"Empyrean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... astounding—inexhaustible; through all my anguish of resistance I found a kind of fierce joy in following her. It was lucidity at white heat: the last sublimation of passion. She might have been an angel arguing a point in the empyrean if she hadn't been, so completely, a woman ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... ad astra!" murmured his dragoman enigmatically, and, lifting his eyes, he followed the Angel's flight into the empyrean. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... heaven. On the contrary, he is related to all below him and all that is above him by ties which enter into the very fibre of his being. He is himself a child of nature, nurtured on the bosom of Mother Earth and raising his eyes to the height of the Empyrean. Evolution, whatever it may be, is a cosmic process—and man is a link in a chain, or rather, a living member of a living universe. For an evolutionist to argue man's relation to his physical environment to be external in its ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... of the spring-tide's volume makes a fresh comment on thy name, Each portal of the Empyrean murmurs ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... move was to stand on his head and cover his face with his paws. Then he did several back flips and wailed aloud in his misery and woe, his yelps of distress quite filling the empyrean. But only for the space of a few seconds. Recovering his customary aplomb he made a flying leap for the top of the gate, his yelps now succeeded by ambitious growls—and in self-defense The Laird was forced to spray him again as ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... other able idiots pouring forth voluminous opinions. A tidal wave of printer's ink has swept across the continent, churned to atrous foam by hurricanes of lawless gibberish and wild gusts of resounding gab. The empyrean has been ripped and the tympana of the too patient gods ravished with fulsome commendation and foolish curse, showers of Parthian arrows and wholesale consignments of soft-soap darkening the sun as they hurtled hither and yon through the shrinking atmosphere. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... can be once persuaded that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind thus wandering in ecstasy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... his stoopings and reposes; but his proper element is the sky, and in the suburbs of the empyrean. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... aggrandize the priesthood on the ruins of nations and governments. A jealous religion has exclusively seized on the minds of men, and persuaded them that they live upon earth merely to occupy themselves with their future happiness in the unknown regions of the empyrean. It is time that this prestige should cease; it is time that the human race should occupy itself with its own true interests. The interests of the people will always be incompatible with those of the guides who believe they have acquired an imprescriptible ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... every other 'vantage Was but of value as subservient to him. As is the gold of costly workmanship Round the fair gem imbedded in the centre. Oh! Gaspar, were I sure I could o'ertake Thy spirit, soaring up in its young flight, This little steel should free my anxious soul, To join thine in the high empyrean, And, fondly link'd, in joy ascend to Heaven. Why waits the friar? Some idle mummery, To him more sacred than my Gaspar's relic, From his dull memory hath chased his promise. Why waits my woman, whom I have despatch'd To learn the history of my Gaspar's death? Alas! ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... student over his flickering lamp; twelve amid the flaming glories of Orion's belt, if he crosses the meridian at that fated hour; twelve by the weary couch of languishing humanity; twelve in the star-paved courts of the Empyrean; twelve for the heaving tides of the ocean; twelve for the weary arm of labor; twelve for the toiling brain; twelve for the watching, waking, broken heart; twelve for the meteor which blazes for ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... for a few moments. The man had always been an enigma to her. She could not understand a nature that soared into the spiritual empyrean one moment, and in the next fell floundering into the bottomless pit of materialism. The undulating curve which marked the development of the Rincon mind was to her ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... had descended upon me. I could have spoken in blank verse of Shakesperian beauty, all sorts of great ideas flashed through my mind; it was as though the bonds of my flesh had been loosened and left the spirit free to soar to the empyrean of its native power. The sensations that poured in upon me are indescribable. I seemed to live more keenly, to reach to a higher joy, and sip the goblet of a subtler thought than ever it had been my lot to do before. I was another and most ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... limitation; if the spectator can be once persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind thus wandering in ecstacy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the stage ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... accidental, unguided, and probably ruinous ways. If one listens, for example, to the preaching of liberal ministers, one sees that every accent of their teaching has been affected by this prevalent and permeating thought. The God they preach no longer sits afar like Dante's deity in the stationary empyrean beyond all reach of change; their God is here in the midst of the human struggle, "their Captain in the well-fought fight." H. G. Wells may be a poor theologian but he is one of our best interpreters of popular thought and his idea of God, marching through the world "like fifes ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... could be accomplished by philosophy. This he regarded as a grand intellectual discipline for the purification of the soul. By this it was to be disenthralled from the bondage of sense[553] and raised into the empyrean of pure thought "where truth and reality shine forth." All souls have the faculty of knowing, but it is only by reflection, and self-knowledge, and intellectual discipline, that the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty—that is, to the vision ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... were fully understood. He thought of her as steadfast and wholesome in mind; one who sought for the best; but beyond this there was an ethereal something that could not be defined. Then a simile struck him: she was like the snow that towered high into the empyrean in British Columbia. In this, however, he was wrong, for there was warm human passion in the girl, though ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... after galaxy, and infinity after infinity, and so man and angel passed on, viewing the universe, until the sun was out of sight—until our solar system appeared as a speck of light against the black empyrean, and there was only darkness. And they looked onward, and in the infinities of light before, a speck of light appeared, and suddenly they were in the midst of rushing worlds. But they passed beyond that system, and beyond system after system, and infinity after infinity, until ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... lay the Itombo village, belonging to Gidi Mavunga's eldest son. Beyond it, the tree-clad heights, rolling away into the distance, faded from blue-brown to the faintest azure, hardly to be distinguished from the empyrean above. The climate of these breezy uplands is superior even to that of Banza Nokki, which lies some 170 feet lower; and the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... empyrean courtly circles his relations were quite as gratifying. The Emperor made no concealment of his partiality, and again insisted ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... of life for granted, referring to the inignorable catastrophe of the fire as a grand elemental phenomenon and spectacle, and soaring easily away and beyond all fact and literalness, into the tender vague, the rare empyrean. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... to see him fall as the others had done. But alas! he did not fall. For a few seconds he rocked to and fro upon his great wings, then commenced to travel upwards in vast circles, which grew gradually more narrow, till he appeared to be flying almost straight into the empyrean. I stared and stared. Everybody stared, till that enormous bird became, first a mere blot upon the blue, and at length but a speck. Then it vanished altogether into regions far ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... narrow cage. By heaven! I will unlock my bosom's door. And blow thee forth upon the boundless tide Of thought's creation, where thy eagle wing May soar from this dull terrene mass away, To yonder empyrean vault—like rocket (sky)— To mingle with thy cognate essences Of Love and Immortality, until Thou burstest with thine own intensity, And scatterest into millions of bright stars, Each one a part of that refulgent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... womb conceiv'd A growing burden. Mean while Warr arose, And fields were fought in Heav'n; wherein remaind (For what could else) to our Almighty Foe Cleer Victory, to our part loss and rout 770 Through all the Empyrean: down they fell Driv'n headlong from the Pitch of Heaven, down Into this Deep, and in the general fall I also; at which time this powerful Key Into my hand was giv'n, with charge to keep These Gates for ever shut, which none can pass Without my op'ning. Pensive here I sat Alone, but long I sat ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... it—Byfield in his Monster Foolardi. One stroke of this knife (always supposing I miss my own hand), and the rope is severed: our common friend scales the empyrean. But he'll come back—oh, never doubt he'll come back!—and begin the dam business over again. Tha's the law 'gravity 'cording ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pump-handle, and play at ball with him beneath the kite. The good-natured sailor consented, and thus the little voluptuary secured a terrestrial and ever-varying excitement, while occasional glances upward soothed him with the mild consciousness that there was his property still hovering in the empyrean; amid all which, poor love-sick David was seized with a desire to hear the name of her he loved, and her praise, even from these small lips. "So you are very fond ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... beautiful thought in language of corresponding beauty. Such unforced ornateness is rarely met in the domain of amateur poetry. We feel certain that Miss Salls has already become a fixed star in the empyrean of the United. Exalted poetry of quite another type is furnished by the work of our new Director, Rev. Frederick Chenault, whose two exquisite lyrics, "Birth" and "The Sea of Somewhere," appear in this issue. With little use of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... adjusted as to convert him into a perfectly dirigible parachute. Swift as his descent was, he alighted on the ground as lightly as a tuft of down. It was the poetry of motion. One or two writers have insisted that the horned lark's empyrean song compares favorably with that of the European skylark; but, loyal and patriotic an American as we are, honesty compels us to concede that our bird's voice is much feebler and less musical than that of his celebrated relative across the sea. It sounds ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... Eumenides have looked, not Xantippes of the pit, snake-tressed, finger-threatening, but radiantly calm as on antique gems; for him paws impatient the winged courser of the gods, champing unwelcome bit: him the starry deeps, the empyrean glooms, and ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... mark the clarion shout— "Go where the winds of victory whirl you!" His eagle organ, petering out, Whines like a sick and muted curlew; A plaintive dirge supplants the paean That used to rock the empyrean. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... the rocks in the sea; that is why I believe in our coming doom, for, on those tablets, we have calculated it to a certainty. But who can calculate evidence of the future fate of the soul? If, indeed, the old order should not pass away—if the depths should remain below and the empyrean still keep its place above—then, to be sure, your studies would not be in vain; for then your soul, which is fixed on spiritual, supernatural and sublime conceptions, would be drawn upwards to the great Intelligence of which it is the offspring, to the very god, and become ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... its depth could be probed by science! A man lived who could measure it from end to end; foretell its term; handle the young cherub as were he a shot owl! We who have flown into cousinship with the empyrean, and disported among immortal hosts, our base birth as a child of Time is made bare to us!—our wings are cut! Oh, then, if science is this victorious enemy of love, let us love science! was the logic of the lady's heart; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... worlds of light. See, in his orbit sure Each takes his journey bright, Led by an unseen hand through the vast maze of night. See how the pale moon rolls Her silver wheel.... See Saturn, father of the golden hours, While round him, bright and blest, The whole empyrean showers Its glorious streams of light on this low world of ours. But who to these can turn And weigh them 'gainst a weeping world like this, Nor feel his spirit burn To grasp so sweet a bliss And mourn that exile ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... pines rising row and row from the hollow pointed heavenwards with all their sombre spires, and led the eye upwards ever over the rock that lost its greyness and glinted to the gleam of snow far up in the empyrean that was sundered from earth by the vapours and wholly spiritual. Alton realized dimly a little of the motive of the scene, and felt that the world was good, for, laying down the frypan, he stood up stretching his arms above his head as he rejoiced in ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... Kostroma and Saratov ones. A pity you don't read the letters. There are some very fine passages in them. For instance, not long ago a lieutenant writes to a friend describing a ball very wittily.—Splendid! "Dear friend," he says, "I live in the regions of the Empyrean, lots of girls, bands playing, flags flying." He's put a lot of feeling into his description, a whole lot. I've kept the letter on purpose. Would you like ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... popular mind in abstract ideas, or in the generalized forms of ethical thought, it did much towards forming that public taste which required and prompted the drama to rise above a mere geography of facts into the empyrean of truth; and under the instructions of which Shakespeare learned to make his persons embodiments of general nature as well as of individual character. For the excellences of the Shakespearian Drama were probably owing as much to the mental preparation of the time as to the powers of the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the Gerusalemme Liberata, the masterpiece of the immortal Torquato Tasso! But the brutal-minded booksellers scorn the fruit of my vigils, and in the empyrean the Muse veils her face so as not to witness the humiliation inflicted ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... attempering reason's strain; O'ercome by tenderness, and terror vain, I cry, "Whence comest thou, O spirit blest?" She from her beauteous breast A branch of laurel and of palm displays, And, answering, thus she says. "From th' empyrean seat of holy love Alone thy ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... its wings of heavenly azure with which it soared light as a lark into the empyrean, and now grovels on the earth, weighed down by the burden ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... been well said by a very imaginative writer, that "when a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird's-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven." And in like manner, when a thinker frees himself from all the trammels of fact, and propounds a "bold ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... which I must honestly say, as Emerson, I believe, once honestly said of some of the writings of Swedenborg: 'I read them with an unction and an afflatus quite indescribable.' They lift one to the empyrean like nothing else I know of outside the Bible. There is such a saintly purity; such a wondrous, rich, mellow joyousness; such bounding elasticity of spirit; such an evidently irresistible gush of song in the heart; such broad catholicity of religion, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... unfaithfulness to the memory of Beatrice, and to the revival of fidelity of love for her. One poem, the last, remains; in which he tells how a sigh, issuing from his heart, and guided by Love, beholds his lady in glory in the empyrean. The book closes ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and flowers there were none; the very trees drooped; and summer assumed the blighted appearance of winter, as it went forth in silence and flame to abridge the means of sustenance to man. In vain did the eye strive to find the wreck of some northern cloud in the stainless empyrean, which might bring hope of change and moisture to the oppressive and windless atmosphere. All was serene, burning, annihilating. We the besiegers were in the comparison little affected by these evils. The woods around afforded us shade,—the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... important policeman vanishing from his uniform—the helmet falling over the collar, the tunic doubling in at the belt, the knees giving way, and the unheard, merry laughter of the disenuniformed spirit winging its way truncheonless into the Empyrean. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... heroic Thought that longed to breathe empyrean air, Failed of its feathers, fell to earth, and perisht of ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... thy wings o'er the empyrean, and away Fleetly athwart the untravelled wilds of space, To where the Sun-light sheds his earliest beams, And blaze the stars, that vision vainly scans In distant regions of the universe! Tell me, Air-wanderer! ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... sentences and struck out similitudes; but by what far finer and more mysterious mechanism Shakespeare organized his dramas, and gave life and individuality to his Ariel and his Hamlet? Wherein lies that life; how have they attained that shape and individuality? Whence comes that empyrean fire, which irradiates their whole being, and pierces, at least in starry gleams, like a diviner thing, into all hearts? Are these dramas of his not verisimilar only, but true; nay, truer than reality ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... of love through the murky streets and lanes of Glamerton, as certainly a divine messenger as any seraph crossing the blue empyrean upon level wing. And if any one should take exception to this, on the ground that she sought her own service and neglected home duties, I would, although my object has not been to set her forth as an exemplar, take the opportunity ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... sweet skylarks springing skyward, singing, Piercing the empyrean of blinding light, So shall our souls take flight, serenely winging, Soaring on azure heights to God's delight; While from below through sombre deeps come stealing The floating notes of earthward ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... the clouds, the world with all its care and heartaches shut out, basking in this glorious sunlight, sailing on in this clear, bracing, microbeless atmosphere. The clouds beneath our feet, the sun above our heads, and God's empyrean all about us. What can be more inspiring and grand? How does the chorus ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... listened. What had I to say that could interest him? But he was full of the wonders of travel, the strangeness of the new world and the new people. Niagara had shaken him to the soul, he told me; on the wings of its thunder he had soared to the empyrean. How his fanciful turns of expression come back to me as I write of him! He was proud of his English, which was in general ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... we descend from the chariot of the empyrean where we are riding with gods and apostles, and enter into one drawn by mortal coursers. We go out for a drive, and alight from the carriage in the poplar grove, to meander in its shades, along ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... There now seemed to be fewer stars in the heavens; it was as though a milky way had fallen from on high, rolling its glittering dust of worlds, and transferring the revolutions of the planets from the empyrean to earth. A bluish light streamed all around; there was naught but heaven left; the buildings and the trees assumed a visionary aspect in the mysterious glow of those thousands of tapers, whose number still ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... cupola. Immortality is a beautiful young woman seated on a cloud. Mercury gazes at her, caduceus in hand; Diana caresses her great hound; Saturn, an old man, rests his head on his hand; Mars, Apollo, Venus, and a little cupid are scattered in the Empyrean, and Jupiter presides over the party. Below, a balcony rail runs round the cupola, and looking over it, an old lady, dressed in the latest fashion, points out the company to a beautiful young one and to a young man ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... lend me speech when I was dumb, to whom I owe it that I have not crept on my belly all the days of my life like the serpent, but sometimes lift my forked crest or tread the empyrean, wake thou out of thy mid-day slumbers! Shake off the heavy honeydew of thy soul, no longer lulled with that Circean cup, drinking thy own thoughts with thy own ears, but start up in thy promised likeness, and shake the pillared rottenness ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Science and she gave freely to her lord and master. Sprawled there over the Turkey-red cloth, which was not unhaunted by the ghosts of dead dinners, he became chastely and divinely happy. His mind floated away into the empyrean; he saw visions of a far more perfect Society; dreamed dreams of the ascending spiral whose law others had groped at, but he would be the first to formulate; caught and fondled the secret of the whole great Design; reduced it to a rule-of-thumb to do his bidding; ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of empyrean day Bursts on my ear the indignant lay; There sit the sainted sage, the bard divine, The few whom Genius gave to shine Through every unborn age and undiscover'd clime. Rapt in celestial transport they, Yet hither oft a glance from high They send of tender sympathy, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... practical, scientific, and social energies which has checked in our Victorian Age the highest imaginative and dramatic genius. With all its achievements in lyric and psychologic poetry, it has hardly attempted to scale the empyrean of song. In the seventy-six years that have passed since Shelley conceived his Prometheus, as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of the Campagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of invention. Since the School for Scandal (1777) ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... as all things beneath the empyrean, 120 Mine! Art thou eyeless like old Destiny, Thou mockery-king, crowned with a wreath of thorns? Whose sceptre is a reed, the broken reed Which pierces thee! whose throne a chair of scorn; For seest thou not beneath this crystal floor 125 The innumerable ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... gleam of intelligence flickering over his face, "is yonder moon, as she sails in the blue empyrean, casting a flood of light o'er hill and dale, like—Why," he repeated, with a feeble smile, "is yonder moon, as she sails in the blue empyrean"—He hesitated,—stammered,—and gazed at me hopelessly, with the tears dripping from his moist and widely ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... has relation to the Air as an atmosphere, and to the Ocean of Ether in filling the Great Spheral Dome of Empyrean or Firmament. The Vowel-Sound u (uh) has a similar relation to Fluidity or Liquidity, and, hence, to Water as a typical fluid, to the Ocean Flux or Tide, to the Flowing Stream, etc. This Time-like idea is uni-dimensional or elongate in a general or fluctuating sense; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... OF THE OCEAN WAVE, etc. There was an ancient belief, that once in ten years the eagle would soar into the empyrean, and plunging thence into the sea, would molt his plumage and renew his youth with a fresh supply ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... girdle. Yet so fascinating was she in those timid blushes, which completely baffle description, that his feelings were roused within him to such a degree, that all sense of pain flew at once beyond the empyrean. "I've only had to bear a few blows," he reflected, "and yet every one of them puts on those pitiful looks sufficient to evoke love and regard; so were, after all, any mishap or untimely end to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Sun, unmastered and insurgent pulse of Life; breath of the empyrean, seraph winged ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... he who'd rival Pindar's fame, On waxen wings doth sweep The Empyrean steep, To fall like Icarus, and with his name Endue ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... story, and perhaps only deserves the light tone in which the soaring of a young man into the empyrean, and his descent again, is always narrated. But as has often been said, the light and the truth may be on the side of the dreamer: a far wider view than the wise ones have may be his at that recalcitrant time, and ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... of new verses yet. The only point on which you never give precise intelligence is your own book; but you shall have your will in that; so only you arrive on the shores of light at last, with your mystic freight fished partly out of the seas of time, and partly out of the empyrean deeps. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... from Mr. Pepys and the seventeenth century, and all that is lofty and instructive, and could fix upon nothing except those dear little wandering tendrils, and the white column on which they twined. Alas, that so small a thing can bring the human mind from its empyrean flights! Alas, that vague emotions can drag down the sovereign intellect! Alas, that even for an hour, a man should prefer ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... face had unconsciously the very expression one sees on the face of the boy whose foot hovers a moment above the worm he means to crush. The boy does not expect to see the worm change to a butterfly just then and there, and mount up before his very eyes toward the empyrean. Neither did Bondo ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... the garlands of to-day are pale, Shall clang of armorers riveting our mail Rise in harsh dissonance where now the song In surging music sweeps the land along? No, Brothers, no! The Providence on high Stretches above us like the arching sky; As o'er the world that broad empyrean field, So o'er the nation God's ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... what. He acted as though he were a machine driven by the two forces of his environment and his personality; his reason was someone looking on, observing the facts but powerless to interfere: it was like those gods of Epicurus, who saw the doings of men from their empyrean heights and had no might to alter one ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... wound, And homeward led my steps. Magnificent The morning rose, in memorable pomp, Glorious as e'er I had beheld—in front, The sea lay laughing at a distance; near, The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, Grain-tinctured, drenched in Empyrean light; And in the meadows and the lower grounds Was all the sweetness of a common dawn— Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds, And laborers going forth to till the fields. Ah! need I say, dear Friend! that to the brim My heart was full; I made no vows, but ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... Achates stood With down-fixt eyes, musing the strange event. Dark thoughts were theirs, and sorrowful their mood; When lo, to leftward Cytherea sent A sign amid the open firmament. A flash of lightning swift from ether sprang With thunder. Turmoil universal blent Earth, sea and sky; the empyrean rang With arms, and loudly ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... Euterpe did not preside when I was lucklessly ushered into this dancing gilt bubble that we call the world, were all good gifts denied me? The fairies ordained that I should paint, should soar like Apelles, Angelo, and Da Vinci into the empyrean of pure classic art, but no sooner did I dabble in pigment, and plume my slender artistic pin-feathers, than the granite hands of Palma pride seized the ambitious ephemeron, cut off the sprouting wings, and bade me paint only my lips and cheeks, if dabble in ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... cherubim; the ninth is the primum mob[)i]l[^e] for the seraphim; and the tenth is the empyre'an for the Virgin Mary and the triune deity. Beatrice, with Rachel, Sarah, Judith, Rebecca and Ruth, St. Augustin, St. Francis, St. Benedict, and others, were enthroned in Venus, the sphere of the virtues. The empyrean, he says, is a sphere of "unbodied light," "bright effluence of bright essence, uncreate." This is what the Jews called "the heaven of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the string of this venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, and the chosen souls would be lost for the race, like balloons, which, but for gravitation, would never return from the empyrean.'—AMIEL. ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... rather took my fancy—there was so much in it—four large fowls flying across the empyrean; each bird carried a rose as large as a cabbage in its beak, and apparently intended to let them drop upon a group of family mourners beneath. The MS. inscribed said, 'If photographs are supplied of members of the Mourning Family, our artist will reproduce same in group gathered ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... to-day without a cloud, and no mist or turbidity interferes with the sharpness of the outlines. Jungfrau, Monk, Eiger, Trugberg, cliffy Strahlgrat, stately lady-like Aletschhorn, all grandly pierce the empyrean. Like a Saul of Mountains, the Finsteraarhorn overtops all his neighbours; then we have the Oberaarhorn, with the riven glacier of Viesch rolling from his shoulders. Below is the Marjelin See, with its crystal precipices and its floating icebergs, snowy white, ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... an empyrean god, the wielder of the thunderbolt and the lightning, and the manipulator of ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... is this! What soft and sweet Sensations greet My soul, and wrap it in Elysian bliss! I soar above Dull earth in these ambrosial clouds, like Jove, And from my empyrean height Look down upon the ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... of the Old Testament. Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent. Christianity is Judaism run divinely mad, a religion without a drainage system, a beautiful dream dissevered from life, soul cut adrift from body, and sent floating through the empyrean, when it can only at best be a captive balloon. At the same time, don't take your idea of Judaism from the Jews. It is only an apostolic succession of great souls that understands anything in this world. The ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Communists had gone too far in their efforts to establish atheism by force, but he adds, "We shall pursue our attacks on Almighty God in due time, and in an appropriate manner. We are confident we shall subdue him in his empyrean. We shall fight him wherever he hides himself.... I have been informed that not only young Communists, but Boy Scouts, are mocking people who are religious. I have also been told that groups of Boy Scouts have even imprisoned whole ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... exhibitions at Hong-Kong. It really does pour on such occasions there. Talk of the deluge, when the windows of heaven were said to have been opened! Why if that venerable dame could have seen the descent of these torrents, she would have thought that all obstructing barriers of the blue empyrean had been removed, and the surcharged clouds suddenly overturned, and have come to the conclusion that forty days of such outpouring would leave no resting-place, even upon the ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... extravagance which would place him among the few immortals. He is not a Homer, nor a Dante, nor a Shakspere. No, he is not even a Wordsworth in philosophic insight into nature, nor a Shelley in power to snatch the soul into the starry empyrean, nor a Tennyson in variety and passion, nor a Milton in grandeur of poetic expression. He is—only Longfellow. But that means he has his own peculiar charm. It is idle to detract from the fame of one man because he is not some one else. Roast beef ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... and of our Age of Hope itself; which shall mount, specifically-light, majestically in this same manner; and hover,—tumbling whither Fate will. Well if it do not, Pilatre-like, explode; and demount all the more tragically!—So, riding on windbags, will men scale the Empyrean. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... in long reduplications of sweetness, minute after minute; till finally receding and rising, it trembled, as it were, among the quick gratulations of angels, and fell into the silence of the pure empyrean. I had never any conception before of what is meant by quality in sound. There was more power upon the soul in one of those simple notes than I ever expect to feel from anything called music below, or ever can feel till I hear them again in the choirs of the angelic world. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... than once escaped, but was always lured by food to return. He never seemed disposed to depart to the blue empyrean, his ancestral home. ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... first four words marshal the great procession in solid array; the last two lift it high into the empyrean. Let any one attempt to get the same upward effect with a stress, however light, laid on the last syllable of the line, or with words of fewer than three syllables apiece, and he will have to confess that, however abstruse the rules of its working may be, there is virtue in metrical ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... which Correggio interpreted his sense of supernatural vision: it is a gaze not of contemplation or deep thought, but of wild half-savage joy, as if these saints also had become the elemental genii of cloud and air, spirits emergent from ether, the salamanders of an empyrean intolerable to mortal sense. The point on which their eyes converge, the culmination of their vision, is the figure of Christ. Here all the weakness of Correggio's method is revealed. He had undertaken to realise by no ideal allegorical suggestion, by no symbolism of architectural grouping, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... is generally the men who have dragged them down. Unless a man is bent on the highest, he is apt to settle on the lowest—whereas a woman generally soars to the highest ideals at first in the blind instinct of a Soul seeking its mate—how often she is hurled back from the empyrean only the angels know! Not to all is given power to master and control the life-forces—and it is this I would have you understand before I leave you to-night. I can teach you the way to hold your life safely above all disintegrating ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... is no fact, no event in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Virgilia intimidated the men, but that the men disappointed Virgilia. They stayed where they always had stayed—close to the ground, whereas Virgilia, with each successive season, soared higher through the blue empyrean of general culture. She had not stopped with a mere going to college, nor even with a good deal of post-graduate work to supplement this, nor even with an extended range of travel to supplement that; ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... it and thickness. One saw the sky beyond the edge of the world getting purer as the vault rose. But right up—a belt in that empyrean—ran peak and field and needle of intense ice, remote, remote from the world. Sky beneath them and sky above them, a steadfast legion, they glittered as though with the armour of the immovable armies ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... enough to make themselves a fool's paradise within it, nor wise enough to escape from it through Christ, "the door into the sheepfold," to return when they will, and bring others with them into the serene empyrean of spiritual truth—truth which explains, and arranges, ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... that he was free from the horror of that bestial vampire sucking his blood—that was his way of referring to the long suffering and hardly used editor—life emerged from gloom into sunshine. Now his spirit could soar untrammelled. It had taken its leap into the Empyrean. He beheld his book beneath him dazzlingly clear. Three months communing with nature, three months solitude on the pure mountain heights, three months calm discipline of the soul—that was what he needed. Then to work, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... and an array of gods and demi-gods and of human souls in their train, follows him. There are glorious and blessed sights in the interior of heaven, and he who will may freely behold them. The great vision of all is seen at the feast of the gods, when they ascend the heights of the empyrean—all but Hestia, who is left at home to keep house. The chariots of the gods glide readily upwards and stand upon the outside; the revolution of the spheres carries them round, and they have a vision of the world beyond. ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... of the Roman writers, "the soul seeks the stars," merely denotes the impersonal mingling after death of the divine portion of man's being with the parent Divinity, who was supposed indeed to pervade all things, but more especially to reside beyond the empyrean. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... or few samples suffice to show the advantage which good extracts from evil. Moreover, since there is no reason for the belief that there are stars everywhere, is it not possible that there may be a great space beyond the region of the stars? Whether it be the Empyrean Heaven, or not, this immense space encircling all this region may in any case be filled with happiness and glory. It can be imagined as like the Ocean, whither flow the rivers of all blessed creatures, when they ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... forever swift descend The waters in their headlong course, then turning, heavenward wend: Now, disenthralled, their essence hath its spirit-shape resumed; Bright, bodiless and pure, its fright to yon empyrean plumed! ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... had to come down from the empyrean, and though the descent was great, yet it gained new life by ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... quick sensitiveness had noted the growth from girl to woman. She was large, full-bosomed, wide-browed, clear-eyed. She had not worried him about other girls. She had reproved him for confessed follies in just the way that man loves to be reproved. She had mildly soared with him into the empyrean of his dreams. She had enjoyed whole-heartedly, from the back row of the dress-circle, the play to which he had taken her—as a member of the profession he had, in Jane's eyes, princely privileges—and on the top of the Cricklewood omnibus she had eaten, with the laughter ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... goes a-tumbling through the hollow And trackless empyrean like a clown, Head pointed to the earth where weaklings wallow, Feet up toward the stars; not such renown Even our lord himself, the bright Apollo, Gets in his gilded car. For one bob down You shall behold the thing." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... heaven! O divine angel!" cried Zadig, humbly prostrating himself on the ground," hast thou then descended from the Empyrean to teach a weak mortal to submit to the eternal decrees ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... beholding this most wonderful achievement of the age, and thus satisfying myself that it was an actual existence, and not the mere chimera of a diseased brain? There she sat like a majestic swan, floating, as it were, in the pure empyrean, and crowned with a diadem of stars. The Moon, Arcturus, and the Pleiades might well all make obeisance to her, and the Milky Way invite her to extend her flight and plough its snowy fields. I was astonished at her size, the symmetry of her parts, and the harmony of her proportions, as she lay ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... reason of the side that is turned to his life-giving and quickening beams. We believe that all the clouds and mist that come between us and God are like the clouds and mist of the sky, not dropped upon us from the blue empyrean above, but sucked up from the undrained swamps and poisonous fens of the lower earth. That is to say, if there be any change in the fulness of our possession of the divine Spirit, the fault lies wholly within the region of the mutable and of the human, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... is plainer to the prophetic eye than that time will bring to this magnificent city an institution of learning worthy of our hopes? I have noticed," added the colonel, waving his cigar broadly about him, "that learning is a shy goddess; she has to be coaxed—hence on these empyrean heights we have provided for a seat of learning; therefore College Heights. Look at the splendid vista, the entrancing view, in point of fact." It was the large white plumes dancing in the colonel's prophetic eyes. So it happened that more real estate buyers than clients came ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... it was convenient that she should be removed. It was dark when Lord Aveleyn, with melancholy foreboding, took his last farewell; for, ere the sun had risen again, the spirit of Edward Forster had regained its liberty, and soared to the empyrean, while the deserted Amber ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... west the whole grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism. The ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... abandoned, and the high fliers have returned to the ignoble security of the Three, Five, and Six hundred foot levels. But there remain a few undaunted sun-hunters who, in spite of frozen stays and ice-jammed connecting-rods, still haunt the blue empyrean. ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... cried suddenly and imperatively, "you are a trifle too empyrean. I don't quite believe in you. Be more ordinary, more vulgarly human. For who are you, after all? What are you?" ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... with bills of known genuineness without being able to discover the slightest point of variation between them. Paper, printing, and engraving seemed to be absolutely perfect. While the study was progressing, the imagination of the clergyman soared through the empyrean of dazzling expectations. Why continue to toil hard for a small pittance when the golden apples were hanging within easy reach? Why drag out an existence in penury when wealth and its joys ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... policemen as its protagonists. All five plays "of the supernatural" follow a single plan. In the foreground, as it were, we see a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and in the background (or in the empyrean above, as you choose) we see the operation of the god-like imbecilities which sway and flay us all. The technical trick is well managed. It would be easy for such four-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... heroes or of kings; No chant of bloody war, no exulting pean Of arms-won triumphs; but your humble strings You touched in chord with music empyrean. You sang far better than you knew; the songs That for your listeners' hungry hearts sufficed Still live,—but more than this to you belongs: You sang a race from wood and ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... force could not oppose; They with a solid cloud All heaven's eclipsed face did shroud; Seemed with large wings spread o'er the sea and earth, To brood up a new Chaos his deformed birth; And every lamp, and every fire, Did, at the dreadful sight, wink and expire, To the empyrean source all streams of light seemed to retire. The living men were in their standing houses buried, But the long night no slumber knows, But the short death finds no repose. Ten thousand terrors through the darkness fled, And ghosts complained, and spirits murmured, And fancy's multiplying sight ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... and already certain of success, they were soon lost in a peaceful slumber, whilst the Projectile, moving rapidly, though with a velocity uniformly retarding, still cleaved its way through the pathless regions of the empyrean. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... for the redoubt over the rampart they go, Not a rifle was fired, not a shot at the foe, By the weight of the column the redoubt is theirs, And the enemy routed, the chivalry scattered everywhere Victorious shouts the empyrean ring in repay, Following Butler to New ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... the vocal choir, Let harmony your raptured souls inspire. Hark how the tuneful, solemn organs blow, Awfully strong, elaborately slow; Now to you empyrean seats above Raise meditation on the wings of love. Now falling, sinking, dying to the moan Once warbled sad by Jesse's contrite son; Breathe in each note a conscience through the sense, And call forth tears ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... endure. Cherishing, it may be, the loftiest thoughts, and clogged with the meanest wants; of pure and holy purposes, yet ever driven from the straight path by the pressure of necessity, or the impulse of passion; thirsting for glory, and frequently in want of daily bread; hovering between the empyrean of his fancy and the squalid desert of reality; cramped and foiled in his most strenuous exertions; dissatisfied with his best performances, disgusted with his fortune, this Man of Letters too often spends his weary days in conflicts with obscure misery: harassed, chagrined, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... placed his hand familiarly on his guest's shoulder, while the bright, steel-gray under-gleam sparkled in his splendid eyes— "'twould be worth dwelling in for the sake of Hyspiros,—as grand a god as any of the Thunderers in the empyrean!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the gods. Ah! people might be sylphs. Games and Laughter, argiraspides; they are stupids. My friends, every recently made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini. Profit by that unique minute in life to soar away to the empyrean with the swans and the eagles, even if you do have to fall back on the morrow into the bourgeoisie of the frogs. Don't economize on the nuptials, do not prune them of their splendors; don't scrimp on the day when ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Shelley. But the religious fervour is Catholic, not Protestant, Southern, not Northern: it is intense, mystical, and ecstatic: like a tongue of upward-darting flame, it burns and trembles with impassioned impulse to mingle with empyrean fire. The imagination, too, is not merely southern, but with an oriental element shining through it, like the ruddy heart of ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... in the accomplishment of your union, despite of all my projects, all my intrigues to prevent it. I am satisfied, moreover, that there is in this alliance a fitness and a propriety which will insure your happiness: and may the spirit of my sainted mother look down from the empyrean palace where she dwells, and bless you both, even as I now implore the divine mercy to shed its beauties and diffuse its ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds |
