Definition of "phantasmal"

The matter of which dreams are made / Not more endowed with actual life / Than this phantasmal portraiture / Of wandering human thought.

1813, Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Canto VII”, in Queen Mab; […], London: […] P. B. Shelley, […], page 98

Mr. Audley, the chairman, was an amiable, elderly man who still wore Gladstone collars; he was a kind of symbol of all that phantasmal and yet fixed society.

1910 October 1, G[ilbert] K[eith] Chesterton, “The Queer Feet”, in The Innocence of Father Brown, London, New York, N.Y.: Cassell and Company, published 1911, page 80

[H]e had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. […] And it was the din of all these hollowsounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.

1916 December 29, James Joyce, chapter II, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, page 93

Her secrets: old feather fans, tassled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. […] Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

1922 February, James Joyce, “[Episode 1: Telemachus]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […], part I [Telemachia], page 10