"Ethereal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the narrow entry just then with a smoking pot of soup. She was followed, later, by Mere Mouchard, who bore a sole au vin blanc, a bottle of white Burgundy, and a super-naturally ethereal souffle. And an hour after, even the curtainless, carpetless bed chambers above were powerless to affect the luxurious ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... with our wings of ether, we 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
... held in constant mind, from Theseus slipped away as clouds are impelled by the breath of the winds from the ethereal peak of a snow-clad mount. But his father as he betook himself to the castle's turrets as watchplace, dimming his anxious eyes with continual weeping, when first he spied the discoloured canvas, flung himself headlong from the top of the crags, deeming ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... branding-irons, skins, cattle-bells, lariats, and such-like appurtenances of the ranch. The little lady was seated in the centre of the group of ranchmen ranged in a wide semicircle about the hearth of flagstones; the ethereal tints of her shimmering attire showed all their highlights; her face and golden brown hair seemed particularly soft and delicate in contrast with the rough tousled heads and bearded countenances about her; here and there the muzzle of ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... figure of a young girl. He seems now, for the first time, to have learned that a maiden can be pure, and in his old idealizing way which went with him to the end, he deified her. Judith became a symbol to him, and he lent her the ethereal grace of abstract beauty. In "Pericles" she is Marina; in "The Winter's Tale" Perdita; in "The Tempest" Miranda. It is probable when one comes to think of it, that Ward was right when he says that Shakespeare spent his "elder years" in Stratford; he was too broken ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... that Porphyry sets the demons apart from the angels by supposing that the former inhabit the air, the latter the ether, or empyrean. But Porphyry, as a Platonist, held the heaven, known as sidereal, to be fiery, and therefore called it empyrean or ethereal, taking ethereal to denote the burning of flame, and not as Aristotle understands it, swiftness of movement (De Coel. i, text. 22). This much has been said to prevent anyone from supposing that Augustine maintained an empyrean heaven in the sense ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... formed into a total, become knowledge of the Great World. I say the Great World—for of the world without the circle of the great, Cleveland naturally knew but little. But of all that related to that subtle orbit in which gentlemen and ladies move in elevated and ethereal order, Cleveland was a profound philosopher. It was the mode with many of his admirers to style him the Horace Walpole of the day. But though in some of the more external and superficial points of character they were alike, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... exist in the female bosom, to an extent that but few men are happy enough to discover, and that most men believe incompatible with the frailties of human nature. Grace Chatterton possessed no little of what may almost be called this ethereal spirit and a visit to Bolton parsonage was immediately proposed by her to Emily. The latter, too innocent herself to suspect the motives of her cousin, was happy to be allowed to devote a fortnight to Clara, uninterrupted by the noisy round of visiting and congratulations which had attended ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... now she was but an ethereal figure, with a patch of red at her heart, and a line of glimmering white from the silver girdle beneath her breast, on whose pale face the moonbeams poured sweetly. For a while she stood thus, and the silence was heavy in that beautiful, dismantled place of prayer. ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... sitting in a wicker chair by the window, arranging flowers in a vase. The morning sunlight streaming in upon her gave a colour to her pale face and glittered in her heavy coils of chestnut hair. She wore a light pink morning dress which added to the ethereal effect of her lithe beautiful figure. As Ezra entered she looked round and started at sight of his face. Instinctively she knew on what errand ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... man, however erratic some of his interpretations might be—this consumptive Jewish workman in threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, delivering himself to hearers who took his thoughts without attaching more consequences to them than the Flemings to the ethereal chimes ringing above their market-places—had the chief elements of greatness; a mind consciously, energetically moving with the larger march of human destinies, but not the less full of conscience and ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... 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 ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... animals, and dozens of angels and demons in friendly intercourse playing upon the surface of a lake and among the entangled branches of trees. In the background a pyrotechnic display of great magnitude is depicted, with rockets shooting up in all directions, while ethereal, large, black-eyed women lie gracefully reclining and unconcerned, upon most unsafe clouds. The result on the spectator of looking at the "Result of a dream," and other similar canvases by the same artist, is generally, I ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... beings who shall substitute brotherly love for the present laws and conventions of society. Such is his philosophy; but the beginner will read this poem, not chiefly for its thought, but for its youthful enthusiasm, for its marvelous imagery, and especially for its ethereal music. Perhaps we should add here that Prometheus is, and probably always will be, a poem for the chosen few who can appreciate its peculiar spiritlike beauty. In its purely pagan conception of the world, it suggests, by contrast, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the same general composition as sorghum syrup. Maple syrup, prepared from the juice of the sugar maple, is characteristically rich in sucrose and contains but little glucose or reducing sugars. The flavor of all the syrups is due mainly to organic acids, ethereal products, and impurities. In some instances the essential flavor can be produced synthetically, or derived from other and cheaper materials; and by the use of these flavors, mixed syrups can be prepared closely resembling many of the natural products. When ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... the landlord, "when my mother yonder, who hasn't grown fifteen days older in all those fifteen years,—bless her dear motherly heart!—used to come down to see me at the academy in the Lisford Road, and give me a dinner in this dear old room. I thought your cutlets the most ethereal morsels ever dished by mortal cook, Mr. Gilwood, and this room the best place in all the world. You know Mr. Lovell—Mr. ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... joys and woes of a truly great artist, this work will be one of exceeding interest. It is a short, glowing, and generous sketch, from the hand of Franz Liszt, (who, considered in the double light of composer and performer, has no living equal,) of the original and romantic Chopin; the most ethereal, subtle, and delicate among our modern tone-poets. It is a rare thing for a great artist to write on art, to leave the passionate worlds of sounds or colors for the colder realm of words; rarer still for him to abdicate, even temporarily, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... curls, and ask me why I don't build castles in the sky; You smile, and you are thinking too, He's nothing else on earth to do. It needs, my dear, romantic ware To raise such fabrics in the air— Ethereal bricks, and rainbow beams, The gossamer of Fancy's dreams: And much the architect may lack Who labours in the zodiac To rear what I, from chime to chime, Attempted ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... men have tried to exorcise in vain The turbulent spirits abroad; As well might we deal with the fetterless main, Or conquer ethereal essence with sword; Like the devils of Milton, they rise from each blow, With spirit ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... they drank much of it.[5] This contented and easily satisfied life was not like the gross materialism of our peasantry, the coarse pleasures of agricultural Normandy, or the heavy mirth of the Flemish. It spiritualized itself in ethereal dreams—in a kind of poetic mysticism, blending heaven and earth. Leave the austere Baptist in his desert of Judea to preach penitence, to inveigh without ceasing, and to live on locusts in the company of jackals. Why should the companions of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... with Melancholy, Born of the secret soul's mistrust, To feel her fair ethereal wings Weigh'd down with vile degraded dust; Even the bright extremes of joy Bring on conclusions of disgust, Like the sweet blossoms of the May, Whose fragrance ends in must. O give her, then, her tribute just, Her sighs and tears, and musings holy; ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... large eyes of the Apostolic man Grew larger; and within them lived that light Not fed by moon or sun, a visible flash Of that invisible lightning which from God Vibrates ethereal through the world of souls, Vivific strength of Saints. The mitred brow Uptowered sublime: the strong, yet wrinkled hands, Ascending, ceased not, till the crosier's head Glittered above the concourse like a star. At last his hands disparting, down he drew From Heaven the Royal Blessing, ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... outline themselves sharply against the lightening sky behind them. Daylight and darkness come with a rush in those latitudes, and by the time that the Rosario Islands were abeam the eastern sky had paled from indigo to white that, even as one looked, became flushed with a most delicate and ethereal tint of blush rose, which in its turn warmed as rapidly to a tone of rich amber, against which a cluster of mangrove-bordered islands, occupying what looked like the embouchure of a river, suddenly revealed themselves a point or two on the weather ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... to do nothing at all; Dresses for winter, spring, summer, and fall,— All of them different in color and pattern, Silk, muslin, and lace, crape, velvet, and satin, Brocade, and broadcloth, and other material Quite as expensive and much more ethereal: In short, for all things that could ever be thought of, Or milliner, modiste, or tradesman be bought of, From ten-thousand-francs robes to twenty-sous frills; In all quarters of Paris, and to every store: While McFlimsey in vain stormed, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... corn-fields, and, when tired With roving, we lie down on beds where springs The simple wild flower, and some shreds of bark, Plucked from the white, white birch, defends our heads, And hides us from the blue ethereal skies, Where, in his sovereign majesty, this Spirit rules; Now, casting lightning from his glowing eyes— Now, uttering thunder with ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... with every breath we draw, an ethereal stream of Lethe runs through our whole being, so that we have but a partial recollection of our joys, and scarcely any of our sorrows. I have always known how to value, and use, this ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... tenderly as they might have treated a little child. They felt that he had been through some ordeal from which they themselves would have shrunk with a terror they would have been ashamed to admit; and that despite the youth's fragile frame and ethereal face that looked little like that of a mailed warrior, a hero's heart beat in his breast, and he had the spirit to do and to dare what they themselves might have ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... stained glass, and the spiritual organ music—all betokened the supreme thought of medieval Christianity. But humanism recalled to men's minds the previous existence of an art simpler and more restrained, if less ethereal. The reading of Greek and Latin writers heightened an esteem for pagan culture in all ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... contemptuous indifference, whether he had seen Lovelock. I soon began to perceive that my host was getting perfectly ill. He would sit at meals never saying a word, with his eyes fixed scrutinisingly on his wife, as if vainly trying to solve some dreadful mystery; while his wife, ethereal, exquisite, went on talking in her listless way about the masque, about Lovelock, always about Lovelock. During our walks and rides, which we continued pretty regularly, he would start whenever in the roads or lanes surrounding Okehurst, or in its grounds, we perceived a ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... anxious man troubles, the hopeful man successes, the avaricious man accumulations, the ambitious possession of power; and the poetic man will imagine all sorts of perfections, be ever yearning for a better and higher, be ever building beautiful air-castles, earthy or moral, material or ethereal, according as the sensuous or the spiritual predominates in his nature. Beckford, of a sensuously poetic nature, having command of vast wealth, brought his castle in the air down to the ground, and dazzled ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... one more look at this veiled and spiritualised loveliness—which was so perfect and so pure that one might almost fancy that the light of a living spirit shone through the marble prison to lead man on to high and ethereal thoughts—this poet's dream of beauty frozen into stone, which I shall never forget while I live, we turned and went back through the vast moonlit courts to the spot whence we had started. I never saw the statue again, which I the more regret, because on the great ball of stone representing ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... was over they all returned to the piazza. At the physician's request she was placed in her old seat, and they all sat down to watch. The moon rose higher and higher, made her hair more silvery, touched her still face with a strange, ethereal beauty, and threw the swaying shadow of a spray of woodbine across her motionless figure—so motionless that she seemed a sculptured rather ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... foremost one—the one with white horses, white reins, and a yellow damask lining—the bride, in her finery, floated by like a cloud. Then the procession into the church, two by two, the white veil in advance, ethereal, and dazzling to behold. The organ, the verger, the cure's sermon, the tapers casting their light upon jewels and spring gowns, and the throng of people in the sacristy, the tiny white cloud swallowed up, surrounded, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... sugar, and by either constipation or diarrhoea. More rarely there is most acute abdominal pain. At first the condition is rather that of collapse than true coma, though later the patient is absolutely comatose. The patient suffers from a peculiar kind of dyspnoea, and the breath and skin have a sweet ethereal odour. The condition may last from twenty-four hours to three days, but is almost invariably the precursor ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... in the nature of the spiritual part of mankind to shrink from the earth, to aspire to something higher; a bird soaring in the blue above us has something of the ethereal; we give wings to our angels. On the other hand, a serpent impresses us as something sinister. Trees, with their strange fight against all the laws of gravity, striving upward unceasingly, bring us something of hope and ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... Medici, in his Ambra, a poem, first 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
... unlimited supply of gasoline was all the engine needed for the complete restoration of its health; and Milk River stood for gasoline in liberal quantities. Hope is generally represented by the poets as a thing winged and ethereal; nevertheless it ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... unequal massive towers of St. Mary's Church soared aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their shaded sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others. In the distance the Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of the old city wall. In the narrow, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... from the very sound of his voice that he did not—could not—love Gertrude. Only a poet could do that. Trefusis was no poet, but a sordid brute unlikely to inspire interest in anything more human than a public meeting, much less in a woman, much less again in a woman so ethereal as Gertrude. She was proud too, yet she had allowed the fellow to insult her—had forgiven him for the sake of a few broad compliments. Erskine grew angry and cynical. The situation did not suit his poetry. Instead of being ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 sudden glory ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... second place, there is no certainty that the postulated phenomena have any real existence. If, however, it be safe to assume that the solar system, cutting its way through space, virtually raises an ethereal counter-current, and if it be further granted that light travels less with than against such a current, then indeed it becomes speculatively possible, through slight alternate accelerations and retardations of eclipses taking place respectively ahead of and in the wake of the sun, to determine ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... them from falling into that decay which is inevitably the result of corruption, following hard upon a devotion to mere self-interest. We are, in a great measure, a nation of materialists, too much devoted to the pursuit of selfish and so-called practical aims, too little to the spiritual and the ethereal. Reform must come, else the soul will become gross and grovelling, and the nobler part of our natures, the more delicate and refined sympathies of the heart, the finer faculties of the intellect, will rust away with disuse, and the whole race ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... at the pretty creature and think of disappointing her,' he said. 'She is altered, you know, Ted; they've bullied her till she is more ethereal than ever, but it only makes her lovelier. I believe if she saw me kill some one on the spot she would think it all my generosity; or, if she could not, she would take and die. Oh no! I'll not fail her. No, I won't; not if I have to spend seven years after the model ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the smooth ledge of rock that made up the entrance to his home and as he sunk his head in thought a voice came up to him out of the blackness of the town below. It was the girl again, singing, high and clear as a flute, as pure and ethereal as an angel, and now she was singing a song. Denver roused up and listened, then lowered his head and tramped back and forth on the ledge. The voice came again in a song that he knew—it was one that he had on a record—and he paused in ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... while he meditated upon one of the little prose poems which formed so delectable a contribution to the culture of Riseholme, for though, as had been hinted, he had in practical life a firm grasp of the obvious, there were windows in his soul which looked out onto vague and ethereal prospects which so far from being obvious were only dimly intelligible. In form these odes were cast in the loose rhythms of Walt Whitman, but their smooth suavity and their contents bore no resemblance whatever to the productions of that barbaric bard, whose ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... decomposition and—after a certain period—the dispersion of the bodies already buried, affords room for other bodies; so, in the former case, the souls which pass into Space, after a certain period are purged of their grosser elements and become ethereal, and glow with the glory of flame as they meet and mingle with the Creative Energy of the world. And thereby there is room for other souls which in their turn pass into Space. This, then, is the explanation that may ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... nothing shallower, nothing narrower, is religion in its perfection; and the measure in which we have attained to this harmony with God, is the measure in which we are Christians. As two stringed instruments may be so tuned to one keynote that, if you strike the one, a faint ethereal echo is heard from the other, which blends undistinguishably with its parent sound; so, drawing near to God, and brought into unison with His mind and will, our responsive spirits vibrate in accord with His, and give ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... become unbelievable. It was a horrible, monstrous thing, a screaming fury, a wall that smote and passed on but that continued to smite and pass on—a wall without end. It seemed to him that he had become light and ethereal; that it was he that was in motion; that he was being driven with inconceivable velocity through unending solidness. The wind was no longer air in motion. It had become substantial as water or quicksilver. He had a feeling that he could reach into it ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... star." It is recorded as "a blazing starre" such as "never appears but as a prognostic of afterclaps," and again, as "dreadful to be seen, with bloudie haires, and all over rough and shagged at the top." Another author complacently explains that comets "were made to the end that the ethereal regions might not be more void of monsters than the ocean is of whales and other great thieving fish!" A very literal interpretation of this "hairy star" has been here embroidered, carefully fitted out with cog-wheels and all the paraphernalia of a ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... pink heather "the timid spider of the thickets suspends by ethereal cables the branching whorl of his snare, which the tears of the night have turned into chaplets of jewels...The magical jewellery sparkles in the sun, attracting mosquitoes and butterflies; but whosoever approaches too ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... weeks I have basked in the sunlight of your existence. Your celestial smile, shedding a tranquil calm o'er my perturbed spirit, has been my daily sustenance. Your ethereal form, beautiful as an houri, has, with its subtle fascination, enthralled and steeped in bliss my innermost soul, lifting me as it were into a purer, a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... views of the realists, or euhemerists, it is necessary to explain that the popular definition of Fairies as "little people" is one which that school is quite ready to accept. But the conception of such "little people" as tiny beings of aerial and ethereal nature, able to fly on a bat's back, or to sip honey from the flowers "where the bee sucks," is regarded by the realists as simply the outcome of the imagination, working upon a basis of fact. An illustration of this position may be seen in the Far East. There is a tradition among the Ainos of Northern ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... head, so that as I glanced over my shoulder I could see her firm white neck through the laces as she stared upward at the streak of blue sky so far above. Then she turned her face toward me again, and it seemed to my excited fancy that it had grown ethereal. ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the burnished gold of wheat that rolled in mile-long waves; but it seemed to him that the wild things of the English North were, after all, more wonderful. They harmonized with the country's deep peacefulness; their beauty was chaste, fairy-like and ethereal. ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... the fleecy veil he sees clear and clean against the intense blue sky the snowy summit of Kinchinjunga, the culminating peak of lesser heights converging upward to it and all ethereal as spirit, white and pure in the sunshine, yet suffused with the delicatest hues of blue and mauve and pink. It is a vision of colour and warmth and light—a heaven of beauty, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Lady 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 watched, however, from a little ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... continued the astronomer, "there are sordid wretches in this crowd who hang to ten cents in preference to observing such sights as these in ethereal space. Venus is millions of miles away, and yet by means of this telescope and by paying ten cents this intellectual young man is enabled to observe the inhabitants of that far-off world hugging each other just as natural as ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... the Almighty Power Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th' ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... with a latent shiver in the air that made the warmth only the more welcome. The shallows of the stream glittered and tinkled among bunches of primrose. Vagrant scents of the earth arrested Archie by the way with moments of ethereal intoxication. The grey Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from the sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its beauty; an essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him, not resident in particulars ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fierce and dazzling. The soft, opalescent mornings are fragrant with love and pleasure. But, most of all, the sunsets attract us by their unwearied variety, sometimes sober and tender, ever fainter and more ethereal, sometimes blood-red, ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... her pulses bounding; her brow hot with fever. She sat by the window to breathe the pure air. The stars were shining in their ethereal brightness; the dipper was wheeling around the polar star; the great white river, the milky way, was illumining the arch of heaven. She thought of Him who created the gleaming worlds. Beneath her window the fireflies were lighting their lamps, and living their little ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... give her a charm which is all the more effective because, being untravelled, she is unconscious of it, and never dreams of deliberately dramatizing and exploiting it, as the Irishwoman in England does. For Tom Broadbent therefore, an attractive woman, whom he would even call ethereal. To Larry Doyle, an everyday woman fit only for the eighteenth century, helpless, useless, almost sexless, an invalid without the excuse of disease, an incarnation of everything in Ireland that drove him out of it. These judgments have little value and no finality; but they are the judgments on which ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... whole of her nature—with both body and spirit; there were even moments in the spring of the year, when, softened by the caressing air and the scent of hyacinths, she felt that she did so love a memory; but beyond this her feeling was as bodiless and ethereal as the vague image to which it was dedicated. And yet this gentle regret was all that she wanted ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... 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
... lines of relief,—it follows that everything, so far as the reproduction is concerned, must depend upon the cleanness and delicacy of the actual cutting. A clouded eye, a fumbling touch, and the most ethereal idea becomes its travesty—the purest line debased. Hence the necessity for taking the knife into ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... of genius," Keats himself has said, "are as great as certain ethereal chemicals, operating in a mass of created matter: but they have not any determined character." That indefiniteness of literary aim—that want of willpower, without which genius is a curse, which have hampered ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... declining, threw down the street a slant of kindly light to mitigate its homeliness. In this ethereal evanescence the house Romance took ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... quarrel with the calendar— For May has been misplaced— And doubt the tale oracular Of "Janus, double-faced;" For this "ethereal mildness" looks Toward shadowy delights Of roseate bowers, of cosy ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... the morning, and felt like one in a calm ethereal dream as he walked home to Weelset in the soft dusk of an evening that would never be night, but die into the day. No one saw him enter the house, no one met him on the ancient spiral stair, as, with apprehensive ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... your ideas of me, Ishmael," she said, with an air of candour that struck him as worthy of her even through his pain. "You think of me as something ethereal and angelic, and I'm not. I'm only a woman, Ishmael, and the little things of life—friendship, beauty, one's own ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourn of Heaven, Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven That, spreading in this dull and clodded earth, Gives it a touch ethereal, a new birth." KEATS. ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... strand, Where the sea-waves shore-ward lean, Curve their graceful heads, and stand Gleaming with ethereal green, Then in foam fall heavily— This is what I saw at night! Lo, a boat! I'll forth on ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... ethereal birth, Thy azure banner floats, In lucid folds, o'er air and earth, And budding woods pour forth their mirth In rapture-breathing notes. I see upon the fleecy cloud The spreading of thy wings; The hills and ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... purpose probably 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 a different part of its periphery for each individual subscriber, ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... inspire a most obsequious awe. It was an expression of arbitrary power 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. Tanglefoot Cove is some four miles long, and its average breadth is ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... 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
... all the shifts and windings of a prodigal invention, familiar without being vulgar, gritty with homely detail without being flat; always, at its lowest levels, touched, like a plain just before sunrise, with hints of ethereal light, momentarily withheld; and rising from time to time without effort to a magnificence of phrase and movement touched in its turn with that suggestion of the homely and the familiar which in the inmost recesses of Browning's genius lurked so ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... savant we point out that we are not trying to pick holes in the order of Nature, but rather by the scrutiny of residual phenomena, to get nearer to the origin and operation of Nature's central mystery of Life. Men who realise that the ethereal environment was discovered yesterday, need not deem it impossible that a metethereal environment—yet another omnipresent system of cosmic law—should be discovered to-morrow. The only valid a priori presumption in the matter, is the presumption that the Universe ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... 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
... task the fervent bees In swarming millions tend: around, athwart, Through the soft air, the busy nations fly, Cling to the bud, and with inserted tube, Suck its pure essence, its ethereal soul; And oft, with bolder wing, they soaring dare The purple heath, or where the wild thyme grows, And yellow load them with the luscious spoil. The ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... prepared in villages thereabouts. Totally unembarrassed, we lounged along or leaped along, light-hearted. When the river neared us, or winsome brooklet from the hill-side thwarted our path, we stooped and lapped from their pools of coolness, or tasted that most ethereal tipple, the mingled air and water of electric bubbles, as they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... they have no noses. When they first arrive in the mansions of the blest, they are laid out to dry on a sort of gridiron over a slow fire in order to purge away the grossness of the body and make them ethereal and light, as spirits should be. Yet, oddly enough, though they have no noses they cannot enter the realms of bliss unless their noses were pierced in their lifetime. For these savages bore holes in their noses and insert ornaments, or what they regard as such, in the holes. The operation ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... to the trapper he suffered his wandering glances to stray towards the intellectual and nearly infantile beauty of Inez, as one might be supposed to gaze upon the loveliness of an ethereal being. It was very evident that he now saw, for the first time, one of those females, of whom the fathers of his tribe so often spoke, and who were considered of such rare excellence as to equal all that savage ingenuity ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of a man who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer and more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliest specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of that ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regions of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for rhyming and for ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... now, with her flat horsehair cap and watered black silk ribbons, her trim bodice and broad blue sash down to her knees, her little white hands crossed in the attitude of a dreamer, her long fair curls—all that was graceful, slender, and ethereal in nature. Yes, I can see Raesel now, sitting in a large leathern arm-chair, close to the blue curtain of the recess at the end of the room, smiling ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... up the steps of 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 singing ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round, Behind him cast. The broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... herself supremer, — A raised, ethereal thing; Henceforth for her what holiday! Meanwhile, ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... saw a light that shone like a flame in the darkness below. Quietly there floated into their line of vision something white, ethereal—perchance a spirit from another world. It vanished and the blackness was again unbroken. The figure had seemed strangely tall. It appeared to swim along, rather than to walk, draperies as fine as mist ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... assur'd, observes Imagind Lands and Regions in the Moon: Or Pilot from amidst the Cyclades Delos or Samos first appeering kenns A cloudy spot. Down thither prone in flight He speeds, and through the vast Ethereal Skie Sailes between worlds & worlds, with steddie wing Now on the polar windes, then with quick Fann Winnows the buxom Air; till within soare 270 Of Towring Eagles, to all the Fowles he seems A Phoenix, gaz'd by all, as that sole Bird When to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... different. Eclipsed at first sight by her more brilliant sister, her fair beauty grew upon one by degrees. The sweet face, the thoughtful brow, the deep dreamy eyes, the golden ripples of hair, the ethereal expression on the calm features, seemed gradually to reveal their charm. Many who at first overlooked Lillian, thinking only of her brilliant sister, ended by believing her to be the ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... begun that practice; and on the eve of her death she had not yet omitted it. On the seventh day of her illness, as she had herself announced, her life came to a close. A sublime expression animated her face; a more ethereal beauty clothed her earthly form. Her confessor for the last time inquires what it is her enraptured eyes behold, and she whispers, "The heavens open! The angels descend! The archangel has finished his task. He stands before me. He beckons ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... leaning forth from my chamber window into a fragrant summer night radiant with an orbed moon. But for once I was heedless of the ethereal beauty of the scene before me and felt none of that poetic rapture that would otherwise undoubtedly have inspired me, since my vision was turned inwards rather than out and my customary serenity ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... is this liberty of which so much is said? Is it to walk about this earth, to breathe this air, to partake the common blessings of God's providence? The beasts of the field and the birds of the air unite with us in such privileges as these. But man boasts a purer and more ethereal temperature. His mind grasps in its view the past and future, as well as the present. We live not for ourselves alone. That which we call liberty is that principle on which the essential security of our political condition depends. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... with trailing vines and blooming flowers. The air is rich with song of birds, sweet with perfume, and the blossoms gaily shower their petals on the passer-by. Overhead, white, billowy clouds float lazily over their background of ethereal blue. Cool June breezes fan the cheek. Distant knolls are dotted with flocks of sheep whose bells tinkle dreamily; and drowsy hum of beetle makes the bass, while lark song forms the air of the sweet symphony that Nature plays. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... 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
... Sircles is held nitely & 4 or 5 long hared fellers has settled here and gone into the Sperret biznis excloosively. A atemt was made to git Mrs. A. Ward to embark into the Sperret biznis but the atemt faled. 1 of the long hared fellers told her she was a ethereal creeter & wood make a sweet mejium, whareupon she attact him with a mop handle & drove him out of the house. I will hear obsarve that Mrs.Ward is a invalerble womum—the partner of my goys & the shairer of my sorrers. In my absunse she watchis ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... the sun playing on it and the sea gulls swooping about its top, it seemed something slender and ethereal. It was only when one was close at hand that its real strength and solidity ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... it was no law of association that revived it; but it seemed the whispering of some one in the air—some ethereal spirit, if you please—which instituted it, and advanced the following problem: "Nitrous oxide gas is composed of the same elements as ordinary air, with a larger equivalent of oxygen, except it is a chemical ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... delighted wonder. And such, as appears from the heroine's name, Miranda, who is the potency of the drama, is probably the sentiment which the play was meant to inspire. But the grace and efficacy in which the workmanship is steeped are so ethereal and so fine, that they can hardly be discoursed in any but the poetic form: it may well be doubted whether Criticism has any fingers delicate enough to grasp them. So much is this the case, that it seemed to me quite doubtful whether I should do well to undertake the theme ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... pleasure at the wild and the sublime outline of the surrounding mountains with their varied combinations, while the richness and beauty of colouring thrown over and around the whole, by the purple and rose colours and ethereal blue of the sky, imparted to the scene a beauty which no fancy sketch of fairyland could surpass. As they turned their eyes towards the nearest shore of the main land, they saw the beach and fringing rocks covered by a multitude of natives, waving green ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... terminated at last by his suddenly coming upon an apparition of the spirit of Creusa, which rose before him in a solitary part of the city, and arrested his progress. The apparition was of preternatural size, and it stood before him in so ethereal and shadow-like a form, and the features beamed upon him with so calm and placid and benignant an expression, as convinced him that the vision was not of this world. AEneas saw at a glance that Creusa's earthly sorrows and sufferings were ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott |
