"Ethereal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... These ethereal creatures have the loveliest eyes of any human beings I ever beheld in any world. They sparkle with the brilliancy of a diamond and move with the quickness of electricity. The head is small but symmetrical and all physical proportions are most harmoniously adapted even to a nicety that would ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... with the look of one who, as he tries to say it, is seeing a thing for the first time, "does not the acorn-cup belong to the acorn? May not some of what you call illusions, be the finer, or at least more ethereal qualities of the thing itself? You do not object to ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... Pursuing the analogy we may say that right, if it is to gain a footing in the world and really prevail, must of necessity be supplemented by a small amount of arbitrary force, in order that, notwithstanding its merely ideal and therefore ethereal nature, it may be able to work and subsist in the real and material world, and not evaporate and vanish into the clouds, as it does in Hesoid. Birth-right of every description, all heritable privileges, every form of national religion, and so on, may be regarded as the necessary ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... we went. It was the day, too, after our sail in the moonlight that I half believed, remembering its lovely unreality, had been a dream. But as we sailed out, there lay Sir Richard Leigh's yacht to prove it, smart and impressive, shining and solid in the sunlight as it had been ethereal the night before. I gazed at ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... ethereal veil, a pale, blue gossamer, spreads over the scenery, as if each object had caught some delicate reflection from the blue heavens above; and the golden illumination of this misty veil causes the peculiar charm of Italian sunsets. This effect is generally wanting in the scenery of the Andes near ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... highest and healthiest poetical genius to have been a dramatist. He could not deal with common folk nor handle common things; humor, that great tragic element, was not in him; the heavens and all their clouds and colors were his, and he floated and hovered and soared in the ethereal element like one native to it. Upon the firm earth his foot wants firmness, and men and women as they are, are at once too coarse and complex, too robust and too infinitely various for his delicate, fine, but in some ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... decisive brevity. A physician informs me that every thought and act of our lives is transfixed on the etheric vapours that surround our earth, and that it is therefore only natural that a clairvoyant is able to see those fixed events and write them down afterward from the ethereal inscriptions. Another tells about his discovery that the human body is a great electrical magnet. I am the more glad to make this fact widely known, as the author writes that he has not given it to the public yet, as he is not financially able to advertise ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... sapphire-blaze Where Angels tremble while they gaze, He saw; but blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night. Behold where Dryden's less presumptuous car Wide o'er the fields of Glory bear Two coursers of ethereal race With necks in thunder clothed, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the two friends made, that whichever should die first should appear at some time to the other. The tale goes on to tell that Mrs. Harrison, after the death of her friend, was walking over to Westover one evening, and as she passed the churchyard she saw the ethereal figure of Evelyn Byrd there by the altar-tomb, smiling in happy ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... patriot and the grand manner no rake or hoe could efface, but Banksleigh had his own interest. He was an Englishman with pale blue eyes that always seemed to be looking beyond our horizon into space. There was something rather poetic and ethereal about him. Perhaps he didn't eat enough, or it may have been the effect of "New Thought," in one of the fifty-seven varieties of which he was a firm believer. He told me that his astral colors were red and blue, and that a phrenologist ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... unwearied explorer of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer and more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliest specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of that ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regions of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... air, this ocean, and this earth, All matter quick, and bursting into birth. Above, how high progressive life may go! Around, how wide! how deep extend below! Vast chain of Being! which from God began, Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see No glass can reach; from Infinity to thee From thee to Nothing.—On superior pow'rs Were we to press, inferior might on ours; Or in the full creation leave ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... lined with crags and woods, and then, widening rapidly, washed the shores of a low, green island. Opposite her white houses shone on the Levis ridge, and beyond this a vast sweep of country, steeped in gradations of color that ended in ethereal blue, rolled away toward ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... could have been favored. The development of the physical sciences, with their infinite multiplicity and complexity, required more centuries of observation, collection and collation of facts, deductions from known phenomena, than the ancients had had to work with; while the more ethereal realms of philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and religion, though needing keen study of Nature and of man, depended more upon inner spiritual forces, and less upon accumulated detail of external knowledge. Yet as there were some ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... The rebellious thoughts that will arise in the most philosophical of us surged in her small heavily gowned bosom. For her were the gray things, the neutral tinted skies, the ugly garb, the coarse meats; for them the rainbow, the ethereal airiness of earthly joys, the bonbons and glaces of the world. Sister Josepha did not know that the rainbow is elusive, and its colours but the illumination of tears; she had never been told that earthly ethereality is necessarily ephemeral, ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... was so thin, so pale, and so generally ethereal looking, that it seemed as if a strong puff of wind would ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... pleasant to think of the shy delight with which the delicate, flower-like, almost ethereal poet-wife, in those memorable Pisan evenings—with the wind blowing soundingly from the hills of Carrara, or quiescent in a deep autumnal calm broken only by the slow wash of Arno along the sea-mossed long-deserted quays—showed her love-poems to her husband. With what ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... he. "Ahem, as it were—as I was saying, my dear madam, these angelic angels of our homes are too ethereal, too dainty, to mingle with the rude crowds. We political men would fain keep them as they are now: we are willing to stand the rude buffetings of—of—voting, in order to guard these sweet, delicate creatures from any hardships. Sweet, tender ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... instance, that monarchy was as apt, in a given case, to secure the public well-being as some other form of government, monarchy should be preferred, and would undoubtedly be established, on account of its imaginative and dramatic superiority. But if, blinded by this somewhat ethereal advantage, a party sacrificed to it important public interests, the injustice would be manifest. In a doubtful case, a nation decides, not without painful conflicts, how much it will sacrifice to its sentimental needs. ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... a not repulsive worldliness in her sapped some of my scruples. What I was doing no longer seemed sacrilege. She had one foot on earth already then, this pretty Elsa, lightly poised perhaps, and quite ethereal, yet in the end resting on this common earth of ours. She would get used to me, as William Adolphus put it, all the sooner. I took courage. The spirit of the scene gained some hold on me. I grew less repressed in manner, more ardent ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... necessary, however, as will now be clearer, to set our net more widely. We must take into consideration every form and degree of sexual manifestation, normal and abnormal, gross and ethereal. When we do this, even cautiously and without going far afield, sexual abstinence is found to be singularly elusive. Rohleder, a careful and conscientious investigator, has asserted that such abstinence, in the true and complete sense, is absolutely non-existent, the genuine cases ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... the pole, Along whose course the flying axles burn Of spirits bravely-pitched, earth's manlier brood; Long as below we cannot find The meed that stills the inexorable mind; 215 So long this faith to some ideal Good, Under whatever mortal name it masks, Freedom, Law, Country, this ethereal mood That thanks the Fates for their severer tasks, Feeling its challenged pulses leap, 220 While others skulk in subterfuges cheap, And, set in Danger's van, has all the boon it asks, Shall win man's praise and woman's love, Shall be a ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph—with how vivid a delight—with how much of all that is ethereal in hope did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought—but less known,—that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... brings wisdom, the night which gives light. I ought to go, I ought to do it, I promised I would—I am weak, I know. But how can I resist the downy creases of my bed? My feet feel flaccid, I think I must be sick, I am too happy just here. I long to see the ethereal horizon of my dreams again, those women without claws, those winged beings and their obliging ways. In short, I have found the grain of salt to put upon the tail of that bird that was always flying away: the coquette's feet are caught in the line. ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... with a fairy play acted by the juniors. They looked very pretty in their gauzy garments, and little Desiree, in a gossamer robe of elfin green, made an attractive queen, so dainty and ethereal that the audience almost expected to see through her. "What a sweet child!" was the general comment, as she tripped back in response to a storm of clapping, to give an ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... She stopped half-way, and gave the young persons a flushed and menacing look. It found apparently little to reassure her, and she moved away with a passionate toss of her drapery. Rowland thought with horror of the sinister compulsion to which the young girl was to be subjected. In this ethereal flight of hers there was a certain painful effort and tension of wing; but it was none the less piteous to imagine her being rudely jerked down to the base earth she was doing her adventurous utmost to spurn. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... remember her; a willowy, shadowy creature, with a sort of ethereal loveliness which appealed very strongly to my imagination when ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... accepted Newton's way of spelling "aether" as given in his work on Optics, and has given "aetherial" the same suffix as "material," in order to differentiate the word from "ethereal," which is too metaphysical a term for a ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... drop to sleep. adornar adorn. adorno m. ornament, adornment. aduar m. camp, camp of gypsies, horde of gypsies. adusto, -a austere, sullen, gloomy, solemn. advertir warn. areo, -a ethereal, aerial, airy. afn m. eager desire, longing, anxiety, effort, toil, difficulty, bustle. afanar distress; —se desire eagerly, struggle for. afeminado, -a effeminate. afilado, -a sharp, slender, thin, tapering. afligido, -a ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... had struck the right vein, that here was a fair and appreciative field for his talent, his fine taste, and high culture. A little utilitarian, perhaps; and he smiled, thinking of some past dreams. And was true art so ethereal that it must exist only in the exalted states of the mind? Was it not to embellish and beautify all lives, rather than crowd out the thousands that the few might feast on some exquisite vision? Was any art higher than that which boldly thrust aside shams, and went to the shaping of true, strong, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... substantial benefits. That which Shakspeare praised, and Milton cultivated, and which is supposed to be the language of saints and angels when they hymn their Maker's praise, ought to be a nation's care: but then it ought to be so only on proper grounds and in the true ethereal spirit which fits it for divine. Not the miserable or the vitious levities of music, which serve but to unman the soul, to wake the dormant sensualities of the heart, and far from lifting the spirit ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... nothing of it at the time; but, looking back, he was haunted by every little thing that had happened. In the light of the tragic event, he could understand everything—her quietness, that calm certitude as if all vexing questions of living had been smoothed out and were gone, and that certain ethereal sweetness about all that she had said and done that had been almost maternal. He remembered the way she had looked at him, how she had laughed when he narrated Mickey Dolan's mistake in staking the fraction on Skookum Gulch. Her laughter had been lightly joyous, while at the same time it had lacked ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... Save in my father, who is God's own image; Or in his angels, who are like to thee— And brighter, yet less beautiful and powerful In seeming: as the silent sunny noon, All light, they look upon us; but thou seem'st 510 Like an ethereal night[108], where long white clouds Streak the deep purple, and unnumbered stars Spangle the wonderful mysterious vault With things that look as if they would be suns; So beautiful, unnumbered, and endearing, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... The far hills enveloped themselves in a faint, purplish haze through which they seemed to blush unwittingly. The mesa, no longer showing itself an and waste of heat and untracked wilderness, lay soft under a thin veil of many ethereal tints. Away off to the northeast they heard the thin, vague clamor of a band of sheep and the ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... that he had penetrated to the secret of the voice. He said to himself, "All that sort of thing comes out of one's self. It doesn't reach one from the outside." And yet, when he looked out over the world, which seemed wrapped in ethereal garments, garments woven by spirit on looms no hand of woman or man might ever touch, he was vaguely conscious that all within him which was of any real value was there too. Surely he did not possess. Rather was he ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... lap-dogs, one of the best stories relative to these creatures is to be found in Madame de Crequey's Memoirs. A Madame de Blot, a French dandysette, if the term may be used, who considered her own sex as bound to be ethereal, and would pretend that the wing of a lark was more than sufficient for her sustenance during the twenty-four hours, had one of the smallest female spaniels that was ever known. She treated her like a human being, and when she went out to a party, used to desire her lady's maid to read ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... lives—this, and nothing shallower, nothing narrower, is religion in its perfection; and the measure in which we have attained to this harmony with God, is the measure in which we are Christians. As two stringed instruments may be so tuned to one keynote that, if you strike the one, a faint ethereal echo is heard from the other, which blends undistinguishably with its parent sound; so, drawing near to God, and brought into unison with His mind and will, our responsive spirits vibrate in accord with His, and give forth tones, low and thin indeed, but still repeating the mighty music ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... been, it imparted to the ocean an ethereal, imponderous look, which was sometimes startling. There were moments when they almost expected to see it expand back into the nebulous form and ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... boys have not all the advantages on their side. A boy never enjoys the luxury of being satisfied. A boy never feels full. He can never stretch out his legs, put his hands behind his head, and, closing his eyes, sink into the ethereal blissfulness that encompasses the well-dined man. A dinner makes no difference whatever to a boy. To a man it is as a good fairy's potion, and after it the world appears a brighter and a better place. A ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... from [differ from] those; one averring those subterranean people to be departed souls, attending a while in this inferior state, and clothed with bodies procured through their alms-deeds in this life; fluid, active, ethereal vehicles to hold them that they may not scatter nor wander, and be lost in the totum, or their first nothing; but if any were so impious as to have given no alms, they say, when the souls of such ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... heroine of fiction is so frail and ethereal in build that when she faints away, under a stress of emotion, the hero gathers her lovely form in his arms and carries her for a couple of miles with delightful ease; but Mollie Farrell was a healthy, well-grown girl; and for one agonising moment it appeared as if the ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was not through the brain alone of the child the panorama flitted, but through his mind and heart as well, and there, like a glacier it scored its passage. Or rather, it left its ghosts behind it, ever shifting forms and shadows, each atmosphered in its own ethereal mood. Hardly thoughts were they, but strange other consciousnesses of life and being. Hills and woods and valleys and plains and rivers and seas, entering by the gates of sight into the live mirror of the human, are transformed to another nature, to a living wonder, a joy, a pain, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... parted a little and she drew in the air again and again, slowly and quietly, as if she could drink it, and live on its sweet taste, and never want food or other drink again, though she was not an ethereal young person, but only a perfectly healthy and natural girl. She was not tired, yet somehow she felt that she was resting body, soul and heart, for a little while, after growing up and before beginning what was ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... accommodating to the ease of hers with a movement of release. They spent so much time in the church that when they issued on the Piazza at last it was with amazement to discern that the cloud mass which an hour before had piled ethereal tones of blueness above Frauli, lit cavernously by soundless flashes, had dissolved ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... to the earth, creatures of clay as frail as the foliage of the woods, you unfortunate race, whose life is but darkness, as unreal as a shadow, the illusion of a dream, hearken to us, who are immortal beings, ethereal, ever young and occupied with eternal thoughts, for we shall teach you about all celestial matters; you shall know thoroughly what is the nature of the birds, what the origin of the gods, of the rivers, of Erebus, and Chaos; thanks to us, Prodicus[250] ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... ethereal and spirit-like in the sheen of the moon, was waiting to give them welcome. Virginia stood on deck, weeping and laughing, Dr. Grayle by ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... hasted to relieve his child, The glittering terrors from his brows unbound, And placed the beaming helmet on the ground; Then kiss'd the child, and, lifting high in air, Thus to the gods preferr'd a father's prayer: "O thou! whose glory fills the ethereal throne, And all ye deathless powers! protect my son! Grant him, like me, to purchase just renown, To guard the Trojans, to defend the crown, Against his country's foes the war to wage, And rise the Hector of the future age! So when triumphant ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... than it had hitherto been; he called for a peculiar species of wine from Southern Italy, which he said was the most delicious production of the grape, and had very seldom, if ever before, been imported pure into England. A delicious perfume came from the cradled bottle, and bore an ethereal, evanescent testimony to the truth of what he said: and the taste, though too delicate for wine quaffed in England, was nevertheless delicious, when ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... understand this most deeply of all Christian minstrels, from first to last; that they are more musical, because more joyful, than any others on earth: ethereal minstrels, pilgrims of the sky, true to the kindred points of heaven and home; their joy essentially the sky-lark's, in light, in purity; but, with their human eyes, looking for the glorious appearing of something in the sky, which ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... possibly be so engaging. And she was so disturbingly beautiful, too. This last fact was not less evident when she came down arranged for their walk. They left the house, and as they proceeded he remembered that he had asked himself earlier how he could do honour to such a combination of leisure and ethereal mildness as he had waked up to that morning—a mildness that seemed the very breath of his own latitude. This question was answered now; to do exactly what he was doing at that moment was ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... different clay from men, less gross, less earthly; he thought not only that they were pious, sweet and innocent, ignorant entirely of disagreeable things, but that it was man's first duty to protect them from all knowledge of the realities of life. To him they were an ethereal blending of milk-and-water with high principles; it had never occurred to him that they were flesh and blood, and sense, and fire and nerves—especially nerves. Most topics, of course, could not be broached in their presence; in fact, almost the only safe subject of conversation was ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... and lonely horizon looked as though a fire of molten gold burned behind the thinnest of mauve and saffron and purple curtains, a fire that was too subdued to be actual flame, but more an unearthly and ethereal radiance, luring the vision on and on until it brought an odd little sense of desolation to the heart and made me glad to remember that Peter was swinging his lanky legs there at my side ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... child whom you would have noticed anywhere because of her luminous, strangely-quiet, gray eyes and because of the ethereal look given to her face by a floating mass of hair, pale-gold and tendrilly. And yet I think you would have known that she was a sick little girl at the first glance. When she moved, it was with a great slowness as if everything tired her. She ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... came towards the mountains it was twilight, and they looked very cold and grim; their outline traced against the sky, and seemingly made of some other material than earth or sky—too dense for the one and too ethereal for the other. But when I came to them in broad day, they had lost their terror, as any other night phantom would have done. When I could scale them with my eye, and stand upon their highest peak, I seemed to have subdued them. But as I retreated, and looked back, they resumed ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... me! could I have seen him ere alarm Of my approach aroused him from his calm! As he, part Hamadryad and, mayhap, Part Faun, lay here; who left the shadow warm As wildwood rose, and filled the air with balm Of his sweet breath as with ethereal sap. ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... spirit of God truly walking over the waters? We cannot say, or rather we shall not stop to inquire. Enough that the poor old hermit saw it, and seeing, was transported into ecstacy. His whole being appeared transfused into the ethereal vision which shone before him. The gross outlines of old age and shabby costume were melted into the beautiful forms of exultation and reverence. Under the misty moon, under the faint light of the stars, he fell upon his knees, stretched out his arms, and his ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... white as she waited Miss Smithson's answer. Teachers, being purely ethereal she felt, never descended to the discussion of materialities. She wondered at ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... the dollar than in 'the music of the spheres'? This first is, I acknowledge, to me a pleasant sound, though only 'heard at rarest intervals.'... Yet I am rather inclined to believe in the reality of the music of the spheres; it is too ethereal, too spiritual a music for the ear to sense it; the food and drink of the gods, ambrosia and nectar, even were we to swallow them, could our mortal palates taste them? Even thus may we drink in the music of the spheres, and, strange as it may seem, the more ear we have, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in the country, a place like Silverbel, has always been the longing of my life," she said, and she looked pathetic and almost ethereal, as she spoke, and as though nothing pleased her more than a ramble through country lanes with buttercups and ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... the wild excitement of that moment, Rachel and Richard struggled hand in hand, after Noie's thin, ethereal form. Across the open space they struggled, through the furious bufferings of the gale, sometimes on their feet, sometimes on their hands and knees, till they came to the great wall where a stairway ran up it to an outlook tower. Up this stair they climbed ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... environ, epicure, epigram, episode, epistolary, epitome, equestrian, equilibrium, equinoctial, equity, equivocate, eradicate, erosion, erotic, erudition, eruptive, eschew, esoteric, espousal, estrange, ethereal, eulogistic, euphonious, evanescent, evangelical, evict, exacerbate, excerpt, excommunicate, excoriate, excruciate, execrable, exegesis, exemplary, exhalation, exhilarate, exigency, exodus, exonerate, exorbitant, exotic, expectorate, expeditious, explicable, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the Persian pattern-birds flying among bluish reeds—produced the effect of a dream in summer, ethereal figures floating before one's languid eyes. The lowered blinds, the matting on the floor, the Virginia jasmine clinging to the trellis-work outside, produced a refreshing coolness which was enhanced by the splashing in the river ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... yearned and prayed over her alternately. Betty, avid of excitement, spent her days in the pleasurable anticipation of a dramatic bankruptcy. It was on Dick, however, that the actual strain came. He saw Nancy growing paler and more ethereal each day, on her feet from morning till night manipulating the affairs of an enterprise that seemed to be assuming more preposterous proportions every hour of its existence. He made surreptitious estimates of expenditures ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... children smarter, than can be found elsewhere. But as the study of astronomy gives ability to look upon the vast universe of thousands of worlds much larger than our own, revolving in their orbits, it develops our intellectual faculties, and enables us to view the concave appearance of the ethereal blue from a standpoint widely differing from the occupancy of the center. And when supreme self is melted away by faith in the blood of the covenant, our spiritual vision becomes clearer and our miniature ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... at first held in constant mind, from Theseus slipped away as clouds are impelled by the breath of the winds from the ethereal peak of a snow-clad mount. But his father as he betook himself to the castle's turrets as watchplace, dimming his anxious eyes with continual weeping, when first he spied the discoloured canvas, flung himself headlong from the top of the crags, deeming Theseus lost by harsh fate. Thus as ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... be more appropriately selected as an emblem token by the descendants of the Puritans. Though so fragrant and graceful, it is invariably the product of the hardest and most rocky soils, and seems to draw its ethereal beauty of color and wealth of perfume rather from the air than from the slight hold which its rootlets take of the earth. It may often be found in fullest beauty matting a granite lodge, with scarcely any perceptible soil ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of Cynthia late Rises in her silver state, Through her brother's roseate light, Blushing on the brows of night; Then the pure ethereal air Breathes with zephyr blowing fair; Clouds and vapours disappear. As with chords of lute or lyre, Soothed the spirits now respire, And the heart revives again Which once more for love is fain. But the orient evening star Sheds with ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... sentimentality about Russian peasant marriages. In this as in other respects the Russian peasantry are, as a class, extremely practical and matter-of-fact in their conceptions and habits, and are not at all prone to indulge in sublime, ethereal sentiments of any kind. They have little or nothing of what may be termed the Hermann and Dorothea element in their composition, and consequently know very little about those sentimental, romantic ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... seemed to vein with marble. A sky in which the stars were dissolved in white radiance curved high above their heads; and not a sail flecked the lake or a cloud the sky. The boat seemed suspended alone in some ethereal medium. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... freezing; ice is, therefore, a double refracting substance. Double refraction is displayed in a particularly impressive manner by Iceland spar, which is crystallized carbonate of lime. The difference of ethereal density in two directions in this crystal is very great, the separation of the beam into the two halves ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... on grass in spring, and Clarimond queenly as day at its noon, and Damarel like a rose grown languorous of its own grace, and Amelys, mysterious as the spirit of dusk with dreams in its hair. But Maudlin was the pale gold wonder of the dawn, a creature of ethereal light, a vision of melting stars and wakening flowers. And she delighted in making seem cheap the palpable prettiness of this, or too robust the fuller beauty of that, or dim and dull the elusive charm of such-an-one. She would have scorned to set her beauty to compete ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... America and made a competence there, is third or fourth cousin to an English lord. He falls in love with a fisherman's daughter (the story appears to be about fifty years back). This fisherman's daughter is a most ethereal personage, speaking and reading Italian, and possessing in the fishing-cottage a pianoforte and a collection of books; nevertheless, she one day hears her husband say something about a person being "well born and well bred," and forthwith goes away ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... knowledge of our own buddies, and how to save our own Bakin—Beef I mean—day by day, from disease and chartered ass-ass-ins, all that may interest the thinkers in Saturn, but what the deevil is it t' us? Talk t' us of the hiv'nly buddies, not of our own; babble o' comets an' meteors an' Ethereal nibulae (never mind the nibulae in our own skulls). Discourse t' us of Predistinashin, Spitzbairgen seaweed, the last novel, the siventh vile; of Chrisehinising the Patagonians on condition they are not to come here and Chrischinise the Whitechapelians; of the letter to ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... his face on hers, wept with her. She had grown fragile, thin, haggard, ah! as though she could be blown away. She let him take her in his arms like a child and clasp her to his breast; let him caress and kiss her. Ah, how ethereal she had become! And those eyes, which at last he saw, now looked tearfully out from their large orbits, but more innocently than a bird from its nest. Over her broad forehead she had wound a large silk handkerchief in turban fashion. It hung down behind. She wished ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... three-quarters with a gossip over a cup of tea; who, indeed, so far forgets her ghostly condition as to ask for a cup of the said tea, and only evades the consequences of her blunder by one of those rather awkward excuses which we all sometimes practise in society; and who, in short, is the least ethereal spirit that was ever met with outside a table. De Foe's extraordinary love for supernatural stories of the gossiping variety found vent in 'A History of Apparitions,' and his 'System of Magic.' The position which he takes up is a kind of modified rationalism. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... that word The large eyes of the Apostolic man Grew larger; and within them lived that light Not fed by moon or sun, a visible flash Of that invisible lightning which from God Vibrates ethereal through the world of souls, Vivific strength of Saints. The mitred brow Uptowered sublime: the strong, yet wrinkled hands, Ascending, ceased not, till the crosier's head Glittered above the concourse like a star. At last ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... looked away from him out of the window, and he saw that this same awe was over her also. All their young pulses were thrilling, but this awe which was of the spirit held them in check. Rose, with the full white moonlight shining upon her face, gained an ethereal beauty which gave her an adorable aloofness. The young man seemed to see her through the vista of all his young dreams. She was the goddess before which his soul knelt at a distance. He thought he had never seen anything ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... certain immunity from the necessity of active exercise for the rounding and completion of their bodies. The lack of fresh air, however, soon tells with them a fatal story of fading complexions and departing bloom. That ethereal beauty which peculiarly marks the American woman is also the earliest to decay. As they are the prettiest, so are they the soonest passees of any Northern nation. Could they but realize that exercise in the open air is Nature's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... little baton, gave the time and rhythm, commanding swift obedience; while his left hand lightly beckoned here and there with magical persuasion, drawing forth louder or softer notes, stirring the groups of instruments to passionate expression, or hushing them to delicate and ethereal strains. ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... the wall," said the cat. "You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and round, and you almost ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... more earnestly at the boy; sickness had touched his fine intellectual features into a purity of expression almost ethereal. His fair skin appeared nearly transparent, and the light of truth and candor lit up his countenance with a lustre which affliction could ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... the bushes and weeds and sedges, in the soft recesses of the moss, and through the intricate tangle of withered grass-blades pierced with bright-green shoots, there is a manifold stir of insect life. In the air millions of gauzy wings are quivering, swarms of ethereal, perishable creatures rising and falling and circling in mystical dances of joy. Fish are leaping along the stream. The night breeze trembles with the shrill, piercing chorus of ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... escaping from the shadow that lowered over his family that he did not read the signs, and so rushed into his misfortunes blindly. These, however, are idle speculations; they are the materials from which sages spin their dry and ethereal webs. But this narrative is concerned only with the facts in the case. Therefore it is necessary to know only that when Jimmy Sears stooped to pick up his nail-pointed arrow, lying beside a stunned pullet, he heard the sharp nasal "sping" of a rock whirring near his head. Chicken and bow and arrow ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... practice were alike catholic. All was fish that came to his net. He sat at the feet of muscular Gamaliels, and campaigned with veterans of the classics. He hobnobbed with prize-fighters, and was the choice spirit in the ethereal feasts of poets. He was king of the ring, and facile princeps in the Greek chorus. He could "talk horse" with any jockey in the land; yet who like him could utter tender poetry and deep philosophy? He had no rival in following the hounds, or scouring the country in breakneck ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... shall find me ready!" he said, half aloud;—and then stood, confronting the ethereal glory. The waves rolled in slowly and majestically one after the other, and broke at his feet in long wreaths of creamy foam,—and presently one or two light gusts of a rather chill wind warned him that he had best be returning homeward. While he yet hesitated, a leaf of paper blew ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... place separated and set apart to religious uses by a solemn act of dedication. When the augur moved his wand aloft and designated the portion of the heavens in which he was to make his observations, he called the circumscribed area of the ethereal blue a temple, and when the medival astrologer did the same, he named the space a "house." On the Roman temple an altar was set up, and there, perhaps beneath the spreading branches of a royal oak, sacred to Jupiter, the king of the gods, or of an olive, sacred to Minerva, the ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... twilight was falling, a green twilight, sylvan and very ethereal, tremulous in its delicate beauty. It stole through the green doors, and down through the murmuring pine trees. The sheep-bells were ringing softly; the flocks were going homeward from pasture; and the chime of their little bells ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... the expression of our sense life to the spirit," she cooed. "We do not live or die, but we pass through the phenomena. Through the purifying of our thoughts we will gradually become more and more ethereal until we are translated." ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... tender influence which it possessed—the hour, soothing and elevating the mind, freed from the harassing and petty cares of existence—to a romantic and imaginative disposition these were all favourable to its effects—the development of that ethereal spirit of our nature, that enchanter whose wand conjures up the busy world within, creating all things according to his own pleasure, and investing them with every attribute at his will. She felt her fears give way, and her resolution was taken: the die was cast, and she committed ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... too refined for utterance, Ethereal as the air, Crowd through the brain's dim labyrinths, And leave their ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... but of these the most familiar is the snare set for unwary flies,—the wonderfully ingenious webs which sparkle with dew among the grasses or stretch from bush to bush. The framework is of strong webbing and upon this is closely woven the sticky spiral which is so elastic, so ethereal, and yet strong enough to entangle a good-sized insect. How knowing seems the little worker, as when, the web and his den of concealment being completed, he spins a strong cable from the centre of the web to the entrance ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... sages stood, Its sanctifying dews they blest, and plung'd within the lustral flood. Whoe'er beneath the curse of heaven from that immaculate world had fled, To th' impure earth in exile driven, to that all-holy baptism sped; And purified from every sin, to the bright spirit's bliss restor'd, Th' ethereal sphere they entered in, and through th' empyreal mansions soar'd. The world in solemn jubilee beheld those heavenly waves draw near, From sin and dark pollution free, bathed in the blameless waters clear. Swift king Bhagiratha drave upon his lofty glittering car, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... I have basked in the sunlight of your existence. Your celestial smile, shedding a tranquil calm o'er my perturbed spirit, has been my daily sustenance. Your ethereal form, beautiful as an houri, has, with its subtle fascination, enthralled and steeped in bliss my innermost soul, lifting me as it were into a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... whisper: "Spirit, partake!" As her husband receives the bowl or plate, he likewise murmurs his invocation to the spirit. When he becomes an old man, he loves to make a notable effort to prove his gratitude. He cuts off the choicest morsel of the meat and casts it into the fire—the purest and most ethereal element. ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... creature as Mercedes, as she lightly hung upon his arm that evening, had never yet appeared. She was an angel, a being apart, a fairy,—any crude simile that occurs to honest plodding men of such young girls. John took the distrait look for dreamy thought; her irresponsiveness for ethereal purity; her moodiness for superiority of soul. She imposed herself on him now, as she had done before on Jamie, as deserving a higher life than he could give her. This is what a man terms being in love, and then would wish, quand meme, to drag ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... thought of in after days, until the odd and plain little harbor of Lamorna, and its rocks and bushes and slopes of granite, seemed to be some bit of Fairyland, steeped in the rich hues of the sunset, and yet ethereal, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... circumstance oppose him, He bends it to his will; And if the flood o'erflows him, He dives and steins it still; No hindering dull material Shall conquer or control His energies ethereal, His gladiator soul! Let lower spirits linger, For hint and beck and nod, He always sees the finger Of ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... her glossy green. There grew the sal and betel, there On bending boughs the flowers were fair. There hermits dwelt who tamed each sense By strictest rule of abstinence: Gandharvas, Kinnars,(488) thronged the place, Nagas and birds of heavenly race. Bright minstrels of the ethereal quire, And saints exempt from low desire, With Ajas, sons of Brahma's line, Marichipas of seed divine, Vaikhanasas and Mashas strayed, And Balakhilyas(489) in the shade. The lovely nymphs of heaven were there, Celestial wreaths confined their hair, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... with a rush in those latitudes, and by the time that the Rosario Islands were abeam the eastern sky had paled from indigo to white that, even as one looked, became flushed with a most delicate and ethereal tint of blush rose, which in its turn warmed as rapidly to a tone of rich amber, against which a cluster of mangrove-bordered islands, occupying what looked like the embouchure of a river, suddenly revealed themselves a point or two on the weather bow. Like ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... took his hands from before his face, wiped his eyes with his handkerchief on which they had been embedded, and with a serene and rather heavenly countenance looked up to the preacher, then closing his eyes as if in a state of ethereal enjoyment, he clasped his hands with a sweet smile, twirling his thumbs and bowing his head, as the speaker closed ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... provoked; for it is sometimes very uncomfortable to have a pleasant train of thought interrupted. The imagination is buoyant, ethereal, and elevates poor mortals up to the stars sometimes. It was so with Bobby. He was building up some kind of an air castle, and had got up in the clouds amidst the fog and moonshine, and that aggravating voice brought him ...
— Now or Never - The Adventures of Bobby Bright • Oliver Optic
... scene of 'Juliet and her Nurse' risen up before the mind of a poet, and been described in 'words that burn,' it had been the admiration of the world.... Many-coloured mists are floating above the distant city, but such mists as you might imagine to be ethereal spirits, souls of the mighty dead breathed out of the tombs of Italy into the blue of her bright heaven, and wandering in vague and infinite glory around the earth that they have loved. Instinct with the beauty of uncertain light, they move and mingle among the pale stars, and ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... Camilla, "I don't see why everybody that knows her isn't mad about Ailsa Paige. She has such high principles, such ideals, such wonderful aspirations—" She clasped her hands sentimentally: "At times, Phil, she seems too ethereal, scarcely of earth—and yet I breakfasted with her and she ate twice as much as I did. How does ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... clear The molten gold of that ethereal tone, Floating and falling through the wood alone, A hermit-hymn poured out for ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... of faded age; Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald, Heav'n, earth, and ocean, plunder'd of their sweets; Nectareous essences, Olympian dews, Sermons and City feasts, and fav'rite airs, Ethereal journeys, submarine exploits, And Katerfelto with his hair on end, At his own wonders wond'ring for ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... touch with our lips a countless number of these maids—light and airy as the "airy, fairy Lilian." What more can the finest poetry achieve in quickening the things of earth into tokens and foretastes of heaven, with glimpses of higher life and ethereal worlds. ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... foliage, transform each narrow lane into a vista of enchantment. Eastern Java spreads map-like beneath the overhanging precipice, the blue strait of Madoera curving between fretted peak and palm-clad isle. The velvety plum-colour of nearer ranges fades through tints of violet and mauve into the ethereal lilac of distant summits. The lowlands gleam with brimming fish-ponds and flooded sawas, as though the sea penetrated through creek and inlet to the heart of the green country, the vague glitter of this watery world investing the scene with dream-like unreality. Brown campongs cling to ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... o'er a pellucid plain Of waters, azure with the noontide ray. Ethereal mountains shone around—a fane Stood in the midst, beyond green isles which lay On the blue, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... insurgents, each party inflamed more or less by religious fanaticism, were each disposed to regard the ethereal battle as waged between the spirits of light and the spirits of darkness, angels against fiends. Each party, of course, imagined itself as represented by the angel bands, which doubtless conquered. The phenomenon ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott |
