"Empyrean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... millionaire dwelt as it were in the Empyrean, something new occurred. One fine morning a man called upon him, calm and severe of aspect, distinguished, but plainly dressed. Politely, but in dignified terms, as befitted his errand, he briefly explained the motive for his visit. He was a lawyer of enlightened views; his client was a young ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... these vague yearnings, whither swells this heart, Like some wild floweret leaping at the dawn? 'Tis not for me, 'tis not for thee to tell, But Time shall be our teacher, and his voice Shall fall unheard, unheeded in the midst! Still art thou doubtful? Then arise and sing Into the Empyrean vault, while I Drift in the vagueness of the ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... not think this author has come into the full possession of his powers. He is too conscious to permit their spontaneous and facile use. While he thinks so much of the motion of his wings, he can never soar into the empyrean. He often talks as if the burden of a prophet were on his heart, but he is too introspective for the fullness of inspiration. Even his strange and grotesque ways are not redeemed by showing the fatal inevitableness of a natural product. They do not appear to grow out of a tough, knotted, impracticable ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... herbage and flowers there were none; the very trees 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 ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... and a ball, are to be pushed down a man's throat just as he is meditating on the great social problem, or (for I think it was my epic I was going to touch up) just as he was about to soar to the height of the empyrean! ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 in the ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... here he placed his hand familiarly on his guest's shoulder, while the bright, steel-gray under-gleam sparkled in his splendid eyes— "'twould be worth dwelling in for the sake of Hyspiros,—as grand a god as any of the Thunderers in the empyrean!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... great and is big with child by thee; haply Allah will vouchsafe thee virtuous issue by her." And he ceased not to exhort him thus, weeping and saying, "O my son, I beseech Allah the Bountiful, the Lord of the glorious Empyrean[FN260] to deliver thee from all straits that may encompass thee and grant thee His ready relief!" Thereupon his son wept with sore weeping and said, "O my father, I am melted by thy words, for these are as the words of one that saith farewell." Replied the merchant, "Yes, O my son, I am aware ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... earthly lives are passed, to a large extent, beneath the shade of the grimy buildings that we ourselves have put up, and which shut out heaven from us, and only now and then a slanting beam comes through some opening, and carries wistful thoughts and longings into the Empyrean beyond. And how feeble our faith, and how little of His power comes into our hearts, and how little of the joy of the Lord is realised in our daily experience we all know, and it is sometimes good for us to force ourselves to feel it is but an ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... lost its wings of heavenly azure with which it soared light as a lark into the empyrean, and now grovels on the earth, weighed down by ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... things beneath the empyrean, 120 Mine! Art thou eyeless like old Destiny, Thou mockery-king, crowned with a wreath of thorns? Whose sceptre is a reed, the broken reed Which pierces thee! whose throne a chair of scorn; For ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and season Fresh gladness brings to you, Howe'er remote your social throngs Their varied path pursue; No winds nor waves dissever— No dusky veil'd FOR EVER, Frowneth across your fearless way in the empyrean blue.{A} ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... circumference revolved about two fixed points. Our author does not decide the nice point in dispute between the philosophers and the theologians, the former holding that there is only one, the latter insisting on seven heavens-the fairy, ethereal, olympian, fiery, firmament, watery, and empyrean. ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... what supreme beatitude is this! What soft and sweet Sensations greet My soul, and wrap it in Elysian bliss! I soar above Dull earth in these ambrosial clouds, like Jove, And from my empyrean height Look down upon ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • 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 long day ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... priestess, just receiving a message from on high, listening with ecstasy, with suppressed breath and parted lips, to the voice of the Deity, and forgetting the world in a blissful intoxication, she seemed about to take her flight to the empyrean! ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... the agony of unsullied bliss, Her Demogorgon's doom shall Sin bewail, The undying serpent at the spheres shall hiss, And lash the empyrean with his tail. ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... greatest sacrifice that man could put there? I thought that afterward something would happen, that 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
... 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 ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... being the opinion of the reading public. We have seen that he never failed, and sometimes he soared into the very empyrean of popularity. In 1834, when he published The Last Days of Pompeii, again in 1837 when he published Ernest Maltravers, the ecstasy of his adorers discovered their favourite in a moment under ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... of fashion and the mould of form," in very truth "the observed of all observers," surely to-night he should be happy! For the soaring pinions of youth have borne him up and up at last, into the empyrean, far, far above the commonplace; the "Coursing Hound," with its faded sign and weatherbeaten gables, has been lost to view long and long ago (if it ever really existed), and to-night he stands above the clouds, his foot upon the topmost pinnacle; ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... celestial sphere was a reality, instead of a mere effect of perspective, as we regard it. The stars were set on its surface, or at least at no great distance within its crystalline mass. Outside of it imagination placed the empyrean. When and how these conceptions vanished from the mind of man, it would be as hard to say as when and how Santa Claus gets transformed in the mind of the child. They are not treated as realities by any astronomical writer from Ptolemy down; yet, the impressions and forms of thought ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... 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 and friend, ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... offended with that eulogistic extravagance which would place 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 ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... lain formless, wrapped in blackness, primitive and pagan. Now the great pines rising row and row from the hollow pointed heavenwards with all their sombre spires, and led the eye upwards ever over the rock that lost its greyness and glinted to the gleam of snow far up in the empyrean that was sundered from earth by the vapours and wholly spiritual. Alton realized dimly a little of the motive of the scene, and felt that the world was good, for, laying down the frypan, he stood up stretching his arms above his head as he rejoiced in the strength ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... EAGLE FRESH OUT OF THE OCEAN WAVE, etc. There was an ancient belief, that once in ten years the eagle would soar into the empyrean, and plunging thence into the sea, would molt his plumage and renew his youth with a fresh supply ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... your life than you are at this moment. Think of it! Here we are above the clouds, the world with all its care and heartaches shut out, basking in this glorious sunlight, sailing on in this clear, bracing, microbeless atmosphere. The clouds beneath our feet, the sun above our heads, and God's empyrean all about us. What can be more inspiring and grand? How does the chorus ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... are devoted to his 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
... my anguish of resistance I found a kind of fierce joy in following her. It was lucidity at white heat: the last sublimation of passion. She might have been an angel arguing a point in the empyrean if she hadn't been, so completely, a woman ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... said the first mate; but after giving a glance up and around the sky, and noticing that the stars still shone out from the blue empyrean, he added, "there does not seem much chance ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... prison bars of an imperfect system; neither degraded enough to make themselves a fool's paradise within it, nor wise enough to escape from it through Christ, "the door into the sheepfold," to return when they will, and bring others with them into the serene empyrean of spiritual truth—truth which explains, and arranges, and ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... were to find a husband for her. Not that Virgilia intimidated the men, but that the men disappointed Virgilia. They stayed where they always had stayed—close to the ground, whereas Virgilia, with each successive season, soared higher through the blue empyrean of general culture. She had not stopped with a mere going to college, nor even with a good deal of post-graduate work to supplement this, nor even with an extended range of travel to supplement that; she was still reading, writing, studying, debating as hard as ever, and paying ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... consented, and thus the little voluptuary secured a terrestrial and ever-varying excitement, while occasional glances upward soothed him with the mild consciousness that there was his property still hovering in the empyrean; amid all which, poor love-sick David was seized with a desire to hear the name of her he loved, and her praise, even from these small lips. "So you are very fond of Miss Lucy?" ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... 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 ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... 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 ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... masterful control of men, a man who could rise in a single year from a prospector to a copper king; such a man was wasted in provincial Arizona—his place was in Wall Street, New York. So she had said that night when they sat close together and their souls sought the high empyrean of dreams—and now he was balked by a woman. Master of men he was, and king of finance he might be, but ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... the other an experiment in photographic realism, with a pair of policemen as its protagonists. All five plays "of the supernatural" follow a single plan. In the foreground, as it were, we see a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and in the background (or in the empyrean above, as you choose) we see the operation of the god-like imbecilities which sway and flay us all. The technical trick is well managed. It would be easy for such four-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque, but in at least two cases, to wit, in "The Blue Sphere" ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... idea, or a group of ideas, must always be broken gently to the English people, because the acceptance of them necessitates the swallowing of words. When the golden ladders are let down from heaven by poets, artists, or critics even; or new spirits are hovering in the intellectual empyrean, the patriarch public snoring on its stone pillow wakes up; but he will not wrestle with the angel. He mistakes the ladders for scaffolding, or some temporary embarrassment in the street traffic; he orders their instant removal; he writes angry letters ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... this be artificially stopped for a single atom, the atom disappears; there is nothing left. Presumably, were that flow checked but for an instant, the whole physical world would vanish, as a cloud melts away in the empyrean. It is only the persistence of that flow[7] which maintains the ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... wretched waifs of society who swept the crossings he had to take on his triumphant way; he would even have bestowed forgiveness on his greatest enemy if he had met him then;—for the divine joy of love was singing in his heart and raising him to the serene and glorious empyrean of heroes and gods. Oh matchless magic of the human heart, which confounds all the hypotheses of science, and ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... 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 wonder and misgiving. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... with the life. Is the less help a man has from God the better?' According to you, the grandest thing of all would be for a man sunk in the absolute abysses of sensuality all at once to resolve to be pure as the empyrean, and be so, without help from God or man. But is the thing possible? As well might a hyena say: I will be a man, and become one. That would be to create. Andrew must be kept from the evil long enough to let him at least see the good, before he was let alone. But when would we be let alone? ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... took'st With me in secret, that my womb conceiv'd A growing burden. Mean while Warr arose, And fields were fought in Heav'n; wherein remaind (For what could else) to our Almighty Foe Cleer Victory, to our part loss and rout 770 Through all the Empyrean: down they fell Driv'n headlong from the Pitch of Heaven, down Into this Deep, and in the general fall I also; at which time this powerful Key Into my hand was giv'n, with charge to keep These Gates for ever shut, which none can pass Without my op'ning. Pensive here I sat Alone, but ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages; Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, Tower, as the deep-doomed empyrean Rings to the roar of an angel onset— Me rather all that bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean, Where some refulgent sunset of India Streams o'er ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... down-fixt eyes, musing the strange event. Dark thoughts were theirs, and sorrowful their mood; When lo, to leftward Cytherea sent A sign amid the open firmament. A flash of lightning swift from ether sprang With thunder. Turmoil universal blent Earth, sea and sky; the empyrean rang With arms, and loudly pealed ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... poor fellow!—more satisfying to the ear,—but none, I believe, so satisfying to the heart; none that so surely lifts you off your feet, and blinds and deafens you to all defects, and sets you wandering far away through the empyrean of musical sounds, till you are lost in a labyrinth of triumphant harmonies. The sad, mournful intonations of Velluti may bring tears into your eyes, but you are never transported beyond yourself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... midnight;—twelve for the pale student over his flickering lamp; twelve amid the flaming glories of Orion's belt, if he crosses the meridian at that fated hour; twelve by the weary couch of languishing humanity; twelve in the star-paved courts of the Empyrean; twelve for the heaving tides of the ocean; twelve for the weary arm of labor; twelve for the toiling brain; twelve for the watching, waking, broken heart; twelve for the meteor which blazes for a moment and expires; twelve for the comet whose period ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... 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. ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... of Drayton is a somewhat perplexing task; for, while rarely subtle, or rising to empyrean heights, he wrote in such varied styles, on such various themes, that the task, at first, seems that of criticizing many poets, not one. But through all his work runs the same eminently English spirit, the same honesty and clearness of idea, the ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... reward; but on him the Eumenides have looked, not Xantippes of the pit, snake-tressed, finger-threatening, but radiantly calm as on antique gems; for him paws impatient the winged courser of the gods, champing unwelcome bit: him the starry deeps, the empyrean glooms, and ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... 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 figure of American Liberty leaning ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... on! strong plumed! on tireless wing upspringing, Thy course be ever toward the empyrean; And at thy side my bonded spirit winging, Will mount with thee till ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... man, who at birth was king of the earth, Soon made himself lord of the sea; And now we arise to empyrean skies, For kings of ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... 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 a doublet who holds a hound in a leash. They are evidently ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... not write them? will be asked; and why should I have written them? I may answer. Why deprive myself of the actual charm of my enjoyments to inform others what I enjoyed? What to me were readers, the public, or all the world, while I was mounting the empyrean. Besides, did I carry pens, paper and ink with me? Had I recollected all these, not a thought would have occurred worth preserving. I do not foresee when I shall have ideas; they come when they please, and not when I call for them; ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... into the still depths of Bayou Lacombe, Louisiana, they said that the reflection of the sky was the empyrean of the Under Land, whither all good souls were sure to go after death. Their chief, Opaleeta, having fallen into this bayou, was so long beneath the water that he was dead when his fellows found him, but by working over him for hours, and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... the man of Tao Receives an urgent summons. Borne aloft Upon the clouds, on ether charioted, He flies with speed of lightning. High to heaven, Low down to earth, he, seeking everywhere, Floats on the far empyrean, and below The yellow springs; but nowhere in great space Can he find aught of her. At length he hears An old-world tale: an Island of the Blest* — So runs the legend — in mid-ocean lies In realms of blue vacuity, too faint To be described; there gaily coloured towers Rise up ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... but now she lost track 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 soul, she ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... 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
... expressed in sonnets or {143} systems, all must wear this form. The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and asks its meaning. He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and makes a voyage long or short. He ascends into the empyrean, and communes with the eternal essences. But whatever his achievements and discoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with which inevitably he is ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... flow over masses of turf and flowers. The rivulet of Ain-Tabiga makes a little estuary, full of pretty shells. Clouds of aquatic birds hover over the lake. The horizon is dazzling with light. The waters, of an empyrean blue, deeply imbedded amid burning rocks, seem, when viewed from the height of the mountains of Safed, to lie at the bottom of a cup of gold. On the north, the snowy ravines of Hermon are traced ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... in dank malarious slime, That Serpent hath no power to soar in air, Save clinging to winged creatures that can climb The empyrean; yet from its foul lair It sprang to the broad wings it would ensnare, Encoil, enshackle, hamper, break, drag down. How swept the Bird so low that it should dare, That Worm, to wriggle midst its plumes full grown, And with the Air's sole ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... tabernacle, that it might be an object of respect. Taken singly, according to some, the curtains denoted the starry heaven, which is adorned with various stars; the curtain (of goats' skin) signified the waters which are above the firmament; the skins dyed red denoted the empyrean heaven, where the angels are; the violet skins, the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... weird scene in a sort of menacing way; while, in lieu of the two or three odd sentinels that had previously peeped out from the firmament, all the galaxies of heaven were, at this moment, in their myriads above, spangling the empyrean from zenith to pole. ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... scene and atmosphere like that of Theocrite's Rome, in which the angels who come and go, and God who enjoys his "little human praise," would be missed if they were not there; but opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern Camberwell. The pages in which Browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author of the Apocalypse are interleaved with others in which, for once, he seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. Of course this is intensely characteristic ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... on the simple condition that we do not covet the thing which gives to our eyes that beauty. As the measureless sky and the unnumbered stars are equally granted to king and to beggar; and in our wildest ambition we do not sigh for a monopoly of the empyrean, or the fee-simple of the planets: so the earth too, with all its fenced gardens and embattled walls, all its landmarks of stern property and churlish ownership, is ours too by right of eye. Ours to gaze on the fair possessions with such delight as the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... the bourgeois empyrean which Pons called his "family," that upper world in which he so painfully reserved his right to ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... acquaintance are Alexander and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind thus wandering in ecstacy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the stage ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... EMPYREAN, the highest heaven, or region of pure elemental fire, whence everything of the nature of fire has been conceived to emanate, whether in the phenomena of nature or ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... writing of a man who was highly perspicacious, formidably powerful, and vulgar. But, on the other hand, he possessed one great quality which Hugo altogether lacked—the sense of the real. Hugo was most himself when he was soaring on the wings of fancy through the empyrean; Balzac was most himself when he was rattling in a hired cab through the streets of Paris. He was of the earth earthy. His coarse, large, germinating spirit gave forth, like the earth, a teeming richness, a solid, palpable ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... glide, As sits the 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 marries with ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... took my fancy—there was so much in it—four large fowls flying across the empyrean; each bird carried a rose as large as a cabbage in its beak, and apparently intended to let them drop upon a group of family mourners beneath. The MS. inscribed said, 'If photographs are supplied of members ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... escaped, but was always lured by food to return. He never seemed disposed to depart to the blue empyrean, ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... 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 ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... the palsied universe aghast Lay mute and still, When drove, so poets sing, the Sun-born youth Devious through Heaven's affrighted signs his sire's Ill-granted chariot. Him the Thunderer hurled From th' empyrean headlong to the gulf Of the half-parched Eridanus, where weep Even now the sister trees their amber tears ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... the exception of the publication of The Restoration, seems to have proved abortive. White entertained many opinions in common with Sterry, which he advocates with great power. He does not however, like his fellow chaplain, soar into the pure empyrean of theology with unfailing pinions. Sterry has frequently sentences which Milton might not have been ashamed to own. His Discourse of the Freedom of the Will is a noble performance, and the preface will well bear a comparison ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... 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. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... practically abandoned, and the high 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
... 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 first rising into the love of ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... 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 law 'gravity ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... example, to the preaching of liberal ministers, one sees that every accent of their teaching has been affected by this prevalent and permeating thought. The God they preach no longer sits afar like Dante's deity in the stationary empyrean beyond all reach of change; their God is here in the midst of the human struggle, "their Captain in the well-fought fight." H. G. Wells may be a poor theologian but he is one of our best interpreters of popular thought and his idea of God, marching through the world "like fifes and drums," calling ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... seem solid facts for their reality to her, and gilded by lovelight, they glitter and sparkle like a true palace of the East. For once all is possible; nothing lies beyond our reach. And as we talk, and she listens, we two seem to be floating off into an empyrean of our own like the summer clouds above our heads, as they sail dreamily on into the far-away depths ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... 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
... (15th July, a date worth remembering, if the reader please): "Might not Most Catholic Majesty be allowed perhaps to mediate a little in this Business?" "Most Catholic Majesty!" answers Pitt, with a flash as if from the empyrean: "Who sent for Most Catholic Majesty?"—and the matter catches fire, totally explodes, and Spain too declares War; in what way ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... fashion of men, his thoughts flew away from Mr. Pepys and the seventeenth century, and all that is lofty and instructive, and could fix upon nothing except those dear little wandering tendrils, and the white column on which they twined. Alas, that so small a thing can bring the human mind from its empyrean flights! Alas, that vague emotions can drag down the sovereign intellect! Alas, that even for an hour, a man should prefer the ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages; Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean Rings to the roar of an angel onset— Me rather all that bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean, Where some refulgent sunset of India Streams ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, ...
— Essays, First Series • 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 to him. The song, like a heavenly lark, folded its ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... ch'ou says, "The empyrean above you is not God; it is but His outward manifestation. That which remains ever fixed in man's heart and which rules over all things without cease, that is God. Alas, you earnestly seek God in the blue sky, while forgetting Him altogether in your hearts. Can you expect ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... believed that St. Paul in his rapture may have been elevated in body and soul into the third heaven, that is, into the Empyrean, into Paradise, into the place where the angels and the blessed are; and we must not call this in question, since the apostle himself says, that he does not know whether he was raised up in the body or out of the body. St. Theresa, whose works are published by authority, ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... 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 ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... which I have just finished reading, is incomparable; a quasi-sacred consolation to me, which almost brings tears into my eyes! Every word of it is as if spoken, not out of my poor heart only, but out of the eternal skies; words winged with Empyrean wisdom, piercing as lightning,—and which I really do not remember to have heard the like of. Continue, while you have such utterances in you, to give them voice. They will find and force entrance into human hearts, whatever the 'angle of incidence' may be; that is to say, ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... the sky, And breathe thee whispers of its minstrelsy. My happy love will overwing all bounds! O let me melt into thee; let the sounds Of our close voices marry at their birth; Let us entwine hoveringly—O dearth Of human words! roughness of mortal speech! 820 Lispings empyrean will I sometime teach Thine honied tongue—lute-breathings, which I gasp To have thee understand, now while I clasp Thee thus, and weep for fondness—I am pain'd, Endymion: woe! woe! is grief contain'd In the very deeps of pleasure, my sole life?"— Hereat, with ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... until it was convenient that she should be removed. It was dark when Lord Aveleyn, with melancholy foreboding, took his last farewell; for, ere the sun had risen again, the spirit of Edward Forster had regained its liberty, and soared to the empyrean, while the ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and scrip; taking the common essentials of life for granted, referring to the inignorable catastrophe of the fire as a grand elemental phenomenon and spectacle, and soaring easily away and beyond all fact and literalness, into the tender vague, the rare empyrean. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... merely a capacity for getting away from his creditors. Why shouldn't a man wax rich if, after floating a thousand bogus corporations, selling the stock at par and putting the money into his own pocket, he could unfold his wings and fly off into the empyrean, leaving his stock and bond holders ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... to the ear of the great Creator, and 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... rays that roll Empyrean splendor o'er th' unchained soul— The soul that scarce (the billows are so dense) Can struggle to its destin'd eminence— To distant spheres, from time to time, she rode, And late to ours, the favour'd one of God— But, now, the ruler of an anchor'd realm, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... soul! These ribs of mine Are all too fragile for thy narrow cage. By heaven! I will unlock my bosom's door. And blow thee forth upon the boundless tide Of thought's creation, where thy eagle wing May soar from this dull terrene mass away, To yonder empyrean vault—like rocket (sky)— To mingle with thy cognate essences Of Love and Immortality, until Thou burstest with thine own intensity, And scatterest into millions of bright stars, Each one a part of that refulgent whole ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... a power. Nor would representing it to be such long help his case; for an ideal hypostasised into a cause achieves only a mythical independence. The least criticism discloses that it is natural laws, zoological species, and human ideals, that have been projected into the empyrean; and it is no marvel that the good should attract the world where the good, by definition, is whatever the world is aiming at. The hypostasis accomplished by Mr. Russell is more serious, and therefore more paradoxical. If I understand it, it may be expressed as follows: In the realm ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... hand, and after his death it was found lying in a sealed book.' After this (about ten years of the twenty-four having already elapsed) he is taken up to heaven by Mephisto in a chariot drawn by dragons—not of course to the Empyrean, the abode of God, but up as far as the fixed stars (the eighth sphere). He finds the sun, which before he had believed to be only as big as the bottom of a cask, to be far larger than the earth, and the planets to be as large as the earth, ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... of the spring-tide's volume makes a fresh comment on thy name, Each portal of the Empyrean murmurs the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... 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? ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... neighbouring grocers; and in the trees without youths of simian habit clung to advantageous limbs and strained to get a view of the proceedings. Old Judge Kellog who usually dozed on his twenty-first vertebra through testimony and argument—once a young fledgling of a lawyer, sailing aloft in the empyrean of his eloquence, had been brought tumbling confusedly to earth by the snoring of the bench—attested to the unusualness of the occasion by being upright and awake. And Bud White, the clerk, called the court to order, not with his usual masterpiece of mumbled unintelligibility, brought to perfection ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... nature of the Widow to resort to violence in every crisis of her life and at each fresh memory of the effrontery of Wiley Holman she searched the empyrean for words. From the very start he had come to Keno with the intention of stealing her mine. First it was his father, who pitied her so much he was willing to buy her shares; then it was the tax sale, ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... have you 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 I know, give you not one example, in line ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... damned, for few instances or few samples suffice to show the advantage which good extracts from evil. Moreover, since there is no reason for the belief that there are stars everywhere, is it not possible that there may be a great space beyond the region of the stars? Whether it be the Empyrean Heaven, or not, this immense space encircling all this region may in any case be filled with happiness and glory. It can be imagined as like the Ocean, whither flow the rivers of all blessed creatures, when they ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... pure Of yon harmonious countless worlds of light. See, in his orbit sure Each takes his journey bright, Led by an unseen hand through the vast maze of night. See how the pale moon rolls Her silver wheel.... See Saturn, father of the golden hours, While round him, bright and blest, The whole empyrean showers Its glorious streams of light on this low world of ours. But who to these can turn And weigh them 'gainst a weeping world like this, Nor feel his spirit burn To grasp so sweet a bliss And mourn that exile hard which here his portion is? ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... and peopled left they e'er and aye! They're tombed yet pledged to actions past away * And after death upon them came decay. Where are their troops? They failed to ward and guard! * Where are the wealth and hoards in treasuries lay? Th' Empyrean's Lord surprised them with one word, * Nor wealth nor refuge could their ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the most promising of our young poets, he is dull enough in conversation. It may be said of him, as of Goldsmith, 'He writes like an angel, but talks like poor Poll.' You may have read his poem, 'Echoes of the Empyrean,' published in ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... child of the Old Testament. Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent. Christianity is Judaism run divinely mad, a religion without a drainage system, a beautiful dream dissevered from life, soul cut adrift from body, and sent floating through the empyrean, when it can only at best be a captive balloon. At the same time, don't take your idea of Judaism from the Jews. It is only an apostolic succession of great souls that understands anything in this world. The Jewish mission will never be over ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... motions, and the anxious animation of her address. Her task of dragging him forward might have reminded the spectator of some of those ancient monuments, on which a small cherub, singularly inadequate to the task, is often represented as hoisting upward towards the empyrean the fleshy bulk of some ponderous tenant of the tomb, whose disproportioned weight bids fair to render ineffectual the benevolent and spirited exertions of its fluttering ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... dearest to God's heart are his flame-winged Possibilities that hover on the borderline between today and tomorrow, Time and Eternity. They alone may not enter time unless we beckon them. The starry heaven is the heaven of the body; the crystal sphere, of the intellect; and the empyrean, of the pure soul. We may live in the starry heaven in this life, if God gives us the grace. But it is then a heaven of desire. But the weaving of the angels is the whole philosophy of nature. Their music explains its sympathies ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... "messuages, tenements, water courses, and all that doth thereunto pertain," Verty had made a charming sketch of a wild-fowl, with expanded wings, falling from the empyrean, with an arrow ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... last sphere there was believed to exist a boundless, uncircumscribed region, of immeasurable extent, called the Empyrean, or Heaven of Heavens, the incorruptible abode of the Deity, the place of eternal mysteries, which the comprehension of man was unable to fathom, and of which it was impossible for his mind to form any conception. Such were the imaginative beliefs ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... been 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 right to lead men ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... th' Almighty Father from above, (From the pure Empyrean where he sits High thron'd above all height) bent down his Eye, His own Works and their Works at once to view. About him all the Sanctities of Heavn Stood thick as Stars, and from his Sight received ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... are preparing to reap the joys of that many-sided existence which awaits a young lady of the Chaulieu family, and to queen it in Paris, your poor little sweetheart, Renee, that child of the desert, has fallen from the empyrean, whither together we had soared, into the vulgar realities of a life as homely as a daisy's. I have vowed to myself to comfort this young man, who has never known youth, but passed straight from his mother's arms to the embrace of war, and from the joys ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... therewith the words 'good' and 'bad,' you indicate a merely subjective process in terms of an objective quality. Such presumption transcends the limit of the merely impudent, and passes into the boundless empyrean ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... into purple and red and then rapidly changed to a greenish sort of neutral tone that, after an interval, finally became merged into the pure ultramarine of the zenith; for, the heavens were now as clear as a bell, no mist or fog or cloud obscuring the expanse of the empyrean. ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... movement set in afresh. There now seemed to be fewer stars in the heavens; it was as though a milky way had fallen from on high, rolling its glittering dust of worlds, and transferring the revolutions of the planets from the empyrean to earth. A bluish light streamed all around; there was naught but heaven left; the buildings and the trees assumed a visionary aspect in the mysterious glow of those thousands of tapers, whose ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos "and old night." Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a "human mind untuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... 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
... confidence. Apprehending none therefore, full of hope rather and already certain of success, they were soon lost in a peaceful slumber, whilst the Projectile, moving rapidly, though with a velocity uniformly retarding, still cleaved its way through the pathless regions of the empyrean. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... 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
... caterpillar which would resist bullet fire was the most obvious suggestion, but when practical construction was considered, the dreamer was brought down from the empyrean, where the aeroplane is at home, to the forge and the lathe, where grimy machinists are the pilots of a matter-of-fact world. Application was the thing. I found myself so poor at it that I did not even ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... 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
... heroes or of kings; No chant of bloody war, no exulting pean Of arms-won triumphs; but your humble strings You touched in chord with music empyrean. You sang far better than you knew; the songs That for your listeners' hungry hearts sufficed Still live,—but more than this to you belongs: You sang a race from wood and ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... 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 days in conflicts with ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... that bestial vampire sucking his blood—that was his way of referring to the long suffering and hardly used editor—life emerged from gloom into sunshine. Now his spirit could soar untrammelled. It had taken its leap into the Empyrean. He beheld his book beneath him dazzlingly clear. Three months communing with nature, three months solitude on the pure mountain heights, three months calm discipline of the soul—that was what he needed. Then to work, and in another three months, currente calamo, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... from girl to woman. She was large, full-bosomed, wide-browed, clear-eyed. She had not worried him about other girls. She had reproved him for confessed follies in just the way that man loves to be reproved. She had mildly soared with him into the empyrean of his dreams. She had enjoyed whole-heartedly, from the back row of the dress-circle, the play to which he had taken her—as a member of the profession he had, in Jane's eyes, princely privileges—and on the top of the Cricklewood omnibus she had eaten, with the laughter and gusto of her ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... impossibility. One day there came the rumour that the thing had been achieved, followed soon by ocular demonstration; and now we rub shoulders every day with men who have outsoared the eagle, and—alas!—carried death and destruction into the hitherto stainless empyrean. ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... the clarion shout— "Go where the winds of victory whirl you!" His eagle organ, petering out, Whines like a sick and muted curlew; A plaintive dirge supplants the paean That used to rock the empyrean. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... 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
... throne, Where the King in glory sitteth. And the holy King says, 'Welcome, Welcome to you, pilgrim, brother!' And he bids an angel bring him— Bring him royal robes and robe him, Garments rich, and white, and lovely, And a golden crown to crown him. While the empyrean minstrels rising, All in flowing garments vested, Some with harps and some with timbrels, Some with lutes and some with trumpets, All in goodly order mingled, In the skill of gay perfection; Far the minstrel band extendeth Like ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... 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 ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... Voices of all Ages and all Worlds. Wouldst thou commune 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 ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the Ptolemaic system, the earth is encompassed by eight celestial zones or heavens; the first or highest, above which is the empyrean, (otherwise called the ninth heaven,) is that of the Moon, the second that of Mercury, the third that of Venus, the fourth that of the Sun, the fifth that of Mars, the sixth that of Jupiter, the seventh that of Saturn and the ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... never hope to overrun, and into that overarching heaven where, amid clouds and storms, lightning and sudden tempest, there is revealed to those who look for them, lucid openings into the pure, deep empyrean, "as it were the very body of heaven in its clearness;" and when, best of all, we may remember Who it is who stretched out these heavens as a tent to dwell in, and on whose footstool we may kneel, and out of the depths of our ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Ra! Supreme power, the beetle that folds his wings, that rests in the empyrean, that is ...
— Egyptian Literature
... political position, passions which are in common and enjoyments which are universal. Knowledge is like the mystic ladder in the patriarch's dream. Its base rests on the primaeval earth—its crest is lost in the shadowy splendour of the empyrean; while the great authors, who for traditionary ages have held the chain of science and philosophy, of poesy and erudition, are the angels ascending and descending the sacred scale, and maintaining, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... and the tenth is the empyre'an for the Virgin Mary and the triune deity. Beatrice, with Rachel, Sarah, Judith, Rebecca and Ruth, St. Augustin, St. Francis, St. Benedict, and others, were enthroned in Venus, the sphere of the virtues. The empyrean, he says, is a sphere of "unbodied light," "bright effluence of bright essence, uncreate." This is what the Jews called "the heaven ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer |
