"Empyrean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blindest Phoebus' beams so bright, With course above the empyrean crystalline; Above the sphere of Saturn's highest height, Surmounting all the angelic orders nine; O Lamp, that shin'st before the throne divine, Where sounds hosanna in cherubic lay, With drum and organ, harp and cymbeline— Mother, of Christ, ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... come down from the empyrean, and though the descent was great, yet it gained new life by once again ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... in a sort of menacing way; while, in lieu of the two or three odd sentinels that had previously peeped out from the firmament, all the galaxies of heaven were, at this moment, in their myriads above, spangling the empyrean from zenith ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... creature, ill with his Wife, I doubt—has joyfully sent his legal hundreds; will vote for the Reichs Ban against this worst of Germans, whom he has for Brother-in-law. Dark days in the heart of Wilhelmina, those of the Camp at Furth. Days which grow ever darker, with strange flashings out of empyrean lightning from that shrill true heart; no peace more, till ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... Chatas looked into the still depths of Bayou Lacombe, Louisiana, they said that the reflection of the sky was the empyrean of the Under Land, whither all good souls were sure to go after death. Their chief, Opaleeta, having fallen into this bayou, was so long beneath the water that he was dead when his fellows found him, but by working over him for hours, and through resort to prayers and incantations of medicine ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... 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 like the unmelodious ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... stretched upward toward heaven, she thus resembled an inspired priestess, just 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
... has relation to the Air as an atmosphere, and to the Ocean of Ether in filling the Great Spheral Dome of Empyrean or Firmament. The Vowel-Sound u (uh) has a similar relation to Fluidity or Liquidity, and, hence, to Water as a typical fluid, to the Ocean Flux or Tide, to the Flowing Stream, etc. This Time-like ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... than once escaped, but was always lured by food to return. He never seemed disposed to depart to the blue empyrean, his ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... never written!—Why did I not write them? will be asked; and 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 ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... stood With down-fixt eyes, musing the strange event. Dark thoughts were theirs, and sorrowful their mood; When lo, to leftward Cytherea sent A sign amid the open firmament. A flash of lightning swift from ether sprang With thunder. Turmoil universal blent Earth, sea and sky; the empyrean rang With arms, and loudly pealed the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... anxious animation of her address. Her task of dragging him forward might have reminded the spectator of some of those ancient monuments, on which a small cherub, singularly inadequate to the task, is often represented as hoisting upward towards the empyrean the fleshy bulk of some ponderous tenant of the tomb, whose disproportioned weight bids fair to render ineffectual the benevolent and spirited exertions of its fluttering ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... less great in detached passages, but is little inferior in general greatness. No less an authority than Tennyson, indeed, expresses a preference for the "bowery loneliness" of Eden over the "Titan angels" of the "deep-domed Empyrean." If this only means that Milton's Eden is finer than his war in heaven, we must concur; but if a wider application be intended, it does seem to us that his Pandemonium exalts him to a greater height above every other poet than his Paradise exalts ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... 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 just before the outburst of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Homer. They are scattered up and down the "Ilias" and "Odusseia" in the shape of disjecta membra. For instance, the Olympus which he beholds through a chasm in the walls of the universe, towering into the pure empyrean, has some of the features of Homer's island Elysiums, the blissful abodes of mortal heroes who have been divinized or translated. The Celtic island-valley of Avalon, the abode of King Arthur, "with its orchard-lawns and bowery hollows," so exquisitely alluded to by Tennyson, is a kindred spot ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... blue firmament visible above the admirably proportioned cornice he caught sight of two planets flaming high in the west, and in close juxtaposition. Necessity had made him somewhat of an astronomer, and he had studied Chinese astrology as a pastime. He recognized these lamps of the empyrean as Mars and Venus, and, up-to-date American though he was, drew comfort from that favoring augury. Then, in stepping from the roadway to the sidewalk, he stumbled over a heavy curb, and laughed at the reminder ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... the plain of Gennesareth, there are enchanting parterres, where the 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 ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... of Drayton is a somewhat perplexing task; for, while rarely subtle, or rising to empyrean heights, he wrote in such varied styles, on such various themes, that the task, at first, seems that of criticizing many poets, not one. But through all his work runs the same eminently English spirit, the same honesty ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... sphere there was believed to exist a boundless, uncircumscribed region, of immeasurable extent, called the Empyrean, or Heaven of Heavens, the incorruptible abode of the Deity, the place of eternal mysteries, which the comprehension of man was unable to fathom, and of which it was impossible for his mind to form any conception. Such were ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... the string of this venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, and the chosen souls would be lost for the race, like balloons, which, but for gravitation, would never return from the empyrean.'—AMIEL. ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... rose, in memorable pomp, Glorious as ere 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 ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... again. And so our earthly lives are passed, to a large extent, 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... it—Byfield in his Monster Foolardi. One stroke of this knife (always supposing I miss my own hand), and the rope is severed: our common friend scales the empyrean. But he'll come back—oh, never doubt he'll come back!—and begin the dam business over again. Tha's the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... have been chaotically tending since time began! Ideal, say you? Call it ideal, soul, mind, matter, art, eternity,... what are they all but words? What are words but the weak strivings of the fettered soul that fain would soar to those empyrean heights where Truth, and Art, and Beauty are one and indivisible? Shall I say ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... charm'd eye in gay undress appear, 170 Or pour your secrets on his raptured ear. How nitrous Gas from iron ingots driven Drinks with red lips the purest breath of heaven; How, while Conferva from its tender hair Gives in bright bubbles empyrean air; 175 The crystal floods phlogistic ores calcine, And the pure ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... why fish in your own lake when you may take a tramp of several miles through the woods to another? They begged Clavering to go with them, and as man cannot exist for long in the rarefied atmosphere of the empyrean without growing restive, he was feeling rather let down, and cherished a sneaking desire for a long day alone ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... dignified with this epithet. History and geography, classics and mathematics, modern languages (her own and those of foreign nations), all these she candidly despises. Let others make their nests upon the shady branches of the tree of learning. For herself she is fain to soar into the empyrean of society, and to gaze with undazzled eyes into the sun of the smart set. She has of course had the advantage of teachers of all sorts, but the claims made upon her time by thoughtless parents have usually been so great as to leave her at the end of her school-room ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... 'shadow cast by turning' from the sun that revolves not at all— but by reason of the side that is turned to his life-giving and quickening beams. We believe that all the clouds and mist that come between us and God are like the clouds and mist of the sky, not dropped upon us from the blue empyrean above, but sucked up from the undrained swamps and poisonous fens of the lower earth. That is to say, if there be any change in the fulness of our possession of the divine Spirit, the fault lies wholly within the region of the mutable and of the human, and not at all in the region ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... yonder realms of empyrean day Bursts on my ear the indignant lay; There sit the sainted sage, the bard divine, The few whom Genius gave to shine Through every unborn age and undiscover'd clime. Rapt in celestial transport they, Yet hither oft a glance from high They send of tender ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... 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; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... "Life of the Bee", and shuddered at the fate of the male-creature. He was a mere accident in the scheme of Nature—she wasted all his splendors to accomplish the purpose of an hour. And now it had been accomplished. He had had his moment of ecstasy, his dizzy flight into the empyrean; and now behold him falling, disembowelled and ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... on! 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 thy ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... far finer and more mysterious mechanism Shakespeare organized his dramas, and gave life and individuality to his Ariel and his Hamlet? Wherein lies that life; how have they attained that shape and individuality? Whence comes that empyrean fire, which irradiates their whole being, and pierces, at least in starry gleams, like a diviner thing, into all hearts? Are these dramas of his not verisimilar only, but true; nay, truer than reality itself, since the essence of unmixed reality is bodied forth in them under more expressive symbols? ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... it is," says this grave author, "that the widow makes it appear whether or no she had any true love for her husband; if she continue yearly to do her best for the comfort of his soul." ... Let your first care be, to ransom him out of Purgatory, and when you have once placed him in the empyrean heaven, he will be sure to take care for you and yours. I know your excuse is, that having procured for him the accustomed services of the Church, you need do no more for him; for you verily believe he is already in a blessed state. But ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... 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 old ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... and then the slow, regular, gliding movement set in afresh. There now seemed to be fewer stars in the heavens; it was as though a milky way had fallen from on high, rolling its glittering dust of worlds, and transferring the revolutions of the planets from the empyrean to earth. A bluish light streamed all around; there was naught but heaven left; the buildings and the trees assumed a visionary aspect in the mysterious glow of those thousands of tapers, whose ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... in common and enjoyments which are universal. Knowledge is like the mystic ladder in the patriarch's dream. Its base rests on the primaeval earth—its crest is lost in the shadowy splendour of the empyrean; while the great authors, who for traditionary ages have held the chain of science and philosophy, of poesy and erudition, are the angels ascending and descending the sacred scale, and maintaining, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... skylarks springing skyward, singing, Piercing the empyrean of blinding light, So shall our souls take flight, serenely winging, Soaring on azure heights to God's delight; While from below through sombre deeps come stealing The floating notes ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... "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, in truth, he has been shining ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... and round towers, Whilst unknown shapes fill up the devious views Formed by these palaces and avenues. Like capes, the lengthening shadows seem to rise Of these dark buildings, pointed to the skies, Immense entanglement in shroud of gloom! The stars which gleamed in the empyrean dome, Under the thousand arches in heaven's space Shone as through meshes of the blackest lace. Cities of hell, with foul desires demented, And monstrous pleasures, hour by hour invented! Each roof ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... blue clouds of tobacco smoke roll overhead, that the great classical scholars of Germany perceive that the classical epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, are but the typifying of the rolling of the clouds in the empyrean, the warfare of the foam-crested waves dashing upon the land, that the metamorphoses and amours of the gods and all the myths of the elder world, are but the mutations of the clouds and the fanciful figures they take on and the metamorphoses and hurryings of the ever-changing ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... inventor of harmonies, O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages; Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, Tower, as the deep-doomed empyrean Rings to the roar of an angel onset— Me rather all that bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean, Where some refulgent sunset of ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... and season Fresh gladness brings to you, Howe'er remote your social throngs Their varied path pursue; No winds nor waves dissever— No dusky veil'd FOR EVER, Frowneth across your fearless way in the empyrean blue.{A} ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Becam'st enamour'd, and such joy thou took'st With me in secret, that my womb conceiv'd A growing burden. Mean while Warr arose, And fields were fought in Heav'n; wherein remaind (For what could else) to our Almighty Foe Cleer Victory, to our part loss and rout 770 Through all the Empyrean: down they fell Driv'n headlong from the Pitch of Heaven, down Into this Deep, and in the general fall I also; at which time this powerful Key Into my hand was giv'n, with charge to keep These Gates for ever shut, which none can pass Without my op'ning. Pensive ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... that we do not covet the thing which gives to our eyes that beauty. As the measureless sky and the unnumbered stars are equally granted to king and to beggar; and in our wildest ambition we do not sigh for a monopoly of the empyrean, or the fee-simple of the planets: so the earth too, with all its fenced gardens and embattled walls, all its landmarks of stern property and churlish ownership, is ours too by right of eye. Ours to gaze ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 of Miss ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... his brain, he fancied was already in form and on the page, and he was aghast at the disproportion between the dream and the reality. His delusion was like that of Don Quixote,—he believed himself in the Empyrean, and took the vapors from the kitchen for the breath of heaven, and, seated on his wooden horse, felt all the shock of an imaginary fall.. Had he been in such a state of mental exaltation merely to produce those two lines? Were these the ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... realism, with a pair of policemen as its protagonists. All five plays "of the supernatural" follow a single plan. In the foreground, as it were, we see a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and in the background (or in the empyrean above, as you choose) we see the operation of the god-like imbecilities which sway and flay us all. The technical trick is well managed. It would be easy for such four-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque, but in at least two cases, to wit, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... of interpretation which showed the dormant artist. He tried at first, of course, to eliminate all striving for effect, content to gain the purity of tone for which he was striving, but she soared beyond him sometimes, her soul defying limitations, liberated into an empyrean of song. If anything, she advanced too rapidly, and Peter's greatest task was to restrain her optimism and self-confidence by imposing the drudgery of fundamental principles. And when he found that she was practicing too long, he set her limits of half-hour ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... all the incense to arise In fragrance to the blue empyrean The blended sweetness of the womens' love Goes pouring too, in all their ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... spectator can be once persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind thus wandering in ecstacy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the stage ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... 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. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 works are published by authority, says that she had ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... have dragged them down. Unless a man is bent on the highest, he is apt to settle on the lowest—whereas a woman generally soars to the highest ideals at first in the blind instinct of a Soul seeking its mate—how often she is hurled back from the empyrean only the angels know! Not to all is given power to master and control the life-forces—and it is this I would have you understand before I leave you to-night. I can teach you the way to hold your life safely above ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... for a few moments. The man had always been an enigma to her. She could not understand a nature that soared into the spiritual empyrean one moment, and in the next fell floundering into the bottomless pit of materialism. The undulating curve which marked the development of the Rincon mind was to her ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... 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 ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... 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 thrones, surrounding the Almighty, as real as the cardinals ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... have hereby been carried thither as if for an exclusive trial; and the mournfulest set of pleadings, out of which nothing but a misjudgment can be formed, prevail there ever since. The noble Sterling, a radiant child of the empyrean, clad in bright auroral hues in the memory of all that knew him,—what is he doing here in inquisitorial sanbenito, with nothing but ghastly spectralities prowling round him, and inarticulately screeching and gibbering what they ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... load of falsehoods? An orphan may rouse the interest of people; an imposter, never. I live in a style which makes me a equal to the son of a duke or a peer; you have educated me well, without expense to the state; you have launched me into the empyrean of the world, and now they fling into my face the declaration, that there are no longer such people as De Frescas in existence. I have been asked who my family are, and you have forbidden me to answer. I am at once a great nobleman and a pariah. I must swallow insults which would drive me to rend ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... when the palsied universe aghast Lay mute and still, When drove, so poets sing, the Sun-born youth Devious through Heaven's affrighted signs his sire's Ill-granted chariot. Him the Thunderer hurled From th' empyrean headlong to the gulf Of the half-parched Eridanus, where weep Even now the sister trees their amber tears ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... spring-tide's volume makes a fresh comment on thy name, Each portal of the Empyrean murmurs the title of ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... the dead. So to relieve The sorrows of his king, the man of Tao Receives an urgent summons. Borne aloft Upon the clouds, on ether charioted, He flies with speed of lightning. High to heaven, Low down to earth, he, seeking everywhere, Floats on the far empyrean, and below The yellow springs; but nowhere in great space Can he find aught of her. At length he hears An old-world tale: an Island of the Blest* — So runs the legend — in mid-ocean lies In realms of blue vacuity, too faint To be described; ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... ears to trying to determine, searching the empyrean. Now his voice seemed to come from the west, now from the north, the south, the east; it was the most deceptive, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... the few immortals. He is not a Homer, nor a Dante, nor a Shakspere. No, he is not even a Wordsworth in philosophic insight into nature, nor a Shelley in power to snatch the soul into the starry empyrean, nor a Tennyson in variety and passion, nor a Milton in grandeur of poetic expression. He is—only Longfellow. But that means he has his own peculiar charm. It is idle to detract from the fame of one man ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... and the contentment of industrious man, is waxing pestiferous with the awful odor of decaying human bodies. Buzzards, invited by their disgusting instinct, gather for a promised feast, and sit and glower on neighboring perches or else circle round and round in the blue empyrean over the location of unfriended corpses, known only to their keen sense of smell ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... mashes, and a ball, are to be pushed down a man's throat just as he is meditating on the great social problem, or (for I think it was my epic I was going to touch up) just as he was about to soar to the height of the empyrean! ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... through all my anguish of resistance I found a kind of fierce joy in following her. It was lucidity at white heat: the last sublimation of passion. She might have been an angel arguing a point in the empyrean if she hadn't been, so completely, a woman pleading ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... for example, to the preaching of liberal ministers, one sees that every accent of their teaching has been affected by this prevalent and permeating thought. The God they preach no longer sits afar like Dante's deity in the stationary empyrean beyond all reach of change; their God is here in the midst of the human struggle, "their Captain in the well-fought fight." H. G. Wells may be a poor theologian but he is one of our best interpreters of popular thought and his idea of God, marching ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... night was still 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 ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... opinions concerning the pursuit of happiness. Mankind, das rastlose Ursachenthier, is born to be on the whole equally happy and miserable. The highest organisms, the fine porcelain of our family, enjoy the most and suffer the most: they have a capacity for rising to the empyrean of pleasure and for plunging deep into the swift-flowing river of woe and pain. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... the temple, 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 ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... open enough, or keen enough, to see and understand what he has given; but it matters little whether the cause lie in the world or in myself, both being incomplete: God is, and all is well. All that is needed to set the world right enough for me—and no empyrean heaven could be right for me without it—is, that I care for God as he cares for me; that my will and desires keep time and harmony with his music; that I have no thought that springs from myself apart from him; that my individuality have ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... popular mind in abstract ideas, or in the generalized forms of ethical thought, it did much towards forming that public taste which required and prompted the drama to rise above a mere geography of facts into the empyrean of truth; and under the instructions of which Shakespeare learned to make his persons embodiments of general nature as well as of individual character. For the excellences of the Shakespearian Drama were probably owing as much to the mental preparation of the time as to the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... anything like the emoluments attaching to the position of County Court Judge, and I know of only one case in which a Professor's income, to the delight and envy of all the teaching profession, actually, for a few years, soared somewhat near the empyrean of a Puisne ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... to leave a sense of relief which a less discerning intelligence might have taken for happiness. Her vulgar cares were at an end. She would be able to arrange her life as she pleased, to soar into that empyrean of security where creditors cannot penetrate. She would have smarter gowns than Judy Trenor, and far, far more jewels than Bertha Dorset. She would be free forever from the shifts, the expedients, the humiliations of the relatively poor. Instead ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... one way by the third heaven we may understand something corporeal, and thus the third heaven denotes the empyrean [*1 Tim. 2:7; Cf. I, Q. 12, A. 11, ad 2], which is described as the "third," in relation to the aerial and starry heavens, or better still, in relation to the aqueous and crystalline heavens. Moreover Paul is stated to be rapt to the "third heaven," not as though his rapture consisted in the vision ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... pitying soul shall smile upon my grief, Shall feel a pang that wishes not relief; In visions still shall shield me as I go, Along this gloomy wilderness of woe; Shall still regard me with peculiar pride, On earth my brother, and in heav'n my guide! Methinks I see thee reach th' empyrean shore, And heav'n's full chorus hails one angel more; While 'mid the seraph-forms that round thee fly, Thy father meets thee with ecstatic eye! He springs exulting from his throne of rest, Extends his arms, and clasps thee to ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... fear, however; and was about to remove the saddle, when an object presented itself to my eyes that interrupted my intention—causing me to remain fixed and immobile. In the open ground, scarcely twenty paces from where I stood, was a form that fell upon the eye like a beam of empyrean light in the midst of deepest darkness—a girl of golden roseate hue, with a chevelure of yellow hair hanging to her haunches in all its lustrous luxuriance! Scarcely twenty paces separated me from Lilian Holt: for need I say that it was Lilian herself ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... 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 lofty ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... these withdrawings to the translunar empyrean that the life of a man of action upon this earth does not appear any more or any less remarkable or important than the life of a man of letters. All human activities from that celestial height are equal; and whether we plunge into politics or into pleasure, into science or into theology, seems a ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... her seal 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, who can tell how much more afflicted they ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... appear, With her sweet speech attempering reason's strain; O'ercome by tenderness, and terror vain, I cry, "Whence comest thou, O spirit blest?" She from her beauteous breast A branch of laurel and of palm displays, And, answering, thus she says. "From th' empyrean seat of holy love Alone thy ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... the Sun, unmastered and insurgent pulse of Life; breath of the empyrean, seraph winged with ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... blackness, primitive and pagan. Now the great pines rising row and row from the hollow pointed heavenwards with all their sombre spires, and led the eye upwards ever over the rock that lost its greyness and glinted to the gleam of snow far up in the empyrean that was sundered from earth by the vapours and wholly spiritual. Alton realized dimly a little of the motive of the scene, and felt that the world was good, for, laying down the frypan, he stood up stretching his arms above his head as he rejoiced in the strength of his vigorous ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... and will probably please a more numerous class of readers. We do not think this author has come into the full possession of his powers. He is too conscious to permit their spontaneous and facile use. While he thinks so much of the motion of his wings, he can never soar into the empyrean. He often talks as if the burden of a prophet were on his heart, but he is too introspective for the fullness of inspiration. Even his strange and grotesque ways are not redeemed by showing the fatal inevitableness of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... on his 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 misgiving. Even in his sleep he opens ever and again one eye to see that ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... hopeless chambers of Hell with a firmness of conviction that knows no wavering. It bears him through the sufferings of Purgatory, believing strongly fits reality: it raises him on the wings of love and contemplation into Heaven's Empyrean, where he really hopes to enjoy bliss far beyond that ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... 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 ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... American. But I fancy it rather points to the condition of greater relative equality. Our Russian friend was accustomed to the patronising kindness of the superior to the inferior, of the master to the servant. It is easy, on an empyrean rock, to be "kind" to the mortals toiling helplessly down below. It costs little, to use Mr. Bellamy's parable, for those securely seated on the top of the coach to subscribe for salve to alleviate the chafed wounds of those who drag it. In America there is less need and less use of this patronising ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... seceding state of Hungary might be recognized as a belligerent. In 1850 the Austrian representative, Baron Huelsmann, had entered upon a correspondence with our own Daniel Webster. The baron remonstrated, and Daniel mounted upon the national bird and soared in the patriotic empyrean. The eloquence of the Secretary of State perhaps aroused unwarranted expectations in the breasts of the struggling revolutionists, and the Hungarian man of eloquence set out for the United States to take the occasion by the forelock. Not since the visit of Lafayette had any foreigner been received ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... disappearance. "Though one of the most promising of our young poets, he is dull enough in conversation. It may be said of him, as of Goldsmith, 'He writes like an angel, but talks like poor Poll.' You may have read his poem, 'Echoes of the Empyrean,' published in ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... policeman vanishing from his uniform—the helmet falling over the collar, the tunic doubling in at the belt, the knees giving way, and the unheard, merry laughter of the disenuniformed spirit winging its way truncheonless into the Empyrean. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... 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 ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... great 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 again harbingers of ill, and sometimes the very Nemesis of hate; but ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... high heroic Thought that longed to breathe empyrean air, Failed of its feathers, fell to earth, and perisht of a ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... Socrates; his good is not a power. Nor would representing it to be such long help his case; for an ideal hypostasised into a cause achieves only a mythical independence. The least criticism discloses that it is natural laws, zoological species, and human ideals, that have been projected into the empyrean; and it is no marvel that the good should attract the world where the good, by definition, is whatever the world is aiming at. The hypostasis accomplished by Mr. Russell is more serious, and therefore more paradoxical. If I understand it, it may be expressed as follows: In the realm of ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... share the coming tide of benefits? Only two things can prevent her: first, lack of preparation—too much "hot air" and not enough hustle; too much after-dinner aviating in the empyrean and not enough muddy mess out on the harbor dredge with "sand hogs" and "shovel stiffs"; then, second, lack of adequate labor to prepare. After-dinner speeches don't make the dirt fly. Canada wants fewer platitudes and a great deal more of good ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... Dec. 24, 1924, states that 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 ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... dine without tasting the fruit and the wine? What attainment would it be to walk in fields of asphodel, when all the colors of all the empyrean were equally dazzling, and perceived by the mind alone? For my part, I should prefer to hold ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... with 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... soul goes down thy far, untrodden paths, To the dim verge of being. There its step Touches the threshold of sublimer life, And through the boundless empyrean leaps Its prayer, borne like a faint, expiring cry, To angel-warders, listening as they pace The crystal walls of Heaven. Down the blue fields Of the untraveled Infinite, they come: Beneath their wings one sweet, dilating ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... N. 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 ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the landscape feels, and is glad of it also—a landscape full of clearness, of the effects of water, of fresh rain newly passed through the air, and collected into the grassy channels; the air, too, in the school of Giorgione, seeming as vivid as the people who breathe it, and literally empyrean, all impurities being burnt out of it, and no taint, no floating particle of anything but its own proper elements allowed to ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... shalt have thy reward; but on him the Eumenides have looked, not Xantippes of the pit, snake-tressed, finger-threatening, but radiantly calm as on antique gems; for him paws impatient the winged courser of the gods, champing unwelcome bit: him the starry deeps, the empyrean glooms, and far-flashing ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... the empyrean as a point of intuitive perception in my heart. Irradiating splendor issued from my nucleus to every part of the universal structure. Blissful AMRITA, the nectar of immortality, pulsed through me with a quicksilverlike ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... 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
... bills of known genuineness without being able to discover the slightest point of variation between them. Paper, printing, and engraving seemed to be absolutely perfect. While the study was progressing, the imagination of the clergyman soared through the empyrean of dazzling expectations. Why continue to toil hard for a small pittance when the golden apples were hanging within easy reach? Why drag out an existence in penury when wealth and its joys were thrust ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... are preparing to reap the joys of that many-sided existence which awaits a young lady of the Chaulieu family, and to queen it in Paris, your poor little sweetheart, Renee, that child of the desert, has fallen from the empyrean, whither together we had soared, into the vulgar realities of a life as homely as a daisy's. I have vowed to myself to comfort this young man, who has never known youth, but passed straight from his mother's arms to the embrace of war, and from the joys of his country ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... time will bring to this magnificent city an institution of learning worthy of our hopes? I have noticed," added the colonel, waving his cigar broadly about him, "that learning is a shy goddess; she has to be coaxed—hence on these empyrean heights we have provided for a seat of learning; therefore College Heights. Look at the splendid vista, the entrancing view, in point of fact." It was the large white plumes dancing in the colonel's prophetic eyes. So it happened that more real estate buyers than clients came ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... 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 of both Earth ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... Mohammed, then, I do confess, God's chosen prophet is, And every man requited is for that which he doth say. The road of right thou hast made straight, that erst was crooked grown; Yea, for its path of old had fall'n to ruin and decay. Exalted mayst thou be above th' empyrean heaven of joy And may God's glory greater grow ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... which humanity has been long accustomed. Yeobright preaching to the Egdon eremites that they might rise to a serene comprehensiveness without going through the process of enriching themselves, was not unlike arguing to ancient Chaldeans that in ascending from earth to the pure empyrean it was not necessary to pass first into the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... supreme beatitude 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
... awakes and bursts the shell of matter, the senses, instead of being the guardians and jailors of its environment, become its servants, and the means by which, united as the one Ego, sense-perception, it races o'er the fields of Aeth—a being of life and beauty, shining in the empyrean of God. ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... deceptions which for pleasure go 860 'Mong men, are pleasures real as real may be: But there are higher ones I may not see, If impiously an earthly realm I take. Since I saw thee, I have been wide awake Night after night, and day by day, until Of the empyrean I have drunk my fill. Let it content thee, Sister, seeing me More happy than betides mortality. A hermit young, I'll live in mossy cave, Where thou alone shalt come to me, and lave 870 Thy spirit in the wonders I shall tell. Through me the shepherd realm shall prosper ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... about Kostroma and Saratov ones. A pity you don't read the letters. There are some very fine passages in them. For instance, not long ago a lieutenant writes to a friend describing a ball very wittily.—Splendid! "Dear friend," he says, "I live in the regions of the Empyrean, lots of girls, bands playing, flags flying." He's put a lot of feeling into his description, a whole lot. I've kept the letter on purpose. Would you ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... the opinion that his earliest efforts were Byronesque, if not Wertheresque. "I have his first attempt at poetry," he says; "it is characteristic, it is not suggestive of swallow flights of song, but of an eaglet peering up toward the empyrean." His mind at this time turned more especially in the direction of music. He jots down in one of his note-books: "The point which I wish to settle is merely by what method shall I ascertain what I am fit for as preliminary to ascertaining ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... In th' empyrean heaven, the bless'd abode, The Thrones and the Dominions prostrate lie, Not daring to behold their angry God; And a hush'd silence ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... 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 those who ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... the power of imparting and communicating them to others. For men are taught, not by those who are on a level with them, but by those who rise above them, who see the distant hills, who soar into the empyrean. Like a bird in a cage, the mind confined to sense is always being brought back from the higher to the lower, from the wider to the narrower view of human knowledge. It seeks to fly but cannot: instead of aspiring towards perfection, 'it hovers about this ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... Himself "the glass of fashion and the mould of form," in very truth "the observed of all observers," surely to-night he should be happy! For the soaring pinions of youth have borne him up and up at last, into the empyrean, far, far above the commonplace; the "Coursing Hound," with its faded sign and weatherbeaten gables, has been lost to view long and long ago (if it ever really existed), and to-night he stands above the clouds, his foot upon the topmost pinnacle; ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... move was to stand on his head and cover his face with his paws. Then he did several back flips and wailed aloud in his misery and woe, his yelps of distress quite filling the empyrean. But only for the space of a few seconds. Recovering his customary aplomb he made a flying leap for the top of the gate, his yelps now succeeded by ambitious growls—and in self-defense The Laird was forced to spray him again as he clung momentarily on top ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... to the recording soul. But even Plato, when he arrives at these provinces of thought, begins to limp a little, and to go upon Egyptian crutches. In the incomparable apologues of the "Phaedrus" he represents our inward charioteer as driving toward the empyrean two steeds, of which the one is virtuously attracted toward heaven, while the other is viciously drawn to the earth; but he countenances the inference that the earthward proclivity of the latter is to be accounted pure misfortune. But to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... seated on a cloud. Mercury gazes at her, caduceus in hand; Diana caresses her great hound; Saturn, an old man, rests his head on his hand; Mars, Apollo, Venus, and a little cupid are scattered in the Empyrean, and Jupiter presides over the party. Below, a balcony rail runs round the cupola, and looking over it, an old lady, dressed in the latest fashion, points out the company to a beautiful young one and to a young man in ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... formidably powerful, and vulgar. But, on the other hand, he possessed one great quality which Hugo altogether lacked—the sense of the real. Hugo was most himself when he was soaring on the wings of fancy through the empyrean; Balzac was most himself when he was rattling in a hired cab through the streets of Paris. He was of the earth earthy. His coarse, large, germinating spirit gave forth, like the earth, a teeming richness, a solid, palpable creation. ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... that this close student of human nature, whose work appears so often severely mundane, and most strong when its roots go down into the earth, sometimes seeming to prefer the rankness and slime of human growths,—can on occasion soar into the empyrean, into the mystic region of dreams and ideals and all manner of subtle imaginings. Witness such fiction as "The Magic Skin," "Seraphita," and "The Quest of the Absolute." It is hard to believe that the author of such creations ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Shall clang of armorers riveting our mail Rise in harsh dissonance where now the song In surging music sweeps the land along? No, Brothers, no! The Providence on high Stretches above us like the arching sky; As o'er the world that broad empyrean field, So o'er the nation ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... Her mother, her husband, her children dead, she is alone and sorrowful. She betakes herself to violent devotion- -falls ill—suffers incessant anguish from a complication of disorders—has rapturous consolations and terrific temptations—is dashed in a moment from a seat of glory above the empyrean ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... 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, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... whether expressed in sonnets or {143} 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 ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... shake their confidence. Apprehending none therefore, full of hope rather and already certain of success, they were soon lost in a peaceful slumber, whilst the Projectile, moving rapidly, though with a velocity uniformly retarding, still cleaved its way through the pathless regions of the empyrean. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... placed at a mighty interval beyond our own. The elder Herschel, 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 ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... firmament, welkin, empyrean, azure, the heavens. Associated words: meridian, zenith, nadir, horizon, uranology, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... whole books full of new verses yet. The only point on which you never give precise intelligence is your own book; but you shall have your will in that; so only you arrive on the shores of light at last, with your mystic freight fished partly out of the seas of time, and partly out of the empyrean deeps. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... forces of his environment and his personality; his reason was someone looking on, observing the facts but powerless to interfere: it was like those gods of Epicurus, who saw the doings of men from their empyrean heights and had no might to alter one smallest particle ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... EAGLE 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 ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... celebrating the imperial state, transcends in thought the limits of space and time, and swells, as it were, the great hymn of humanity. But this represents rather the utmost reach of the poet's flight after he has thrown himself into the empyrean than the original definitely conceived goal on which he fixed his mind. We should supplement this view by another held by Macrobius and many Latin critics, and of which Mr. Nettleship, in a recent ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... there were a next 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
... 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 to be ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... 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 |
