should he return to find them in possession of his gold.
disembodied - not having a material body; "bodiless ghosts"