phantom of the mind

We cannot strictly speaking fix our faith on a phantom, unless we admit faith itself to be but a phantom of the mind, yet such is the pretence of all those who make so much clamour about the word religion.

When I drink my sorrow's o'er; I think of doubts and fears no more; But scatter to the railing wind Each gloomy phantom of the mind!

Therefore it is readily dismissed as a phantom of the mind, and the mind is all the more readily dismissed for its harbouring of such fears and delusions.

Hearts, chilled and silent, as the pensive beam, Whose shadowy glory resting on the pall, Casts on the dead a sad portentous gleam, And serves past hours of rapture to recall, Till the soul roused herself with one wild scream, As shuddering nature felt the powerful call, And I awoke in ecstasy to find 'Twas but a fleeting phantom of the mind!

At the time we came on it first we were unaware of our propinquity to it, and this mansion looming on us suddenly through the vapours teemed a cantrip of witchcraft, a dwelling's ghost, grey, eerie, full of frights, a phantom of the mind rather than a habitable home.