"Empyrean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... were to find a husband for her. Not that 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; she was still reading, writing, studying, debating as hard as ever, and paying dues to this ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... thirty chief priests. Fifteen gaze upon the region above the earth, and fifteen on the region below it. At regular intervals one of them rushes from the upper regions to the lower, whilst another abandons the lower to mount towards the empyrean. ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... receiving a message from on high, listening with ecstasy, with suppressed breath and parted lips, to the voice of the Deity, and forgetting the world in a blissful intoxication, she seemed about to take her flight to the empyrean! ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... Possibilities that hover on the borderline between today and tomorrow, Time and Eternity. They alone may not enter time unless we beckon them. The starry heaven is the heaven of the body; the crystal sphere, of the intellect; and the empyrean, of the pure soul. We may live in the starry heaven in this life, if God gives us the grace. But it is then a heaven of desire. But the weaving of the angels is the whole philosophy of nature. Their ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... 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
... would not come down from the empyrean and be conceived unless somebody's thought were absorbed in the conception. Art actually segregates classes of men and masses of matter to serve its special interests. This involves expense; it impedes some possible activities and imposes others. On this ground, from ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... her lips and, flashing crimson, droop her head, and simply fumble with her 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 unexpectedly befall me, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... itur ad astra!" murmured his dragoman enigmatically, and, lifting his eyes, he followed the Angel's flight into the empyrean. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... said Vendramin, taking Emilio home with him. "Those two men are of the legion of unearthly spirits to whom it is given here below to escape from the wrappings of the flesh, who can fly on the shoulders of the queen of witchcraft up to the blue empyrean where the sublime marvels are wrought of the intellectual life; they, by the power of art, can soar whither your immense love carries you, whither opium transports me. Then none can understand them but ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... 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 hard which here his portion is? For there, and there alone, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... ribs of mine Are all too fragile for thy 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 whole Which once ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 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 pealed the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... 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 world ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... 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 the material ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... 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 with ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... 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 of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... even brutal fidelity as just here. He seeks no legendary scene and atmosphere like that of Theocrite's Rome, in which the angels who come and go, and God who enjoys his "little human praise," would be missed if they were not there; but opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern Camberwell. The pages in which Browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author of the Apocalypse are interleaved with others in which, for once, he seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. Of course this is intensely characteristic of Browning. The quickened ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... add that this steamer has no rivals. It was with the greatest interest that I sailed at such a height on this adventurous craft; and the next time that I stand upon the summit of Mount Washington, and see the fleecy clouds float in the empyrean, one-third of a mile above me, I shall remember that the steamer on Lake Yellowstone sails at precisely the same altitude as that enjoyed by those ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... further turned to day, for above the City, high in the velvet black empyrean were suspended thousands of glass balloons, each emitting the Geissler-like illumination that marked the lines of streets. So full and opulent was the flood of light, that the summit I had reached, the encircling hills, and the farther side of the saucer-shaped valley where Scandor ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... vast system developed by these three leaders of mediaeval thought; and now came the man who wrought it yet more deeply into European belief, the poet divinely inspired who made the system part of the world's LIFE. Pictured by Dante, the empyrean and the concentric heavens, paradise, purgatory, and hell, were seen of all men; the God Triune, seated on his throne upon the circle of the heavens, as real as the Pope seated in the chair of St. Peter; the seraphim, cherubim, and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... mild, domesticated face. My dog is as tame as his master (in whose veins flows the blood of the old cavemen). But time has not tamed fire. Fire is as wild a thing as when Prometheus snatched it from the empyrean. Fire in my grate is as fierce and terrible a thing as when it was lit by my ancestors, night after night, at the mouths of their caves, to scare away the ancestors of my dog. And my dog regards it with the old wonder and ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... lighting up the pale surfaces of cloud, and tinging the grey waters of that majestic sea with a lurid hue of blood. They kissed the bellying sails, and seemed to rest upon the vessel's lofty trucks, and then travelled on and away, and away, through the great empyrean of space till they broke and vanished upon the horizon's rounded edge. There behind them—miles behind—Kerguelen Land reared its fierce cliffs against the twilight sky. Clear and desolate they towered in an unutterable solitude, and on their snowy surfaces the sunbeams ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... beneath the shade of the grimy buildings that we ourselves have put up, and which shut out heaven from us, and only now and then a slanting beam comes through some opening, and carries wistful thoughts and longings into the Empyrean beyond. And how feeble our faith, and how little of His power comes into our hearts, and how little of the joy of the Lord is realised in our daily experience we all know, and it is sometimes good for us to force ourselves to feel it is but an 'earnest' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... things. Patterns leap and tumble out of it. Violin music launches swiftly into space, trumpets run scales, the tempi move with the velocity of express trains. It has become a giant, terrible bird, the great auk of music, that seizes you in its talons and spirals into the empyrean. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... celestial sphere was a reality, instead of a mere effect of perspective, as we regard it. The stars were set on its surface, or at least at no great distance within its crystalline mass. Outside of it imagination placed the empyrean. When and how these conceptions vanished from the mind of man, it would be as hard to say as when and how Santa Claus gets transformed in the mind of the child. They are not treated as realities by any astronomical writer from Ptolemy down; yet, the impressions and forms of thought ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... this preponderance of the 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 ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... postscript to Townsend's oracular sayings I must add one of his dicta on women. Here his generalisations were enormous and almost always included a wild nosedive from the empyrean of generalities to that purely specific element, the hard earth. For example, he was never tired of saying—in various forms, for he never really repeated himself—that women were far more trustworthy in money matters than men. He used to say that he had ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... 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)
... join 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
... wings With dreadful shade contiguous, and the orbs Of his fierce chariot rolled, as with the sound Of torrent floods, or of a numerous host. He on his impious foes right onward drove, Gloomy as night: under his burning wheels The steadfast empyrean shook throughout. All but the throne itself of God. Full soon Among them he arrived; in his right hand Grasping ten thousand thunders, which he sent Before him, such as in their souls infixed Plagues: they, astonished, all resistance lost, All ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... 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 ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... 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
... that Seymour Hicks should have a frequent invitation to Lady Roehampton's assemblies. Seymour Hicks only wanted a lever to raise the globe, and this introduction supplied him with one. It was astonishing how he made his way in society, and though, of course, he never touched the empyrean regions in which Endymion now breathed, he gradually, and at last rapidly, planted himself in a world which to the uninitiated figures as the very realm of nobility and fashion, and where doubtless is found a great fund ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... Zinovieff, a Soviet leader, admitted that the 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 congregations in church while they were worshipping! ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... by a muttering priest, With superstitious rites, and senseless words, Out-snuffled from an old worm-eaten book, In a dark corner (railed off like a sheep-pen) Of an old house, that fools do call a CHURCH! THEIR altar was the flowery lap of earth— The starry empyrean their vast temple— Their book each other's eyes—and Love himself Parson, and Clerk, and Father to the bride!— Holy espousals! whereat wept with joy The spirit of the universe.—In sooth There was a sort of drizzling rain that day, For I remember (having left at home My ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... proper angle to make a rudder, all the various organs so finely 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
... or, to be precise, he talked, and I 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 ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... it had been a far cry, from his careless days and his empyrean populous with deities, to this utter and unhappy night and one unseen Power. In that time he had run the gamut of sensations from a laugh to a wail. Now was his need the sorest of all his life. The most helpful of all hands must aid him. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Pi ch'ou says, "The empyrean above you is not God; it is but His outward manifestation. That which remains ever fixed in man's heart and which rules over all things without cease, that is God. Alas, you earnestly seek God in the blue sky, while forgetting Him altogether in your ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... supplying his own wants, he acquires opportunity of leisure to improve his mind, to purify his heart, to cultivate his taste; that he has time on his hands to plunge into the depths of philosophy, and to soar to the clear empyrean of seraphic morality. The master-statesman—ay, the statesman in the land of the Declaration of Independence, in the halls of national legislation, with the muse of history recording his words as they drop from his lips, with the colossal figure ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... swept the crossings he had to take on his triumphant way; he would even have bestowed forgiveness on his greatest enemy if he had met him then;—for the divine joy of love was singing in his heart and raising him to the serene and glorious empyrean of heroes and gods. Oh matchless magic of the human heart, which confounds all the hypotheses of science, and flouts all ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... Becam'st enamoured; and such joy thou took'st With me in secret that my womb conceived A growing burden. Meanwhile war arose, And fields were fought in Heaven: wherein remained (For what could else?) to our Almighty Foe Clear victory; to our part loss and rout Through all the Empyrean. Down they fell, Driven 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 hands was given, with charge to keep These ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... the exception of the publication of The Restoration, seems to have proved abortive. White entertained many opinions in common with Sterry, which he advocates with great power. He does not however, like his fellow chaplain, soar into the pure empyrean of theology with unfailing pinions. Sterry has frequently sentences which Milton might not have been ashamed to own. His Discourse of the Freedom of the Will is a noble performance, and the preface will well bear a comparison ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... story of courage and coolness by which empires had been saved from disaster. And he was so persuasive, so convincing, that our imaginations, which would have refused to follow a smaller man on lower flights, soared obediently after him through an empyrean of impossible romance. Nor did he stop at this. General TEMPEST was the pattern of old-world punctilio, but before a week was out he had introduced COBBYN, of whom he knew nothing except what COBBYN told him, to all ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... well; genius wears itself out; talent drives a brougham in fact, genius a sun-chariot in fancy; talent keeps to earth and fattens there, genius soars to the empyrean, to get picked by every kite that flies; talent is the part and the venison, genius the seltzer and souffle of life. The man who has talent sails successfully on the top of the wave; the man with ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... endowed with the wild and ethereal imagination of 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 ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... and small, they roam the vast wilderness of the stars, and soar the very empyrean of thought and action, and they fear and crouch and kneel; and in their quaking fears and driveling doubts seem like puny things crawling on the ground; they are saints and sinners; sometimes emissaries of light and love, and yet ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... world, creation, nature, universe; earth, globe, wide world; cosmos; kosmos^; terraqueous globe^, sphere; macrocosm, megacosm^; music of the spheres. heavens, sky, welkin^, empyrean; starry cope, starry heaven, starry host; firmament; Midgard; supersensible regions^; varuna; vault of heaven, canopy of heaven; celestial spaces. heavenly bodies, stars, asteroids; nebulae; galaxy, milky way, galactic circle, via lactea [Lat.], ame no kawa [Jap.]. sun, orb of day, Apollo^, Phoebus; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... systems, all must wear this form. The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and asks its meaning. He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and makes a voyage long or short. He ascends into the empyrean, and communes with the eternal essences. But whatever his achievements and discoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... all other men, so should his memorial tower over all other monuments. I cannot help thinking that the re-erection of the Wembley Tower in the form of a gigantic swan soaring into the empyrean to the height of say two or three thousand feet would prove a satisfactory solution of the problem. Whether it should be black or white is a question which might be referred to a small committee of experts, such as Sir SIDNEY LEE, Sir HERBERT TREE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... EMPYREAN, the highest heaven, or region of pure elemental fire, whence everything of the nature of fire has been conceived to emanate, whether in the phenomena of nature or the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... air; and we've got men, gentlemen, men of grit and backbone, men of courage and determination, that 'fear no foe in shining armour,' men like our friend Mr. Smith (roars of applause), who brave the perils of the deep and the chance of the empyrean, who take their lives in their hands and think nothing of it. Some croakers will tell you the Old Country is going to the dogs. Don't you believe it. ("We won't.") I don't believe she ever will go to the dogs while she's got left a ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... why should I have written them? I may answer. Why deprive myself of the actual charm of my enjoyments to inform others what I enjoyed? What to me were readers, the public, or all the world, while I was mounting the empyrean. Besides, did I carry pens, paper and ink with me? Had I recollected all these, not a thought would have occurred worth preserving. I do not foresee when I shall have ideas; they come when they please, and not when I call for them; either ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 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 a moment and expires; ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... never hope to overrun, and into that overarching heaven where, amid clouds and storms, lightning and sudden tempest, there is revealed to those who look for them, lucid openings into the pure, deep empyrean, "as it were the very body of heaven in its clearness;" and when, best of all, we may remember Who it is who stretched out these heavens as a tent to dwell in, and on whose footstool we may kneel, and out of the depths of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... seas of rays that roll Empyrean splendor o'er th' unchained soul— The soul that scarce (the billows are so dense) Can struggle to its destin'd eminence— To distant spheres, from time to time, she rode, And late to ours, the favour'd one of God— But, now, the ruler of an anchor'd realm, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... conduct, reproved unwonted licences assumed by Lady Grace; who, in allusion to Hymen's weaving of a cousinship between the earldom of Southweare and that of Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang, set her mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions, as it were from the egg to the empyrean. Her stature was rather short, all of it conversational, at the eyebrows, the shoulders, the finger-tips, the twisting shape; a ballerina's expressiveness; and her tongue dashed half sentences through and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and funnily candid. Anybody ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... FRESH OUT 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
... 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 ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... behind them. "The sun is always shining for us. The earth turns around from the sun, and it is night—turns toward him, and it is day. The earth wanders far away from the sun, and it is winter—comes toward him again, and it is summer. But the sun shines in the empyrean all the time, wherever the earth may be. Fogs and mists arise from the land and water, condense in clouds, and obscure his glorious face, but they come down in rain or snow, clearing the atmosphere, and we say the sun shines again, when, ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... and many others believed that St. Paul in his rapture may have been elevated in body and soul into the third heaven, that is, into the Empyrean, into Paradise, into the place where the angels and the blessed are; and we must not call this in question, since the apostle himself says, that he does not know whether he was raised up in the body or out of the body. St. Theresa, whose ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... 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
... strong plumed! on tireless wing upspringing, Thy course be ever toward the empyrean; And at thy side my bonded spirit winging, Will mount with thee till ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... la Corneille, who carried his gaze to the stars, and only spoke to mortals from the summit of his trophies. His sister, Madame de Longueville, had also in the same fashion soared into the sphere of a goddess. The one and the other, in the empyrean, no longer distinguished their fellow mortals from such a height save with a smile of disdain. Great folks, as a contemporary tells us, kicked their heels in their antechambers for hours, and, when granted an audience, were received with yawning ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... ceaseless still, 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
... waves ebb and flow over masses of turf and flowers. The rivulet of Ain-Tabiga makes a little estuary, full of pretty shells. Clouds of aquatic birds hover over the lake. The horizon is dazzling with light. The waters, of an empyrean blue, deeply imbedded amid burning rocks, seem, when viewed from the height of the mountains of Safed, to lie at the bottom of a cup of gold. On the north, the snowy ravines of Hermon are traced in white lines upon the sky; on ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... An empyrean infinitely vast And irridescent, roof'd with rainbows, whose Transparent gleams like water-shadows shone, Before me lay: Beneath this dazzling vault— I felt, but cannot paint the splendour there! Glory, beyond the wonder of the heart To dream, around interminably blazed. A spread of fields ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... after his death it was found lying in a sealed book.' After this (about ten years of the twenty-four having already elapsed) he is taken up to heaven by Mephisto in a chariot drawn by dragons—not of course to the Empyrean, the abode of God, but up as far as the fixed stars (the eighth sphere). He finds the sun, which before he had believed to be only as big as the bottom of a cask, to be far larger than the earth, and the planets to be as large as the earth, and the clouds of the upper sky ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... femmes suspendues seem to float in the air or rest on the frail support of sprays or branches of trees. While, finally, at the back of all the most glorious paradise of all will open, revealing the pure empyrean itself, and some fair spirit aloft in a cloud among the stars; the apex of all. Then all motion ceases; the work is complete; the fumes of crimson, red, and blue fire begin to rise at the wings; ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... from being the opinion of the reading public. We have seen that he never failed, and sometimes he soared into the very empyrean of popularity. In 1834, when he published The Last Days of Pompeii, again in 1837 when he published Ernest Maltravers, the ecstasy of his adorers discovered their favourite in a moment under the mask of anonymity which he chose to assume. This was ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... your life than you are at this moment. Think of it! Here we are above 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 of that ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... directing his wonderful tube towards the SIDES of our system, where stars are planted most rarely, and raising the powers of the instrument to the required pitch, was enabled with awe-struck mind to see suspended in the vast empyrean astral systems, or, as he called them, firmaments, resembling our own. Like light cloudlets to a certain power of the telescope, they resolved themselves, under a greater power, into stars, though these generally seemed no larger than ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... trained to express 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 formal rhyme and metre, Mr. Chenault ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Poetry, it is clear, embraces all we can experience; and every high, impassioned, imaginative, intellectual, and moral state of being becomes religious before it passes away, provided it be left free to seek the empyrean, and not adstricted to the glebe by some severe slavery of condition, which destroys the desire of ascent by the same inexorable laws that palsy the power, and reconcile the toilers to the doom of the dust. If all the states of being that poetry ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... as these a strange neglect of that glory of man, the Pure Intellect, with which the spiritual prig enjoys to believe that he can climb up to the Empyrean itself. It almost seems as though the mystics shared Keats' view of the supremacy of feeling over thought; and reached out towards some new and higher range of sensation, rather than towards new and more accurate ideas. They are ever eager to assure us that man's most sublime thoughts of the Transcendent ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... built and peopled left they e'er and aye! They're tombed yet pledged to actions past away * And after death upon them came decay. Where are their troops? They failed to ward and guard! * Where are the wealth and hoards in treasuries lay? Th' Empyrean's Lord surprised them with one word, * Nor wealth nor refuge could their ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 itself, since the essence ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... 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 of Heaven. Two days' march, three days' march away, they stood up like the walls of Eden. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... 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
... N. world, creation, nature, universe; earth, globe, wide world; cosmos; kosmos[obs3]; terraqueous globe[obs3], sphere; macrocosm, megacosm[obs3]; music of the spheres. heavens, sky, welkin|, empyrean; starry cope, starry heaven, starry host; firmament; Midgard; supersensible regions[obs3]; varuna; vault of heaven, canopy of heaven; celestial spaces. heavenly bodies, stars, asteroids; nebulae; galaxy, milky way, galactic ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... round the Mundane Creation, and surging everywhere against its outmost firmament, was the dark and turbid CHAOS out of which its orderly and orbicular immensity had been cut; and high over all, radiant above Chaos, but with the Mundane Universe pendent from it at one gleaming point, was the great EMPYREAN or HEAVEN of HEAVENS, the abode of Angels and of Eternal Godhead. Not to the mere Earth of Man or the Mundane Universe about that Earth was Milton's adventurous song now to be confined, representing only dramatically by means of speeches and choruses ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... thought from the rigid rule of classical authority; and all the enthusiastic believers in the future glories of the "Muse Romantique" went to the English theater, to be amazed, if not daunted, by the breadth of horizon and height of empyrean which her wings might sweep, and into which she might soar, "puisque Shakespeare ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... 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 ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... heaven.] According to our Poet's system, there are ten heavens; the seven planets, the eighth spheres containing the fixed stars, the primum mobile, and the empyrean. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... 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 ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... note that the Romans established a relation between the Great Comet of 43 B.C. and the death of Caesar, who had been assassinated a few months previously. It was, they asserted, the soul of their great Captain, transported to Heaven to reign in the empyrean after ruling here below. Were not the Emperors Lords ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... embraced his heart's desire. He looked into the heart of 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; bestrode ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... 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 its streams. But digressing from one path into another, we enter unaware the eternal vista ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... world, my friend,"—and here he 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
... 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
... first day of the year dawned in gloom, but the sun, like the sun of Austerlitz, soon beamed forth in great splendor upon a people radiant with smiles and exalted to the empyrean. ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... kind, of inconceivable tenuity—atoms appear; if this be artificially stopped for a single atom, the atom disappears; there is nothing left. Presumably, were that flow checked but for an instant, the whole physical world would vanish, as a cloud melts away in the empyrean. It is only the persistence of that flow[7] which maintains the ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... 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 a ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... to the Ptolemaic system, the earth is encompassed by eight celestial zones or heavens; the first or highest, above which is the empyrean, (otherwise called the ninth heaven,) is that of the Moon, the second that of Mercury, the third that of Venus, the fourth that of the Sun, the fifth that of Mars, the sixth that of Jupiter, the seventh that of Saturn and the eighth or lowest that of the fixed stars and ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... was wrong. Something had come into the blind—a winged, fluttering thing, out of the empyrean—and even Uncle Dudley had not seen or heard it, and never a honk or a quack warned anybody, or heralded the unseen coming of the ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... 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
... escaped, but was always lured by food to return. He never seemed disposed to depart to the blue empyrean, ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... sorry to have a little time to think; to try in some fashion to readjust the point of view so suddenly snatched from its anchorings in the commonplace and shot high into the empyrean. It was the night of the ninth of June. Three months earlier, to a day, I had been an outcast; a miserable tramp roaming the streets of a great city; broken in mind, body and heart; bitter, discouraged, and so nearly ready to fall in ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... of Dante consists of nine crystalline spheres of different sizes, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, and the Empyrean, enclosed one within the other, and revolved by the Angels, Archangels, Princedoms, Powers, Virtues, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim. Beyond these orbs, whose whirling motions cause "the music of the spheres," lies a tenth circle, the real heaven (a Rose), where "peace ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... 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 Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... meeting? To all which questions, not unessential in a Biographic work, mere Conjecture must for most part return answer. 'It was appointed,' says our Philosopher, 'that the high celestial orbit of Blumine should intersect the low sublunary one of our Forlorn; that he, looking in her empyrean eyes, should fancy the upper Sphere of Light was come down into this nether sphere of Shadows; and finding himself mistaken, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... her mission 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
... 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
... 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. A man ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann |
