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Ethereal   /ɪθˈɪriəl/   Listen
Ethereal

adjective
1.
Characterized by lightness and insubstantiality; as impalpable or intangible as air.  Synonyms: aerial, aeriform, aery, airy.  "Aerial fancies" , "An airy apparition" , "Physical rather than ethereal forms"
2.
Of or containing or dissolved in ether.
3.
Of heaven or the spirit.  Synonyms: celestial, supernal.  "Ethereal melodies" , "The supernal happiness of a quiet death"
4.
Characterized by unusual lightness and delicacy.  Synonym: gossamer.  "Gossamer shading through his playing"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Ethereal" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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, And swift with ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb

... the emotions of life. Certainly both have the power of transporting men to superhuman ecstasies; both are means to unearthly states of mind. Art and religion belong to the same world. Both are bodies in which men try to capture and keep alive their shyest and most ethereal conceptions. The kingdom of neither is of this world. Rightly, therefore, do we regard art and religion as twin manifestations of the spirit; wrongly do some speak of art as a manifestation ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... greater interest and reverence than ever. This did not prevent her reading Sara a great many lectures on constancy, and giving her own opinions on what true love ought to be—opinions which were a little too ethereal for Miss Derwent's comprehension, but which she liked very ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... there was a yet brighter radiance cast over the royal halls, there was a spirit of light and glory in every word and action of the youthful enthusiast, Nigel Bruce, that acted as with magic power on all around; known in the court of England but as a moody visionary boy, whose dreams were all too ethereal to guide him in this nether world, whose hand, however fitted to guide a pen, was all too weak to wield a sword; the change, or we should rather say the apparent change, perceived in him occasioned many an ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar

... the common earth, and she seeks the treetops to be nearer the sky," said Nyoda banteringly. "If I may intrude such a material question among your ethereal desires," she continued, "how are you going to ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey

... cost!" Strange to say, the child thrived. Perhaps the invigorating climate of the mountain camp was compensation for material deficiencies. Nature took the foundling to her broader breast. In that rare atmosphere of the Sierra foothills,—that air pungent with balsamic odor, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating,—he may have found food and nourishment, or a subtle chemistry that transmuted ass's milk to lime and phosphorus. Stumpy inclined to the belief that it was the latter and good nursing. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... depended on it. From all sides queer and fantastic shadows of objects, which certainly had no material counterparts in the moon-kissed sward of the rich, ripe meadows, rose to greet us, and filled the lane with their black-and-white wavering, ethereal forms. The evening was one of wonders for which I had no name—wonders associated with an iciness that was far from agreeable. I was not at all sure which I liked best—the black, Stygian, tree-lined part of the road ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... published by Mr. Roscoe, in the Appendix to his Life of Lorenzo. Marking the tracts of air, the clamorous cranes Wheel their due flight in varied ranks descried: And each with outstretch'd neck his rank maintains In marshal'd order through th' ethereal void. Roscoe, v. i. c. v. p. 257. 4to edit. Compare Homer. Il. iii. 3. Virgil. Aeneid. 1 x. 264, and Ruccellai, Le Api, 942, and Dante's Purgatory, Canto ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... There was an ethereal quality in the beauty of her pale face, jet-crowned in the starlight, and a Jeanne d'Arc gallantry in the straightness of her slender figure. When at last she began to speak it was in a low voice, vibrant with repression, but ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... universe; that it was only some undiscovered correlative of a thermal limit,—some unknown molecular complexity or entanglement in cosmic ether—some spontaneously occurring affinity or antagonism of ethereal molecules in the interplanetary spaces—some "potentiated potentiality" of mere sky-mist,—conditions of which he could have had no experimental knowledge, nor have given the slightest analogical proof. That we are justified in thus partially travestying ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... generally known as the Sankhya system. This teaching opposes the Atomic Theory of the Vaisheshika system, and holds that the atoms are not indestructible nor eternal, but may be resolved back into a primal substance called Prakriti. Prakriti is held to be an universal, eternal energy or ethereal substance, something similar to certain Western scientific conceptions of an Universal Ether. From this eternal, universal energy, Kapila held that all the universe has been evolved—all material forms or manifestations of ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson

... Tynemouth had been eyeing her friend with swift inquiry, for she had never seen Jasmine look as she did to-night, so ethereal, so tragically ethereal, with dark lines under the eyes, the curious transparency of the skin, and the feverish brightness and far-awayness of the look. She was about to say something in comment, but other guests entered, and it was impossible. She ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Hong-Kong, and achieved his ends quite as handily as in his present role of wireless operator. But his fingers had begun to itch again for the heavy brass transmission-key, and his ears were yearning for the drone of radio voices across the ethereal void. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... slowly home through the delicious gloaming, with the evening air cooled to freshness so soon as the sun had sunk below the great mountains to the west, from behind which he shot up glorious rays of gold and crimson against the blue ethereal sky, causing the snowy peaks to look more exquisitely pure from the background of gorgeous colour. During the flood of sunlight all day, we had not perceived a single fleck of cloud; but now lovely pink wreaths, floating in mid-air, betrayed that here ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker

... he gone now? Has he joined his compeers? Is he conversing in ethereal regions with Alexander, Caesar, Frederick? Is he sweeping over land and sea in the whirlwind and the thunder-cloud? Or may we hope that he is still working out the task which, in spite of all the imperiousness ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... addressing the photograph of the airy but not ethereal Dolly. The words were not for the ears of others. Even the infatuated lover would have despised the strain of softness in his tones had he known there ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon

... depressed by misfortune, we may readily believe, because such traits of character are in perfect harmony with all the facts and conclusions already presented. Such characteristics were the natural product of the warm and genial sunlight, the elastic bracing air, the ethereal skies, the glorious mountain scenery, and the elaborate blending of sea and land, so peculiar to Greece and the whole of Southern Europe.[31] These characteristics were shared in a greater or less degree by all the nations of Southern Europe in ancient times, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... there no deceptions or changes, And there all is lovely and still; No grief nor fate that estranges, Nor hope that no life can fulfil, But ethereal shelter from ill. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... him to bed, and Melchior also assisted at the performance. As the old lady looked from mother to child a great pity filled her heart for the dear son of her late master who had staked his happiness on a creature so ethereal that the first wind might blow her away; such delicate perfection as that, if her experience did not deceive her, was hardly adapted to the needs of an everyday German husband. But then did Melchior look ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... holy, as the balm Of flow'rs impearl'd with dew, which summer skies Diffuse around—I mark the marble brow Of polish'd symmetry, the eyes more blue Than violets in their vernal bloom, the neck Swanlike, and moulded with ethereal grace; And feel their magic influence on my mind. I will embody them, and give the stamp Of fervid genius to their various charms, Ere this last aspiration is extinct In the unbroken slumbers of the tomb! For I have had prophetic ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various

... ethereal creatures, with delicate peach blow complexions, and very small hands and feet. They seemed to favor all kinds of fluffy and flimsy things; they were explosions of all the colors of the springtime. There were leaves and flowers and fruits and birds in their hats; and ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair

... the world. A sceptre lay beside him—a rod of ebony, surmounted by a cone-shaped diamond, which, cut in a hundred facets, flashed all the hues of the rainbow, and threw coloured gleams on every side, that looked like Shadows too, but more ethereal than those that bore him. Then the Shadows rose gently to the window, passed through it, and sinking slowing upon the field of outstretched snow, commenced an orderly gliding rather than march along the frozen surface. They took it by turns to bear the king, ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald

... reader. These are doubly illuminative, casting spiritual light on the material world, and strengthening with material fact the tenuous thoughts of the spiritual. The words which he used of Shelley are, in this respect, applicable to himself. "To Shelley's ethereal vision the most rarefied mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... of daisies, was even prettier than it had been when she enacted it. He realized now what were the results sought by the camera men in shifting the reflectors. Like a halo, sunlight shone around her face, through the loose tresses of her hair, giving it an ethereal appearance. ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson

... seemed guilty of overweening arrogance and its attendant, presumption; she could not see the form ethereal to which he bowed. To Richard, Dorothy appeared the dupe of superstition; he could not see the god that dwelt within the idol. To Dorothy, Richard seemed to be one who gave the holy name of truth to nothing but the offspring of his own vain fancy. To Richard, Dorothy appeared one who ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... in anatomy, will bother, at the sight of the most beautiful statue of an angel, concerning the construction of the limbs, the wings, and their relation to the skeleton. In certain directions, therefore, the imagination is too weak to conceive an ethereal being in human form floating in the air. Further, one authority points out that we think more frequently of centaurs than of human beings with serpentine bodies, not because centaurs are more sthetic but because horses are more massive than serpents. I do not believe this to be the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... an 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... ruled that he might. More, he would shake hands with him himself. Summoning Mr. Buffin behind his desk, he proceeded to do so. If there were more men like Mr. Buffin, London would be a better place. It was the occasional discovery in our midst of ethereal natures like that of Mr. Buffin which made one so confident for the ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse

... being narrow. We could almost jump from our deck to the banks. We felt in perfect safety. Contrasting that with the night before in that terrible hurricane and in the death struggles for our lives, it produced a supreme feeling of ethereal ideal happiness that this earth seemed almost a Paradise. The captain informed me that there was one place on the river where we might have to anchor. It was called the Devil's Elbow. There was a sharp turn in the river and the current was rapid, and ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower

... a well-known feature of every great debate, and adds grace to his appearance and delivery. When summer comes, however, he bursts into an almost dazzling glory of white waistcoats, grey cashmere coats, and hats of creamy-yellow whiteness, ethereal and almost aggressively summery. The younger men are not slow to follow so excellent an example—though generally there is the tendency to the dark grey, which is a compromise between the black of winter ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... of good fighters, good eaters, good sleepers, good breeders. Literature dies with the decay of the un-literary element. It is not in the spirit of something far away in the clouds or under the moon, something ethereal, visionary, and anti-mundane, that Angelo, Dante, and Shakespeare work, but in the spirit of common Nature and of the homeliest facts; through these, and not away from them, the path of the ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... accept the creations of another soul only as wings on which they may soar into space; features the most delicate they bring to perfection by making them their own; and the most poetic expression which appears in the imagery of an author brings forth still more ethereal imagery in the mind of a reader. To read is to join with the writer in a creative act. The mystery of the transubstantiation of ideas, originates perhaps in the instinctive consciousness that we have of a vocation loftier than our ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... but parts of one stupendous whole; Whose body nature is, and God the soul; That, changed through all, and yet in all the same; Great in the earth as in th' ethereal frame; Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars and blossoms in the trees; Lives through all life, extends through all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent; Breathes in our souls, informs our mortal part, As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart; As full, as ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... began 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 encore to her ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... it matter? Let those who have made the mistake learn their error by knocking against the world. Why need I bother about their plight? For the present I find it wearisome to keep Bimala soaring much longer, like a captive balloon, in regions ethereal. I had better get quite through with the matter ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... 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

... over her lips; I could not help it. She was such a frail little thing, so white and so ethereal, and her poor five hundred had been earned ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green

... a serene life!— Who hath the power (I ask), who hath the power To rule the sum of the immeasurable, To hold with steady hand the giant reins Of the unfathomed deep? Who hath the power At once to roll a multitude of skies, At once to heat with fires ethereal all The fruitful lands of multitudes of worlds, To be at all times in all places near, To stablish darkness by his clouds, to shake The serene spaces of the sky with sound, And hurl his lightnings,—ha, and whelm how oft In ruins his own temples, and to rave, Retiring to the wildernesses, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... evening thou ever hast watch'd Some pale and impalpable vapor, detach'd From the dim and disconsolate earth, rise and fall O'er the light of a sweet serene star, until all The chill'd splendor reluctantly waned in the deep Of its own native heaven? Even so seem'd to creep O'er that fair and ethereal face, day by day, While the radiant vermeil, subsiding away, Hid its light in the heart, the faint gradual veil Of a sadness unconscious. The lady grew pale As silent her lord grew: and both, as they eyed Each the other askance, turn'd, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith

... native to the feeling, what can the loyal poet do, but take the most precious portion of the currency, and impress it with the mint-mark of his own devoted fancy? Perhaps there never was a more panegyrical rhymer than Spenser, and yet, so fine and ethereal is his incense, that the breath of morning is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various

... overwhelming flashes of wit, of which the sparkling verse of Voltaire, the Persian Letters, give us a faint idea! Even the most brilliant books have not succeeded in catching on the wing this airy chatter, which comes, goes, flies elusively. This is that spirit of ethereal nature which, in the Thousand and One Nights, the enchanter confined in his bottle. But what phial would have ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... O goddess! You're getting too ethereal for the school. I shall be glad when the entertainment's over, and we can have a cricket match again. It's ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil

... should commit some extravagance. In walking, I was hardly sensible of my feet touching the ground, it seemed as if I slid along the street, impelled by some invisible agent, and that my blood was composed of some ethereal fluid, which rendered my body lighter than air. I got to bed the moment I reached home. The most extraordinary visions of delight filled my brain all night. In the morning I rose, pale and dispirited; my head ached; my body was so debilitated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various

... me, pale and dishevelled from the night, sit the people whom I saw—years ago!—at Charing Cross. How they have changed! The coffee sends a glow throughout my body. I am fulfilled with a sense of material well-being. The queer ethereal exaltation of the dawn has vanished. I climb up into the train, and dispose myself in the dun-cushioned coupe'. 'Chemins de Fer de l'Ouest' is perforated on the white antimacassars. Familiar and strange inscription! I murmur its impressive iambs ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... the protection afforded by the State. The State was for his culture not a supervisor, regulator, and watchman, but a vigorous and muscular companion and friend, ready for war, who accompanied his noble, admired, and, as it were, ethereal friend through disagreeable reality, earning his thanks therefor. This, however, does not happen when a modern State lays claim to such hearty gratitude because it renders such chivalrous service to German culture and art: for in this regard its past is as ignominious as ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... the laurel wreath is seen Unmixed with pensive pansies dark; There's a light and a shadow on every man Who at last attains his lifted mark— Nursing through night the ethereal spark. Elate he never can be; He feels that spirit which glad had hailed his worth, Sleep in oblivion.—The shark Glides white ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... will be dark and comfortless; but if you persevere day and night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul discovered the place of the heart, than it is involved in a mystic and ethereal light." And Mr. Braid produces absolute anaesthesia, so that surgical operations can be performed without suffering to the patient, only by making him fix his eyes and his mind on a single object; and Newton is said to have said, as you remember, "I keep the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... crags, then again fell in blank abrupt precipices, their edges fringed with shrubs, the recesses of their sides sheltering wild-flowers of the most varied hues, whose sprays and blossoms waved in the sweet breath of morning. Equally varied, and as delicately beautiful, were the ethereal tints of the mountain tops, to which the cloudless sky seemed to impart a tinge of its azure. On the edge of a ravine, midway up a mountain, were seen a few crumbling walls, and a fragment of a broken ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... fountain of liquid light, the ethereal sun, steadily fertilises the heavens with new heat, and supplies a continuous store of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... as violets in their dew, Unfading memories of a smile more sweet Than perfume of pale roses, hopes that strew Ethereal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... world of spirits and dreams than with what I actually saw and heard around me. Surely the elves and genii of the place were conversing, by some inscrutable means, with the principle of intelligence lurking within the poor uncultivated clod! Perhaps to that ethereal principle the wonders of the past, as connected with that stream, the glories of the present, and even the history of the future, were at that moment being revealed! Of how many feats of chivalry had those old walls been witness, when hostile kings contended for their possession!—how many ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams— In what ethereal dances, ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... moon, just risen, showed the form of Lady Vargrave slowly approaching the house. By the light, her features seemed more pale than usual; and her slight and delicate form, with its gliding motion and noiseless step, had in it something almost ethereal and unearthly. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... strongest. When he depicts the workings of nature—the wind roaring through the woods, the storm above the convent roof, the flash of the lightning, the thunderbolt—he does not accomplish it with the wonderful point and accuracy of Weber, nor with the ethereal delicacy of Purcell, but with a breadth, a sympathy with the passion of nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever attained to. He views natural phenomena through a human temperament, and so infuses human emotion into natural phenomena, as Wagner does in "The Valkyrie" ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... whenever I would recall Kristofer Hansteen. Perhaps to those who had known him in his youth, before his body was consumed like a half-spent taper, he might have seemed less spirit-like; but when I met him, three years ago this coming August, his eyes were already burning with ethereal fires, the pallor of waste was on the high, fine forehead, the cough racked him constantly, and there was upon the whole being the unnameable evanescence of the autumn leaf; only—his autumn came ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... spent itself a great warm flood of genuine sorrow tided over her, floated her away: she cried as though her heart was breaking; and now she cried for pity, and at last she cried for very love. A pale ethereal Cino, finger on lip, rose before her; a halo burned about his head; he seemed a saint, he should be hers! Ugolino and Ridolfo, helpless and ashamed before her outburst, went out bickering to their sport; and Selvaggia, wild as her name, untaught, with none to tutor her, dared her ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... 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 Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... physics. It seems in some degree to bridge over the chasm between what we call the material and the spiritual. If we are not within hailing distance of life and mind, we seem assuredly on the road thither. The mystery of the transformation of the ethereal, imponderable forces into the vital and the mental seems quite beyond the power of the mind to solve. The explanation of it in the bald terms of chemistry and physics can never satisfy a mind with a ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... dawned upon the minds of opera makers that thugs and thieves, punks and paillards, were proper persons to present as publishers of operatic themes. Since then there has grown up in Italy a notion that the mud of the slums is ennobling material for celebration by the most ethereal of the arts, and in France that lust and lubricity are lofty inspirations for dramatic song. Gautier's delectable account of one of Cleopatra's nights has furnished forth an opera book; the mysteries of Astarte have been hymned, and Phryne, Thas, and Messalina have been held up ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... match In things resembling them. They are not love! Comes love (that subtle essence, without which Life were but leaden dulness!—weariness! A plodding trudger on a heavy road!) Comes it of title-deeds which fools may boast? Or coffers vilest hands may hold the keys of? Or that ethereal lamp that lights the eyes To shed the sparkling lustre o'er the face, Gives to the velvet skin its blushing glow, And burns as bright beneath the peasant's roof As roof of palaced prince? Yes, Love should seek Its match—then give my love ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles

... far away, beyond the harbour, the grey light of dawn was yielding to the crimson glow of morning. The rain had ceased and heavy slaty clouds parted here and there, displaying glints of delicate turquoise sky, and tiny ethereal vapours in the dim and remote distance of infinity, flecked with touches ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... paradise. V. vanish, evaporate, fade, dissolve, melt away; disappear &c. 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c. (imaginary) 515; immaterial &c. 137; spectral &c. 980; dreamy; shadowy; ethereal, airy; cloud built, cloud formed; gossamery, illusory, insubstantial, unreal. vacant, vacuous; empty &c. 187; eviscerated; blank, hollow; nominal; null; inane. Phr. there's nothing in it; "an ocean of dreams without a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... 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 an ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... powdering everything with an icy froth; and in the utter stillness of the town, quiet and buried under its winter pall, nothing was audible but this faint, fluttering, and indefinable rustle of falling snow—more a sensation than a sound—the intermingling of ethereal atoms seeming to fill space, to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... 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 ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin

... the altar and holds the pennies high above his head in consecrating gesture, and as he does so, the organ music breaks off with an amazed suddenness for from above there comes the far triumphant ringing of the chimes, mingled with ethereal voices ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden

... delicious to lie on the short turf in an ethereal region with a perception of the burden and heat of the day in the valley below; yet the fresh breeze of the mountain drove us with a sense of hunger back ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... which one might ardently wish directed elsewhere. From the moment that the echoes of the Cove caught the first elusive strain of the trumpet, infinitely sweet and clear and compelling, yet somehow ethereal, unreal, as if blown down from the daylight moon, a filmy lunar semblance in the bland blue sky, the denizens of Tanglefoot began to tremulously confer together, and to skitter like frightened rabbits from house to house. ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... 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 influence kindlier far Dews of ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various

... simplicity was almost too tenuous for human speech. She discussed robes whose trailing and voluminous richness could with difficulty be supported by ten strong attendants, and she had heard of a dress the fabric whereof was of such gossamer and ethereal insubstancy that it might be packed into a walnut more conveniently than an ordinary dress could be impressed into a portmanteau. Mary's exclamations of delight and longing ranged from every possible dress to every impossible one, and then Mrs. Makebelieve reviewed ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... yields two millions of dollars. The pecuniary advantages of this school, as of all schools, we may estimate; but there are better and higher considerations, in the elevated intellectual, moral, and religious life of the state, that are too pure, too ethereal, to be weighed in the balance against the grosser possessions and acquisitions of society. We thus get glimpses of the prophetic wisdom which led Mr. Lyman to say, "I do not look on this school as an experiment; on the contrary, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell

... was rather connected with the world of spirits and dreams than with what I actually saw and heard around me. Surely the elves and genii of the place were conversing, by some inscrutable means, with the principle of intelligence lurking within the poor uncultivated clod! Perhaps to that ethereal principle, the wonders of the past, as connected with that stream, the glories of the present, and even the history of the future, were at that moment being revealed. Of how many feats of chivalry had those old ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... music is ringing! Hark! What a careless and jubilant singing! See on ethereal azure waves swinging, Now the glad lark to her South-land is winging! Silence, O Life full of doubting and fears, Hushed first of all be ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi

... into her own dusky room the pale Virgin, touched by a silver shaft of the sinking moon, stood out in startling, ethereal beauty, Her meek hands folded on Her breast. Tharon Last stumbled forward and sank in a heap at Her feet, her ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe

... white serge gown with a large black hat, but a gown that seemed to have been moulded on to her slim, faultless figure. She brought with her a musical rustle, a slight suggestion of subtle perfumes—a perfume so thin and ethereal that it was unrecognizable except in its faint suggestion of hothouse flowers. She held out her hand to Laverick, who placed for ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... leave us to ourselves. There is no question that her exodus was a relief to my Mother, since my paternal grandmother was a strong and masterful woman, buxom, choleric and practical, for whom the interests of the mind did not exist. Her daughter- in-law, gentle as she was, and ethereal in manner and appearance— strangely contrasted (no doubt), in her tinctures of gold hair and white skin, with my grandmother's bold carnations and black tresses—was yet possessed of a will like tempered steel. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... in the landscape around them spoke of autumn. The sea was roaring hollowly in the distance, the fields were bare and sere, scarfed with golden rod, the brook valley below Green Gables overflowed with asters of ethereal purple, and the Lake of Shining Waters was blue—blue—blue; not the changeful blue of spring, nor the pale azure of summer, but a clear, steadfast, serene blue, as if the water were past all moods and tenses of emotion and had settled down to a tranquility unbroken ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes, Or on the hillside, always unforwarned, A grace of being finer than himself, That beckons and is gone,—a larger life Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse Of spacious circles, luminous with mind, To which the ethereal substance of his own Seems but gross cloud to make that visible, Touched to a ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... last of all, we find that in the beginning all things were in chaos. Heaven and earth were not separated. The world substance floated in the cosmic mass, like oil on water or a fish in the sea. Motion in some way began. The ethereal portions sublimed and formed the heavens; the heavier residuum became the present earth. In the plain of high heaven, when the heaven and earth began, were born three kami who "hid their bodies," that is, passed away or ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... was hanging in the balance, she was as desirable as a rosy apple just out of reach; but now that she is smugly satisfied to be in the hands of another her ethereal charm is fled. ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... megiston thauma}), and passing into the brain became converted by the action of that organ into a yet higher type of spirits, the animal spirits (πνευμα ψυχικον {pneuma psychikon}, spiritus animalis), an ethereal substance distributed to the various parts of the body by the structures known to-day as nerves, but believed then to be hollow channels. The three fundamental faculties (δυναμεις {dynameis}), the natural, the vital, and the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... plan. From a central position in the court, where one can look down the broad approach leading from the bay, Nature spreads before the beholder two expanses of color, the deep blue of salt water sparkling in the sun, and the not less deep, but more ethereal, blue of the California sky. With this are the browns and greens of the hills beyond the bay, and, nearer at hand, the vivid verdure of lawns and trees and shrubs. All these the designer used as though they were colors from his own ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... great night laid hold upon her; her eyes shone with stars; she dipped her sight into the coolness and brightness of the sky, as she might have dipped her wrist into a spring; and her heart, at that ethereal shock, began to move more soberly. The sun that sails overhead, ploughing into gold the fields of daylight azure and uttering the signal to man's myriads, has no word apart for man the individual; and ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson

... jealous care of the Magi, had spouted ceaseless flames for nearly a thousand years, was extinguished. All the idols in the world except the Kaaba tumbled to earth. Immediately after the babe was born an ethereal light dazzled the surrounding territory, and, on the very moment when his eyes were first opened, he lifted them to heaven and exclaimed: "God is great! There is no God but Allah and I am his Prophet!" All ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... 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

... family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, and if lovers had never been tied together by a bond less ethereal than ideal passion, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labour would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family. For we pay a high price for our conquests in this ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... but common, a dingy washed-out blonde girl whom it would be a humiliation to present as his wife. She was standing there, in the majesty of such proud pale beauty as poets delight to ascribe to a sorrowful princess. Her wonderful skin was clear and translucent, giving her an ethereal look. Her hair reminded him again of what marvels he had seen in the sunlight of Sunday afternoon. And looking at her form and the small head so gracefully capping it, he could think only of the simile that had always ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... working eight hours a day; and attained to such proficiency that her collaboration in chamber music was courted by professionals. And more than twenty years later the old lady might have been seen dauntlessly beginning the study of Hebrew. This is the more ethereal part of courage; nor was she wanting in the more material. Once when a neighbouring groom, a married man, had seduced her maid, Mrs. Jenkin mounted her horse, rode over to the stable entrance, and horsewhipped the man ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Mr Wititterly, 'you are deceiving his lordship—unintentionally, my lord, she is deceiving you. It is your poetical temperament, my dear—your ethereal soul—your fervid imagination, which throws you into a glow of genius and excitement. There is nothing in the place, my ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... hole in 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... you arrive at the ground-floor, reading your file of the 'Daily Advertiser;' not an egg broken nor a drop spilled. I saw it done in a New York hotel. The air is compressed under the elevator, and acts as a sort of ethereal buffer." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... through the casement and in at the door— All through the long night hear it fitfully roar, The mitre ethereal silently flies So keen and so ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... was common. Virtue and vice, profane and sacred things, were alike for sale. The Pope made money by the sale of cardinalates and traffic in indulgences. "Give me gifts, ye spectators," begged Pasquin; "bring me not verses: divine Money alone rules the ethereal gods." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... are to fall back into the earth-clods of our birth?... Is an angel to be imprisoned in the body to be its dumb servant, its stove-warmer and butler, its cuisinier and porter at the door of the stomach? Shall the ethereal flame merely serve to fill the circular stove with life's warmth, obediently burn and warm, then ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... the words was full of soft allurement and appeal. Of her own accord she put her hand on his arm, and spoke in low, contented tones, as if she had at last found rest and refuge. The moon poured around her a flood of radiance, which gave her an ethereal aspect. Her white drapery enhanced and spiritualized her remarkable beauty, making her appear all that lover or poet could ask. His own words grew kinder and gentler; his heart went out to her as never before; she seemed so fair, delicate, and pure in ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe

... glistened a star. He managed his gold-headed cane with an airy grace, peculiar to the fine gentleman of the period; and to give the highest possible finish to his equipment, he had lace ruffles at his wrist, of a most ethereal delicacy, sufficiently avouching how idle and aristocratic must be the hands ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... have been intently studying earthly life. It is true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forests, have loved women.... Beauties as ethereal as clouds, created by the magic of your poets and geniuses, have visited me at night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl. In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elburz and Mont Blanc, and from there I have seen the sun rise and have ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... is the creator of its own separate, different world. The unity of outward things is imposed on them by the faculty of individuality, and is a mere fiction of the mind. Matter is a creature of the imagination, and is a pure assumption. It is the centre of force, as immaterial as spirit, as ethereal and unsubstantial. As centres of force imply locality, and locality space, so space must have an extension of its own. Not so; it is a pure creation of the mind. The same holds true of time. The world of mind, the moral world as well, are ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... gaiety of the scene, she looked pinched and older than her years. But there was some sort of character in her face, for Mrs. McKail caught her directing a glance full of hatred at the governess. In spite of her ethereal prettiness, Daisy Kent was a good hater. Mrs. McKail felt sure of that. "And she is much more of the cat type than the other one is," thought the observant lady, too ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume

... instructed, and it had not that torrent-rush in which Carlyle so often indulged. It was far more restrained. It had neither the continuousness nor the range of Browning's many-sided conversation, nor did it possess the charm of the ethereal visionariness of Newman's. It lacked the fullness and consummate sweep of Mr. Buskin's talk, and it had neither the historic range and brilliance of Dean Stanley's, nor the fascinating subtlety—the elevation and the depth combined—of that of the late ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... of the ball beyond dispute, and danced with ethereal grace and athletic endurance. She was madly fond of waltzing, and here she encountered what she was pleased to call a divine dancer. It was a Mr. Reginald Falcon, a gentleman who had retired to the seaside to recruit his health and finances sore tried by London and Paris. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade

... larger size, to fix the rudder to the stern, to erect the mast, and unfurl the sails. Thus would the art of navigating the ocean advance from step to step, while the art navigating the air remained a mystery, practiced, it may be, by flying demons, and flying witches, and the like ethereal beings of a dark mythology, but an achievement to which ordinary mortals could ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... bounds of place and time: The living Throne, the 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 ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... of anemones from her niece's cold fingers, laid it down carefully in Mary's rush basket and covered it with a corner of the cloth. Had she been a 'nowadays aunt' she might have thought that Mary was not unlike a windflower herself. The girl's small white face was flushed faintly, like the ethereal white sepals; there was a delicate, fragile fragrance about her as if a breath might blow her away, yet there was an unconquerable air of determination also in her every movement and gesture. But Joan Dewsbury was not a 'nowadays aunt'; she was a 'thenadays aunt,' and ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

... add an ethereal touch to it all, a rainbow spanned the Falls at that moment, and we saw the pilgrims through it or arched by it as they stood, some at either end of the bow where the colours painted the rock and the spray, and some in the space between. ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael

... viscous, fluid-like something, flowing away in a long, red streamer into seemingly empty space. Costigan turned his ultra-gaze into that space and saw that it was actually far from empty. There lay a vast something, formless and indefinite even to his sub-ethereal vision; a something into which the viscid stream of transformed metal plunged. ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... magnificent meteor of the north which, in some measure, makes up to the inhabitants for the absence of the sun. It spread over the whole extent of the sky in the form of an irregular arch, and was intensely brilliant. But the brilliancy varied, as the green ethereal fire waved mysteriously to and fro, or shot up long streamers toward the zenith. These streamers, or "merry dancers" as they are sometimes termed, were at times peculiarly bright. Their colour was most frequently yellowish white, sometimes greenish, and once or twice of a lilac tinge. ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne

... 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

... rarefied extension of it; moving, in triumph and in beauty, through 'an ampler ether, a diviner air.' It is a world where the hesitations and the pettinesses and the squalors of this earth have been fired out; a world where ugliness is a forgotten name, and lust itself has grown ethereal; where anguish has become a grace and death a glory, and love the beginning and the end of all. It is, too, the world of a poet, so that we reach it, not through melody nor through vision, but through the poet's sweet articulation—through verse. Upon English ears the rhymed couplets of Racine sound ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... 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 ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... The ethereal beauty of the asters in the moonlight, the glimmer of the little spring, the soft croon of the brook, the wavering grace of the brackens all wove a white magic round John Meredith. He forgot congregational worries and spiritual problems; the years slipped away from him; he was a young divinity ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... light shakes across the lakes,' the blackest arts of the tourist (and they are as black as they are many) cannot break the spell. Sitting on one of these hillsides, we heard a bugle-call taken up and repeated in delicate, ethereal echoes,—sweet enough, indeed, to be worthy of the fairy buglers who are supposed to pass the sound along their lines from crag to crag, until it faints and dies in silence. And then came the 'Lament for Owen Roe O'Neil.' We were thrilled to the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... only those elements which suit themselves, and to drop others from their thought. As a bee can extract pure honey from the blossoms of some plants whose leaves are poisonous, so some souls can nourish themselves only with the holier and more ethereal parts of popular belief. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... I were the colour of Things, (if hue they had) That are hard to name. Of curious, twisted thoughts that men call "mad" Or oftener "shame." Of that delicate vice, that is hardly vice, So reticent, rare, Ethereal, as the scent of buds and ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.

... strawberries, red and moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of departure for the fancy. Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth. If the name were changed, angels might eat it. Potato plants were ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... ennui, enunciate, 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, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... impious thro' the ethereal tract We no assistance bring: but those to whom Justice and sanctity of life is dear, We from their dangerous toils relieve and save. Let no one then unjustly will to act, Nor in one vessel with the perjured sail: A god to mortals ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton

... With what breadth, yet precision, she reproduced pursy Abbot Boniface, devoted Prior Eustace, wild Christie of the Clinthill, buxom Mysie Hopper, exquisite Sir Percy Shafton, and even tried her hand to some purpose on the ethereal White Lady. Perhaps Chrissy enjoyed the reading as much as the great enchanter did the writing. Like great actors, she had an instinctive consciousness of the effect she produced. Bourhope shouted with laughter when the incorrigible Sir Percy, in the disguise ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... 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 music ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... takes full eight minutes, and fancy in an evening suit and open waistcoat. Spirits don't freeze, but when one's in fleshly form, well ... in brief, I didn't think, and set off, and you know in those ethereal spaces, in the water that is above the firmament, there's such a frost ... at least one can't call it frost, you can fancy, 150 degrees below zero! You know the game the village girls play—they invite the unwary to ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... lustrously away from a face of ivory. The eyes that looked down into his reflected the stars in their depths, the gently-parted mouth was like a vivid red rosebud in the dusk. To Wade she seemed the very Spirit of Twilight, white and slim and ethereal, and so suddenly had the apparition sprung into his vision that he was startled and bewildered. For a long moment their looks held. Then, ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour

... she looked at the drooping, attenuated figure, each day growing more ethereal, that her burden was greater than she could bear. An awful fear haunted her, that she would not give a name, and often, when she had thought of the future till she grew sick with fear, she had felt that work would be a positive relief to ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock

... enjoyment, whether in man or woman, but an unconscious feeling directs our emotions, and this feeling (having a germ that was placed in modern men by Christianity, and perhaps by still older religions) says that woman ought to be an absolutely pure being, with ethereal sensations, and that in her sexual enjoyment is out of place, improper, scandalous. To arouse sexual emotions in a woman, if not to profane a sacred host, is, at all events, the staining of an immaculate peplos; ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... to lack the charm [2] that makes them ours, The obedient vassals of that conquering spell, Whose omnipresent and ethereal powers Encircle Heaven, ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter

... am a verse-maker," he resumed, "but my verse is no more than the material body into which I breathe the celestial soul of thought. Alas! how many a pang has it cost me, this same insensibility to the ethereal essence of poetry, with which you have here tortured me again, at the moment when I am to relinquish my profession forever! O Fate! why hast thou warred with Nature, turning all her higher and more perfect gifts to the ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... be more refined, more refulgent, more ethereal, than her whole appearance, nor had I ever seen the light-blue eyes so clear and brilliant, the thin, writhing lips so scarlet and smiling, the pearly teeth so glistening by contrast with the first, as on ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... troubled, though by no cloud on the ethereal firmament; and Lois was not quite so conscious as she had been of the beauty around her. The silence lasted a good while; she wondered if her neighbour's thoughts were busy with the lady he had just set down, to such a degree that he ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner

... sands upon the shore,) Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree, Or the stricken eagle soar! Now all my hours are trances; And all my nightly dreams Are where the dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams, In what ethereal dances, By what Italian streams. Alas! for that accursed time They bore thee o'er the billow, From Love to titled age and crime, And an unholy pillow!— From me, and from our misty clime, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... shallop slip Its moorings suddenly, to dip Adown the clear, ethereal sea From star to star, all silently? What tenderness of archangels In silver, thrilling syllables Pursued thee, or what dulcet hymn Low-chanted by the cherubim? And thou departing must have heard The holy Mary's ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various

... 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

... shown in a previous communication (Trans., 1898, 73, 554) that certain classes of carbohydrates when acted upon at the ordinary temperature with dry hydrogen bromide in ethereal solution give an intense and beautiful purple colour.[5] It was further shown (Trans., 1899, 75, 423) that this purple substance, when neutralised with sodium carbonate and extracted with ether, yields golden-yellow ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross

... 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

... that mortals desire as a reward and a portion of the immortality their famous deeds deserve; though we Catholic Christians and knights-errant look more to that future glory that is everlasting in the ethereal regions of heaven than to the vanity of the fame that is to be acquired in this present transitory life; a fame that, however long it may last, must after all end with the world itself, which has its own appointed end. So that, O Sancho, in what we ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... cloudless. He does not see. Yet he is not blind, does not hear, yet he is not deaf. He goes beyond the feeling of time and space. Every time the true seer enters a state of dreamless sleep he enjoys the span of Ethereal Glory; his consciousness is centered in ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun

... have 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 ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... love was passion's essence—as a tree On fire by lightning; with ethereal flame Kindled he was, and blasted; for to be Thus enamour'd were in him the same. But his was not the love of living dame, Nor of the dead who rise upon our dreams, But of ideal beauty, which became In him existence, and o'erflowing teems ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... by arts of a divine chemistry He turns foul decay into the snow-white purity and fragrant odours of a lily; He fashions the infant in the darkness of the mother's womb; He inspires dead matter with the active principle of life; in man He unites an ethereal spirit to a lump of clay—wonders these which have perplexed the wisest men, and remain as incomprehensible to philosophers as to fools. Yet, as if there was no mystery in these but what our understanding could fathom—as ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie

... indulgence and ubiquity, he teaches them the first sediments of gastronomy, by pointing out to them the bear, the lion, and many other fixed invisible consternations, which are continually involving upon their axletrees, through the blue cerulean fundamus above. From this vast ethereal he dives with them to the very bottom of the unfathomable oceans, bringing up from thence liquid treasures of earth and air. He then courses with them on the imaginable wing of fancy through the boundless regions ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... women a friendship sprang up, which was due rather to a wish to like each other than to a real attraction or real fellow-feeling. The Comtesse d'Agoult, with her blue eyes, her slender figure, and somewhat ethereal style, was a veritable Diana, an aristocrat and a society woman. George Sand was her exact opposite. But the Comtesse d'Agoult had just "sacrificed all the vanities of the world for the sake of an artist," so that she ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic

... now. She beheld with a curious interest a sight till now so unfamiliar, taking a childish pleasure in watching the great white arm of moon-rays stretch further and further across the water, changing the ripples into molten silver, and making ethereal and ghostlike every little boat that ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)

... soul emanates from the ethereal celestial part of the cosmos and consists of yang substance. When operating actively in the living human body, it is called khi or "breath," and hwun; when separated from it after death it lives forth as a refulgent spirit, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... the synchronised clock system already referred to will be found essential, each office or house being furnished with a timekeeper of this type kept in constant agreement with a central clock, and so arranged that only when the ethereal electrical impulse is given at a certain fixed point in the minute, will any particular subscriber's bell be rung. This may be effected by some such arrangement as a revolving drum, perforated at ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... germs of life which, if Mr. Darwin was right, were once the world's only inhabitants. They could hardly have come hither from some other world; they could not in their wet, cold, slimy state have travelled through the dry ethereal medium which we call space, and yet remained alive. If they travelled slowly, they would die; if fast, they would catch fire, as meteors do on entering the earth's atmosphere. The idea, again, of their having been created ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... dewy meadow breeds the cloud That rises on ethereal wings, And wraps the mountain in a shroud From which the living lightning springs And torrents pour, ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland

... 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 of his watch-tower. Then, when ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... however small, and however light, buoyant, and ethereal they may seem, are subject to this force: the tiniest speck in a sunbeam and the most volatile vapour, equally with the heaviest metal and the hugest block, the particles of bodies as well as the ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness



Words linked to "Ethereal" :   heavenly, chemistry, celestial, gossamer, unsubstantial, ether, unreal, insubstantial, delicate, aeriform, chemical science



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