"Empyrean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heaven.] According to our Poet's system, there are ten heavens; the seven planets, the eighth spheres containing the fixed stars, the primum mobile, and the empyrean. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... grief, to an episode of temporary unfaithfulness to the memory of Beatrice, and to the revival of fidelity of love for her. One poem, the last, remains; in which he tells how a sigh, issuing from his heart, and guided by Love, beholds his lady in glory in the empyrean. The book closes with ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... in their courses, the spheres with all their harmonies, 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
... the 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, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... tablets, we have calculated it to a certainty. But who can calculate evidence of the future fate of the soul? If, indeed, the old order should not pass away—if the depths should remain below and the empyrean still keep its place above—then, to be sure, your studies would not be in vain; for then your soul, which is fixed on spiritual, supernatural and sublime conceptions, would be drawn upwards to the great Intelligence of which it is the offspring, to the very god, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hitherto asked of them?—Ramsgate Sands, and Dolly Vardens, and the Paddington Station,—these, I think, are typical of your chief demands; the cartoons of Raphael—which you don't care to see themselves; and, by way of a flight into the empyrean, the Madonna di San Sisto. And literally, there are hundreds of cities and villages in Italy in which roof and wall are blazoned with the noblest divinity and philosophy ever imagined by men; and of all this treasure, I can, as far as ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... above the surface in spite of our efforts to restrain them. Beneath us the foaming river made wild music in its hidden gorge, and the roar of a fall drifted up with the scent of cedars across the climbing pines, while above the hill-slopes led the gaze upward into the empyrean. But there is no need for description; we were in the mountains of British Columbia, and it ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... was wrong. Something had come into the blind—a winged, fluttering thing, out of the empyrean—and even Uncle Dudley had not seen or heard it, and never a honk or a quack warned anybody, or heralded the unseen ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... man, who is willing to recognize the universal neighbourhead, but finds himself unable to fulfil the bare law towards the woman even whom he loves best,—"How am I then to rise into that higher region, that empyrean of love?" And, beginning straightway to try to love his neighbour, he finds that the empyrean of which he spoke is no more to be reached in itself than the law was to be reached in itself. As he cannot keep the law without ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... 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
... Commedia" deals with all the heavens to the Empyrean itself, and with all spiritual life to the very presence of God. It derives its imagery from the cosmology of the day, its dramatic motive from the Christian and Greek conceptions of God and his dealings ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... imagination of Shelley. But the religious fervour is Catholic, not Protestant, Southern, not Northern: it is intense, mystical, and ecstatic: like a tongue of upward-darting flame, it burns and trembles with impassioned impulse to mingle with empyrean fire. The imagination, too, is not merely southern, but with an oriental element shining through it, like the ruddy heart of an ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... Addison composed sentences and struck out similitudes; but by what 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 ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... 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
... Seville, the rich and honored painter of the court received with generous kindness the shabby young wanderer, clothed him, and taught him, and watched with noble delight the first flights of the young eagle whose strong wing was so soon to cleave the empyrean. And when Murillo went back to Seville he paid his debt by doing as much for others. These magnanimous hearts were fit company for the saints ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... fliers have 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
... proper angle to make a rudder, all the various organs so finely adjusted as to convert him into a perfectly dirigible parachute. Swift as his descent was, he alighted on the ground as lightly as a tuft of down. It was the poetry of motion. One or two writers have insisted that the horned lark's empyrean song compares favorably with that of the European skylark; but, loyal and patriotic an American as we are, honesty compels us to concede that our bird's voice is much feebler and less musical than that of his celebrated relative across the sea. It sounds like the unmelodious clicking ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... thus, his face had unconsciously the very expression one sees on the face of the boy whose foot hovers a moment above the worm he means to crush. The boy does not expect to see the worm change to a butterfly just then and there, and mount up before his very eyes toward the empyrean. Neither did Bondo ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... the prospect of abundant trout; and 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 ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... ancients the celestial sphere was a reality, instead of a mere effect of perspective, as we regard it. The stars were set on its surface, or at least at no great distance within its crystalline mass. Outside of it imagination placed the empyrean. When and how these conceptions vanished from the mind of man, it would be as hard to say as when and how Santa Claus gets transformed in the mind of the child. They are not treated as realities by any astronomical ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... the Virgin Mary and the triune deity. Beatrice, with Rachel, Sarah, Judith, Rebecca and Ruth, St. Augustin, St. Francis, St. Benedict, and others, were enthroned in Venus, the sphere of the virtues. The empyrean, he says, is a sphere of "unbodied light," "bright effluence of bright essence, uncreate." This is what the Jews called "the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... under a 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
... 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, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... said, a gleam of intelligence flickering over his face, "is yonder moon, as she sails in the blue empyrean, casting a flood of light o'er hill and dale, like—Why," he repeated, with a feeble smile, "is yonder moon, as she sails in the blue empyrean"—He hesitated,—stammered,—and gazed at me hopelessly, with the tears dripping from his moist and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... 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
... such, he sat entranced, listening to the song of a violin, alone and perfect, soaring and sailing the empyrean unconvoyed,—and Barbara in his heart was listening with him. He had given up hope of seeing her again in this world, but not all hope of seeing her again somewhere; and her image had not grown less dear, I should rather say less precious ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... assumptions, much less sanctions such exceptions and deviations as we constantly find in the Darwinian path of continuity. The eye of imagination can supply nothing to her vision. She is eagle-eyed, and soars into the bright empyrean—does not dive into quagmires and the slime of creation ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... mission of love through the murky streets and lanes of Glamerton, as certainly a divine messenger as any seraph crossing the blue empyrean upon level wing. And if any one should take exception to this, on the ground that she sought her own service and neglected home duties, I would, although my object has not been to set her forth as an exemplar, take the opportunity of asking whether to ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... 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 won't be! And as they go on in this way, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... An empyrean infinitely vast And irridescent, roof'd with rainbows, whose Transparent gleams like water-shadows shone, Before me lay: Beneath this dazzling vault— I felt, but cannot paint the splendour there! Glory, beyond the wonder of the heart To dream, around interminably blazed. A ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... 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 imaginative beliefs upon which this ancient astronomical theory was ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... little business to be spoken of in any Church-court, 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 call ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... to-day without a cloud, and no mist or turbidity interferes with the sharpness of the outlines. Jungfrau, Monk, Eiger, Trugberg, cliffy Strahlgrat, stately lady-like Aletschhorn, all grandly pierce the empyrean. Like a Saul of Mountains, the Finsteraarhorn overtops all his neighbours; then we have the Oberaarhorn, with the riven glacier of Viesch rolling from his shoulders. Below is the Marjelin See, with its crystal precipices and its floating icebergs, snowy white, sailing on a blue ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... Mundane Creation, and surging everywhere against its outmost firmament, was the dark and turbid CHAOS out of which its orderly and orbicular immensity had been cut; and high over all, radiant above Chaos, but with the Mundane Universe pendent from it at one gleaming point, was the great EMPYREAN or HEAVEN of HEAVENS, the abode of Angels and of Eternal Godhead. Not to the mere Earth of Man or the Mundane Universe about that Earth was Milton's adventurous song now to be confined, representing only dramatically by means of speeches and choruses those transactions ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... nature 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
... 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 ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... I looked—without a visible movement on the part of the cow—with never a perceptible tremor of her frame, nor a lapse in the placid regularity of her chewing—that hog had gone away from there—had utterly taken his leave. But away toward the pale horizon a minute black speck was traversing the empyrean with the speed of a meteor, and in a moment had disappeared, without audible report, beyond the distant hills. It may ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... to make the translation at the time of the Miller excitement in 1843, when the world was to come to a sudden termination; when the saints were preparing their robes for ascension into the empyrean, and wicked unbelievers (the vast majority) were to descend as far the other way. She and her family were much interested in Miller's predictions, and she was anxious to see for herself if, in the original Hebrew text of the Bible there was ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... assembles all the gods of Olympia at a supper in the cupola. Immortality is a beautiful young woman 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
... mount, specifically-light, majestically in this same manner; and hover,—tumbling whither Fate will. Well if it do not, Pilatre-like, explode; and demount all the more tragically!—So, riding on windbags, will men scale the Empyrean. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... loftiest thoughts, and clogged with the meanest wants; of pure and holy purposes, yet ever driven from the straight path by the pressure of necessity, or the impulse of passion; thirsting for glory, and frequently in want of daily bread; hovering between the empyrean of his fancy and the squalid desert of reality; cramped and foiled in his most strenuous exertions; dissatisfied with his best performances, disgusted with his fortune, this Man of Letters too often spends his weary ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Sage with Science by his side; To his 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 ETHER ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... reach shall yet be more profound, And a vision without bound: The axis of those eyes sun-clear Be the axis of the sphere: So shall the lights ye pour amain Go, without check or intervals, Through from the empyrean walls Unto ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sorry to have a little time to think; to try in some fashion to readjust the point of view so suddenly snatched from its anchorings in the commonplace and shot high into the empyrean. It was the night of the ninth of June. Three months earlier, to a day, I had been an outcast; a miserable tramp roaming the streets of a great city; broken in mind, body and heart; bitter, discouraged, and so nearly ready to fall in with Kellow's criminal suggestion as actually ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... doors would be opened beyond which I should see something unknown. Let it be wonderful or awful, surpassing human conception, if only great and uncommon. But that sacrifice was not sufficient. To open the empyrean doors it is evident that something greater is needed, and let it be given ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... It is needless to add that this steamer has no rivals. It was with the greatest interest that I sailed at such a height on this adventurous craft; and the next time that I stand upon the summit of Mount Washington, and see the fleecy clouds float in the empyrean, one-third of a mile above me, I shall remember that the steamer on Lake Yellowstone sails at precisely the same altitude as that enjoyed by those sun-tinted galleons of ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... (aw), 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 idea is uni-dimensional or elongate in a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... were to find a husband for her. Not that Virgilia intimidated the men, but that the men disappointed Virgilia. They stayed where they always had stayed—close to the ground, whereas Virgilia, with each successive season, soared higher through the blue empyrean of general culture. She had not stopped with a mere going to college, nor even with a good deal of post-graduate work to supplement this, nor even with an extended range of travel to supplement that; she was still reading, writing, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... with such a one? Be his real peer, then: does that lie in thee? Know thyself and thy real and thy apparent place, and know him and his real and his apparent place, and act in some noble conformity with all that. What! The star-fire of the Empyrean shall eclipse itself, and illuminate magic-lanterns to amuse grown children? He, the god-inspired, is to twang harps for thee, and blow through scrannel-pipes, to soothe thy sated soul with visions of new, still wider Eldorados, Houri Paradises, richer Lands of Cockaigne? Brother, this is ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... sky-sailer. Ah, how shall I describe my sensations on first beholding this most wonderful achievement of the age, and thus satisfying myself that it was an actual existence, and not the mere chimera of a diseased brain? There she sat like a majestic swan, floating, as it were, in the pure empyrean, and crowned with a diadem of stars. The Moon, Arcturus, and the Pleiades might well all make obeisance to her, and the Milky Way invite her to extend her flight and plough its snowy fields. I was astonished at her size, the symmetry of her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... preponderance of the practical, scientific, and social energies which has checked in our Victorian Age the highest imaginative and dramatic genius. With all its achievements in lyric and psychologic poetry, it has hardly attempted to scale the empyrean of song. In the seventy-six years that have passed since Shelley conceived his Prometheus, as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of the Campagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of invention. Since the School ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... sending it round and round in long reduplications of sweetness, minute after minute; till finally receding and rising, it trembled, as it were, among the quick gratulations of angels, and fell into the silence of the pure empyrean. I had never any conception before of what is meant by quality in sound. There was more power upon the soul in one of those simple notes than I ever expect to feel from anything called music below, or ever can feel till I hear them again in the choirs of the angelic ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... misdoubt me his present journey bodes no good. My Hollander, I beg not any man's bread, yet am I hard put to it to show the world that heaven doth not desert her favourites. If the pity of a 'prentice can reach from you to Chester, lend it me, I pray you, as I sit here gazing into the empyrean for my next meal. If I may, I shall shorten the space betwixt us. Meanwhile, count for thyself a lodging in at least one poetic breast, which is that of thy patron ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... said by a very imaginative writer, that "when a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird's-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven." And in like manner, when a thinker frees himself from all the trammels of fact, and propounds a "bold hypothesis," ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... eighth is that of the Stars; the ninth is that which is not visible except by that movement which is mentioned above, which they designate the great Crystalline sphere, diaphanous, or rather all transparent. Truly, beyond all these, the Catholics place the Empyrean Heaven, which is as much as to say, the Heaven of Flame, or rather the Luminous Heaven; and they assign it to be immoveable, in order to have in itself, according to each part, that which its material desires. And this is why that first moved—the Primum Mobile—has such extremely rapid motion. ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... the exception of the publication of The Restoration, seems to have proved abortive. White entertained many opinions in common with Sterry, which he advocates with great power. He does not however, like his fellow chaplain, soar into the pure empyrean of theology with unfailing pinions. Sterry has frequently sentences which Milton might not have been ashamed to own. His Discourse of the Freedom of the Will is a noble performance, and the preface will well bear a comparison with ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... 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 ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... empyrean courtly circles his relations were quite as gratifying. The Emperor made no concealment of his partiality, and again insisted ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... plenty 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 like ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... ceaseless still, forever swift descend The waters in their headlong course, then turning, heavenward wend: Now, disenthralled, their essence hath its spirit-shape resumed; Bright, bodiless and pure, its fright to yon empyrean plumed! ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... suppose that falling stars are the firebrands wherewith the good angels drive away the bad, when they approach too near the empyrean or verge or ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... rays that roll Empyrean splendor o'er th' unchained soul— The soul that scarce (the billows are so dense) Can struggle to its destin'd eminence— To distant spheres, from time to time, she rode, And late to ours, the favour'd ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... whether the 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 ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... possibilities of less ethereal love which lay in the longing of every well-conditioned male to recall such beings to earth. It was a fashion which permitted them to abide in a semi-religious, semi-Ossianic empyrean; they could, and did, ignore all the practical details of daily life, a short and easy method of disposing of many questions. De Marsay, foreseeing the future developments of the system, added a last word, for he saw that Rastignac was ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... be observed our decided advantage in having made sure of the Moral by a vigorous assertion of the same at the commencement of this narrative; for, thus relieved of the necessity of a final flutter into the empyrean of ethics, we may part company in a few ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... him among 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 because he is not some one else. Roast beef may be more nutritious than strawberries, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... lofty and instructive, and could fix upon nothing except those dear little wandering tendrils, and the white column on which they twined. Alas, that so small a thing can bring the human mind from its empyrean flights! Alas, that vague emotions can drag down the sovereign intellect! Alas, that even for an hour, a man should prefer the material to ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... didst lend me speech when I was dumb, to whom I owe it that I have not crept on my belly all the days of my life like the serpent, but sometimes lift my forked crest or tread the empyrean, wake thou out of thy mid-day slumbers! Shake off the heavy honeydew of thy soul, no longer lulled with that Circean cup, drinking thy own thoughts with thy own ears, but start up in thy promised likeness, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... such definitions as these a strange neglect of that glory of man, the Pure Intellect, with which the spiritual prig enjoys to believe that he can climb up to the Empyrean itself. It almost seems as though the mystics shared Keats' view of the supremacy of feeling over thought; and reached out towards some new and higher range of sensation, rather than towards new and more accurate ideas. They ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... of to-day are pale, 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 ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... but a few months elapsed before he, too, had passed beyond the veil. There came also Edward D. Baker, Representative from Illinois and Senator from Oregon. To him Nature had been lavish with her gifts. His eloquence cast a spell about all who heard him. As was said of the gifted Prentiss: 'the empyrean height into which he soared was his home, as the upper air the eagle's.' Our language contains few gems of eloquence comparable to this wondrous eulogy on the lamented Broderick. His own tragic death in ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... ascended, and Moses arising from the nether world." This is not to be understood as though the soul of Moses was reunited to his body, but that his soul appeared through some assumed body, just as the angels do. But Elias appeared in his own body, not that he was brought down from the empyrean heaven, but from some place on high whither he was taken up in the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... drooped; and summer assumed the blighted appearance of winter, as it went forth in silence and flame to abridge the means of sustenance to man. In vain did the eye strive to find the wreck of some northern cloud in the stainless empyrean, which might bring hope of change and moisture to the oppressive and windless atmosphere. All was serene, burning, annihilating. We the besiegers were in the comparison little affected by these evils. The woods around afforded us shade,—the river secured to us a constant ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.[48] Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules,[49] the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hoped this could be accomplished by philosophy. This he regarded as a grand intellectual discipline for the purification of the soul. By this it was to be disenthralled from the bondage of sense[553] and raised into the empyrean of pure thought "where truth and reality shine forth." All souls have the faculty of knowing, but it is only by reflection, and self-knowledge, and intellectual discipline, that the soul can be raised to the vision ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Roman writers, "the soul seeks the stars," merely denotes the impersonal mingling after death of the divine portion of man's being with the parent Divinity, who was supposed indeed to pervade all things, but more especially to reside beyond the empyrean. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... evening with thy star-lit spires, Thou wert a witness when I kissed the mouth Of her whose eyes outblazed the skyey fires. I saw the parallels of thy long streets, With lamps like angels shining all a-row, While overhead the empyrean seats Of gods were steeped in paradisic glow. The Pleiades with rarer fires were tipt, Hesper sat throned upon his jewelled chair, The belted giant's triple stars were dipt In all the splendour of Olympian air, On high to bless, ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... 279 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
... terrestrial paradise. From this the hero and his mistress ascend by a flight, exquisitely conceived, to the stars; where the sun and the planets of the Ptolemaic system (for the true one was unknown in Dante's time) form a series of heavens for different virtues, the whole terminating in the empyrean, or region of pure light, and the presence of the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... sensuel! Sic itur ad astra!" murmured his dragoman enigmatically, and, lifting his eyes, he followed the Angel's flight into the empyrean. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... and we've got men, gentlemen, men of grit and backbone, men of courage and determination, that 'fear no foe in shining armour,' men like our friend Mr. Smith (roars of applause), who brave the perils of the deep and the chance of the empyrean, who take their lives in their hands and think nothing of it. Some croakers will tell you the Old Country is going to the dogs. Don't you believe it. ("We won't.") I don't believe she ever will go to the dogs while she's got left a man ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... are 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 ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... meeting house was its singers' seat—that empyrean of those who rejoiced in the divine, mysterious art of fa-sol-la-ing, who, by a distinguishing grace and privilege, could "raise and fall" the cabalistical eight notes, and move serene through the enchanted region of flats, sharps, thirds, fifths, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... here. He seeks no legendary scene and atmosphere like that of Theocrite's Rome, in which the angels who come and go, and God who enjoys his "little human praise," would be missed if they were not there; but opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern Camberwell. The pages in which Browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author of the Apocalypse are interleaved with others in which, for once, he seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... seemed to have been purged from the race. The great sitting of the Chamber, that almost religious celebration of defensive union, really expressed the opinion of the whole people. It is fairly easy to soar to the empyrean when one is carried on the wings of such an impulse, and when one does not know how long one is to be kept suspended at ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... from prehistoric wolves; but you could hardly decipher his pedigree 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 ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... exhibitions at Hong-Kong. It really does pour on such 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 peak of ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... sweet 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 of ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... She came down from the empyrean to lower levels, to be closer to Her flock, and at last found a place where they might almost kiss Her feet, at the corner of an aisle that was always in gloom; but there She wore ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... 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 ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... OF THE OCEAN WAVE, etc. There was an ancient belief, that once in ten years the eagle would soar into the empyrean, and plunging thence into the sea, would molt his plumage and renew his youth with a fresh supply ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... 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
... portion of his work is accordingly 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 him above his predecessor, ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... 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 encircling hills, and the farther side ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... above, below; Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee, Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry, That moves in gentle curves of courtesy; Soul filled like thy long veins with sweetness tense, By every godlike sense Transmuted from the four wild elements. Toward the empyrean Thou reachest higher up than mortal man, Yet ever piercest downward in the mould, And keepest hold Upon the reverend and steadfast earth That gave thee birth. Yea, standest smiling in thy very grave, Serene and brave, With unremitting breath Inhaling life from death, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... he talked, and I listened. What had I to say that could interest him? But he was full of the wonders of travel, the strangeness of the new world and the new people. Niagara had shaken him to the soul, he told me; on the wings of its thunder he had soared to the empyrean. How his fanciful turns of expression come back to me as I write of him! He was proud of his English, which was in general ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... his child; that, released from the necessity of supplying his own wants, he acquires opportunity of leisure to improve his mind, to purify his heart, to cultivate his taste; that he has time on his hands to plunge into the depths of philosophy, and to soar to the clear empyrean of seraphic morality. The master-statesman—ay, the statesman in the land of the Declaration of Independence, in the halls of national legislation, with the muse of history recording his words as they drop from his lips, with the colossal ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... heroic Thought that longed to breathe empyrean air, Failed of its feathers, fell to earth, and perisht ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... written them? I may answer. Why deprive myself of the actual charm of my enjoyments to inform others what I enjoyed? What to me were readers, the public, or all the world, while I was mounting the empyrean. Besides, did I carry pens, paper and ink with me? Had I recollected all these, not a thought would have occurred worth preserving. I do not foresee when I shall have ideas; they come when they please, and not when I call for them; either they avoid me altogether, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... to aggrandize the priesthood on the ruins of nations and governments. A jealous religion has exclusively seized on the minds of men, and persuaded them that they live upon earth merely to occupy themselves with their future happiness in the unknown regions of the empyrean. It is time that this prestige should cease; it is time that the human race should occupy itself with its own true interests. The interests of the people will always be incompatible with those of the guides who believe they have acquired an imprescriptible ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... of him altogether. Her feelings were those of Psyche, when she found that her lover was a god with wings and a mania for flight. So far as concerned the further marriage of their minds, he now disappeared for her into the blue empyrean; when she sought to embrace his ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... poetry, it has not been preserved. His brother is of 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 ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... over the rampart they go, Not a rifle was fired, not a shot at the foe, By the weight of the column the redoubt is theirs, And the enemy routed, the chivalry scattered everywhere Victorious shouts the empyrean ring in repay, Following Butler to New Market heights ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... 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 and ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... 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 torn, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... the shade of the grimy buildings that we ourselves have put up, and which shut out heaven from us, and only now and then a slanting beam comes through some opening, and carries wistful thoughts and longings into the Empyrean beyond. And how feeble our faith, and how little of His power comes into our hearts, and how little of the joy of the Lord is realised in our daily experience we all know, and it is sometimes good for us to force ourselves to feel it ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... with proof live coals of frowardness: I own for Prophet, my Mohammed's self, and men's award upon his word we base. Thou madest straight the path that crooked ran Where in old days foul growth o'ergrew its face. Exalt be thou in Joy's empyrean! And Allah's ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... This was the bourgeois empyrean which Pons called his "family," that upper world in which he so painfully reserved his right ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... his good will and pleasure herein, as if it were such an abstruse and mysteriously hidden secret that for the clear understanding thereof it were necessary to consult with those of his celestial privy council, or expressly make a voyage unto the empyrean chamber where order is given for the effectuating of his most holy pleasures. The great God hath done us this good, that he hath declared and revealed them to us openly and plainly, and described them in ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... his stoopings and reposes; but his proper element is the sky, and in the suburbs of the empyrean. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... 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, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... his death it was found lying in a sealed book.' After this (about ten years of the twenty-four having already elapsed) he is taken up to heaven by Mephisto in a chariot drawn by dragons—not of course to the Empyrean, the abode of God, but up as far as the fixed stars (the eighth sphere). He finds the sun, which before he had believed to be only as big as the bottom of a cask, to be far larger than the earth, ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill |
