"Empyrean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the 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
... 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
... tomb; Thy pitying soul shall smile upon my grief, Shall feel a pang that wishes not relief; In visions still shall shield me as I go, Along this gloomy wilderness of woe; Shall still regard me with peculiar pride, On earth my brother, and in heav'n my guide! Methinks I see thee reach th' empyrean shore, And heav'n's full chorus hails one angel more; While 'mid the seraph-forms that round thee fly, Thy father meets thee with ecstatic eye! He springs exulting from his throne of rest, Extends his arms, and ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... 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 with the world. Sin is punished because of the justice ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Slapman, remarking his disappearance. "Though one of the most promising of our young poets, he is dull enough in conversation. It may be said of him, as of Goldsmith, 'He writes like an angel, but talks like poor Poll.' You may have read his poem, 'Echoes of the Empyrean,' published in the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... wings of heavenly azure with which it soared light as a lark into the empyrean, and now grovels on the earth, weighed down by the burden of ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... 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
... wrote any 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 ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... him whole books full of new verses yet. The only point on which you never give precise intelligence is your own book; but you shall have your will in that; so only you arrive on the shores of light at last, with your mystic freight fished partly out of the seas of time, and partly out of the empyrean deeps. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... steps or phases of still loftier progress. Verily, it is an astonishing world! Change rising above change—cycle growing out of cycle, in majestic progression—each new one ever widening, like the circles that wreathe from a spark of flame, enlarging as they ascend, finally to become lost in the empyrean! And if all that we see, from earth to sun, and from sun to universal star-work—that wherein we best behold images of eternity, immortality and God—if that is only a state or space of a course of being ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... on those 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, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... whole object of religion has 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 ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... 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 physical ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... discipline of the popular mind in abstract ideas, or in the generalized forms of ethical thought, it did much towards forming that public taste which required and prompted the drama to rise above a mere geography of facts into the empyrean of truth; and under the instructions of which Shakespeare learned to make his persons embodiments of general nature as well as of individual character. For the excellences of the Shakespearian Drama were probably ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... 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
... opposite hill-side; here lay the Itombo village, belonging to Gidi Mavunga's eldest son. Beyond it, the tree-clad heights, rolling away into the distance, faded from blue-brown to the faintest azure, hardly to be distinguished from the empyrean above. The climate of these breezy uplands is superior even to that of Banza Nokki, which lies some 170 feet lower; and the nights are ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... 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 hallows, and ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... they began shouting and roaring in chorus two single words, "Sha-shao," kill and burn, in an ever-increasing crescendo. I have heard a very big mass of Russian soldiery give a roar of welcome to the Czar some years ago, a roar which rose in a very extraordinary manner to the empyrean; but never have I heard such a blood-curdling volume of sound, such a vast bellowing as began then and there, and went on persistently, hour after hour, without ever a break, in a maddening sort of way which filled one with evil thoughts. Sometimes for a few moments the sound sank imperceptibly ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... "The sun is always shining for us. The earth turns around from the sun, and it is night—turns toward him, and it is day. The earth wanders far away from the sun, and it is winter—comes toward him again, and it is summer. But the sun shines in the empyrean all the time, wherever the earth may be. Fogs and mists arise from the land and water, condense in clouds, and obscure his glorious face, but they come down in rain or snow, clearing the atmosphere, and we say the sun shines again, when, in truth, ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the daughters of the notables and is with child by thee; belike God will vouchsafe thee virtuous offspring by her.' And he went on to exhort him thus, weeping and saying, 'O my son, I beseech God the Bountiful, the Lord of the Empyrean, to deliver thee from all straits that may betide thee and grant thee His ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... its coming. Reaching the zenith, it seems there to hang poised awhile,—a ghostly bridge arching the empyrean,—upreaching its measureless span from either underside of the world. Then the colossal phantom begins to turn, as on a pivot of air,—always preserving its curvilinear symmetry, but moving its unseen ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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
... 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 coming of ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... for a few moments. The man had always been an enigma to her. She could not understand a nature that soared into the spiritual empyrean one moment, and in the next fell floundering into the bottomless pit of materialism. The undulating curve which marked the development of the Rincon mind was to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... ecstatic look by which Correggio interpreted his sense of supernatural vision: it is a gaze not of contemplation or deep thought, but of wild half-savage joy, as if these saints also had become the elemental genii of cloud and air, spirits emergent from ether, the salamanders of an empyrean intolerable to mortal sense. The point on which their eyes converge, the culmination of their vision, is the figure of Christ. Here all the weakness of Correggio's method is revealed. He had undertaken to realise by no ideal allegorical ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... unwonted licences assumed by Lady Grace; who, in allusion to Hymen's weaving of a cousinship between the earldom of Southweare and that of Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang, set her mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions, as it were from the egg to the empyrean. Her stature was rather short, all of it conversational, at the eyebrows, the shoulders, the finger-tips, the twisting shape; a ballerina's expressiveness; and her tongue dashed half sentences through and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... happily inspired when they imagined that beyond the gods and the fixed stars the cosmos came to an end, for the empyrean beyond was nothing in particular, nothing to trouble one's self about. Many existences are either out of relation to man altogether or have so infinitesimal an influence on his experience that they ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... whether expressed in sonnets or {143} systems, all must wear this form. The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and asks its meaning. He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and makes a voyage long or short. He ascends into the empyrean, and communes with the eternal essences. But whatever his achievements and discoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... flush of colour, every shaft of light,—and the wild, voluptuous singing of unseen skylarks, descending to their nests, and shaking out their songs, as it seemed, like bubbles of music breaking asunder in the clear empyrean, expressed the rapture of heaven wedded to the sensuous, living, breathing joys of earth. The glamour and radiance of the air affected Walden with a sudden unwonted sense of fatigue and pain, and pressing one hand across his eyes, he shut out the dazzle of blue sky and green grass ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... comfortably into the assurance that midair is not his appointed element. The confession is a humiliating one, but there is a temperate balm in the consciousness that his inability to "shave with level wing" the blue empyrean cannot justly be charged upon himself. He has done his endeavour, and done it nobly; but he'll break his ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... 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 wonder and misgiving. Even in his sleep he opens ever and again one ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... 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 Which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 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 because he is not some one else. Roast beef may be more nutritious than strawberries, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... 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 ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Olympian festival, and preceded by Venus, the only other planet visible in the sky. What a canopy!—Not the gaudiest velabrum that the ostentatious munificence of her Caesars extended above its gilded cordage, ever equalled the empyrean pomp of this soft sky. Never could the artificial rains of perfumed water surpass the dewy fragrance that steals around ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... brutal fidelity as just 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. Of course this is intensely characteristic ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... poetical faculty of Drayton is a somewhat perplexing task; for, while rarely subtle, or rising to empyrean heights, he wrote in such varied styles, on such various themes, that the task, at first, seems that of criticizing many poets, not one. But through all his work runs the same eminently English spirit, the same honesty ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... the proper melodies our grandmas used to sing; With "Bonnie Doon," and "Nellie Gray," and "Sitting on the Stile," "The Heart Bowed Down," the "White Cockade," and "Charming Annie Lisle" Our hearts would echo and the sombre empyrean ring Beneath the wizard sorcery of ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... give. My dark imaginations rest you there, This is your grave and superstitious sphere. Get up, my disentangled soul, thy fire Is now refin'd, and nothing left to tire Or clog thy wings. Now my auspicious flight Hath brought me to the empyrean light. I am a sep'rate essence, and can see The emanations of the Deity, And how they pass the seraphims, and run Through ev'ry throne and domination. So rushing through the guard the sacred streams Flow to the neighbour stars, and in their beams —A glorious cataract!—descend to earth, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... 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 ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... to be precise, 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 ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... heroic Thought that longed to breathe empyrean air, Failed of its feathers, fell to earth, and perisht of ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... (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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 and party, town and ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... more than once escaped, but was always lured by food to return. He never seemed disposed to depart to the blue empyrean, his ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... I see thee far beyond the sun, When the new dawn lights Empyrean scenes? What matters now? I know the poem's done, And wonder what ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... serener air images of infinite suggestion projected from worlds not realized, but substantial to faith, hope, and aspiration. Beyond the horizon of speculation floats, in the passionless splendor of the empyrean, the city of our God, the Rome whereof Christ is a Roman,[72] the citadel of refuge, even in this life, for souls purified by sorrow and self denial, transhumanized[73] to the divine abstraction of pure contemplation. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... himself written down with his own 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 ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... interpretation which showed the dormant artist. He tried at first, of course, to eliminate all striving for effect, content to gain the purity of tone for which he was striving, but she soared beyond him sometimes, her soul defying limitations, liberated into an empyrean of song. If anything, she advanced too rapidly, and Peter's greatest task was to restrain her optimism and self-confidence by imposing the drudgery of fundamental principles. And when he found that she was practicing ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... 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, as it were, the communication between man and heaven. This feeling is so universal that there is ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... "the glass of fashion and the mould of form," in very truth "the observed of all observers," surely to-night he should be happy! For the soaring pinions of youth have borne him up and up at last, into the empyrean, far, far above the commonplace; the "Coursing Hound," with its faded sign and weatherbeaten gables, has been lost to view long and long ago (if it ever really existed), and to-night he stands above the clouds, his foot upon the topmost pinnacle; and surely man can ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... down on the 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 ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... 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
... levels have been 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. ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... 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
... then the slow, regular, gliding movement set in afresh. There now seemed to be fewer stars in the heavens; it was as though a milky way had fallen from on high, rolling its glittering dust of worlds, and transferring the revolutions of the planets from the empyrean to earth. A bluish light streamed all around; there was naught but heaven left; the buildings and the trees assumed a visionary aspect in the mysterious glow of those thousands of tapers, whose ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... little while. And then, as inevitably, as inevitably, slowly the clouds began to edge up again above the horizon, slowly, slowly to lurk about the heavens, throwing an occasional cold and hateful shadow: slowly, slowly to congregate, to fill the empyrean space. ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... 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 are ever eager to assure us that man's most sublime ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... throne, was bending down to Gwynplaine! What! had she drawn up her chariot of the dawn, with its yoke of turtle-doves and dragons, before Gwynplaine, and said to him, "Come!" What! this terrible glory of being the object of such abasement from the empyrean, for Gwynplaine! This woman, if he could give that name to a form so starlike and majestic, this woman proposed herself, gave herself, delivered herself up to him! Wonder of wonders! A goddess prostituting herself for him! The arms of a courtesan opening in a ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... mountain with dark pines and sun He stood between the armies, and his shout Rolled from the empyrean above the host: "Bid any little flea ye have come forth, And wince at death upon my finger-nail!" He turned his large-boned face; and all his steel Tossed into beams the lustre of the noon; And all the shaggy horror of his locks Rustled like ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... the stormy glory in the west, lighting up the pale surfaces of cloud, and tinging the grey waters of that majestic sea with a lurid hue of blood. They kissed the bellying sails, and seemed to rest upon the vessel's lofty trucks, and then travelled on and away, and away, through the great empyrean of space till they broke and vanished upon the horizon's rounded edge. There behind them—miles behind—Kerguelen Land reared its fierce cliffs against the twilight sky. Clear and desolate they towered in an unutterable solitude, and on their snowy ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... 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
... 1863.—This 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
... darkened 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
... liberator. For short, he calls him "GARRY." Standing in front of the Hotel de Ville, talking to a group of eager listeners, with his arms wildly gesticulating and his nose contemptuously curling towards the empyrean, he asks: ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... 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
... Yeobright preaching to the Egdon eremites that they might rise to a serene comprehensiveness without going through the process of enriching themselves, was not unlike arguing to ancient Chaldeans that in ascending from earth to the pure empyrean it was not necessary to pass first into the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... sublime transformation is wrought. It is a new hemisphere which hangs above me, with countless fires lighting the awful highways of the universe, and guiding the daring and reverent thought as it falters in the highest empyrean. The mind that has come into fellowship with Nature is subtly moved and penetrated by the decline of light and the oncoming of darkness. As the sun is replaced by the stars, so is the hot, restless, eager spirit of the day replaced by the infinite calm and peace of the night. ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... 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 ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... 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 Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... thy reward; but on him the Eumenides have looked, not Xantippes of the pit, snake-tressed, finger-threatening, but radiantly calm as on antique gems; for him paws impatient the winged courser of the gods, champing unwelcome bit: him the starry deeps, the empyrean glooms, and far-flashing ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... the letter, and promised to receive Amber into his house 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 deserted Amber wept ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... we mark 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
... 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
... "is our true national anthem—the commemoration of national triumph; the grand upsoaring of the victorious American Eagle as it wings its everlasting flight through the blue empyrean away up to ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... 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
... not preside when I was lucklessly ushered into this dancing gilt bubble that we call the world, were all good gifts denied me? The fairies ordained that I should paint, should soar like Apelles, Angelo, and Da Vinci into the empyrean of pure classic art, but no sooner did I dabble in pigment, and plume my slender artistic pin-feathers, than the granite hands of Palma pride seized the ambitious ephemeron, cut off the sprouting wings, and bade me paint only my lips and cheeks, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... 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 ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... 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
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... 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 ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... admitted that the Communists had gone too far in their efforts to establish atheism by force, but he adds, "We shall pursue our attacks on Almighty God in due time, and in an appropriate manner. We are confident we shall subdue him in his empyrean. We shall fight him wherever he hides himself.... I have been informed that not only young Communists, but Boy Scouts, are mocking people who are religious. I have also been told that groups of Boy Scouts ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... imaginative visions, as we know, and as all truly superior minds have them, even though their main superiority happens to be in the practical order. But her visions were limited as a landscape set in a rigid frame; they had not the wings that soar and poise in the vague unbounded empyrean. And she was much too sensible to think that these moods were strong, or constant, or absorbing enough in her case to furnish material and companionship for a life from day to day and year to year. Nor again ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 writer from Ptolemy down; yet, the impressions ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... heaven and of hell—shalt overthrow the planets, stars, and worlds—shalt loose thy steed in fields of emeralds and diamonds—shalt make his litter of the wings torn from the angels,—shalt cover him with the robe of righteousness! Thy saddle shall be broidered with the stars of the empyrean,—and then thou wilt destroy it! After thou hast annihilated everything, —when naught remains but empty space,—thy coffin shattered and thine arrows broken, then make thyself a crown of stone from heaven's highest mount, and cast thyself into the abyss of oblivion. ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... story and brighten the urn of the Ladies of Llangollen may suggest that friendship lies within the province of women as much as within the province of men; that there are pairs of feminine friends as worthy of fame as any of the masculine couples set by classic literature in the empyrean of humanity; that uncommon love clothes the lives of its subjects with the interest of unfading romance; that the true dignity, happiness, and peace of women and of men, too—are to be found rather ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... huge castle—Castle Delusive, where an Angel of light appears and rescues him from their hands. The Angel, after questioning him as to himself, who he was and where he came from, bids him go with him, and resting in the empyrean, he beholds the earth far away beneath them. He sees an immense City made up of three streets; at the end of which are three gates and upon each gate a tower and in each tower a fair woman. This is the City of Destruction and its streets ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... 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 life ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... written!—Why did I not write them? will be asked; and why should I have written them? I may answer. Why deprive myself of the actual charm of my enjoyments to inform others what I enjoyed? What to me were readers, the public, or all the world, while I was mounting the empyrean. Besides, did I carry pens, paper and ink with me? Had I recollected all these, not a thought would have occurred worth preserving. I do not foresee when I shall have ideas; they come when they please, and not when I call for them; either they avoid me altogether, or rushing in ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 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
... and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism. The very ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... our 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 parts, and the harmony ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... descend from the chariot of the empyrean where we are riding with gods and apostles, and enter into one drawn by mortal coursers. We go out for a drive, and alight from the carriage in the poplar grove, to meander in its shades, along its streams. But digressing from one path into another, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the enfranchisement of French poetical thought from the rigid rule of classical authority; and all the enthusiastic believers in the future glories of the "Muse Romantique" went to the English theater, to be amazed, if not daunted, by the breadth of horizon and height of empyrean which her wings might sweep, and into which she might soar, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the 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
... world, creation, nature, universe; earth, globe, wide world; cosmos; kosmos^; terraqueous globe^, sphere; macrocosm, megacosm^; music of the spheres. heavens, sky, welkin^, empyrean; starry cope, starry heaven, starry host; firmament; Midgard; supersensible regions^; varuna; vault of heaven, canopy of heaven; celestial spaces. heavenly bodies, stars, asteroids; nebulae; galaxy, milky way, galactic circle, via lactea [Lat.], ame no kawa [Jap.]. sun, orb ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... coolness by which empires had been saved from disaster. And he was so persuasive, so convincing, that our imaginations, which would have refused to follow a smaller man on lower flights, soared obediently after him through an empyrean of impossible romance. Nor did he stop at this. General TEMPEST was the pattern of old-world punctilio, but before a week was out he had introduced COBBYN, of whom he knew nothing except what COBBYN told him, to all the best people in Dansington; nor shall ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... are 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 ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... 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 like ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... 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 ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... 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
... sudden, he saw her seal her lips and, flashing crimson, droop her head, and simply fumble with her girdle. Yet so fascinating was she in those timid blushes, which completely baffle description, that his feelings were roused within him to such a degree, that all sense of pain flew at once beyond the empyrean. "I've only had to bear a few blows," he reflected, "and yet every one of them puts on those pitiful looks sufficient to evoke love and regard; so were, after all, any mishap or untimely end to unexpectedly befall me, who ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... ours for the moment, 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 ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 flouts all ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... capable had descended upon me. I could have spoken in blank verse of Shakesperian beauty, all sorts of great ideas flashed through my mind; it was as though the bonds of my flesh had been loosened and left the spirit free to soar to the empyrean of its native power. The sensations that poured in upon me are indescribable. I seemed to live more keenly, to reach to a higher joy, and sip the goblet of a subtler thought than ever it had been my lot to do before. I was another and most ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... ad astra!" murmured his dragoman enigmatically, and, lifting his eyes, he followed the Angel's flight into the empyrean. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... enamour'd, and such joy thou took'st With me in secret, that my womb conceiv'd A growing burden. Mean while Warr arose, And fields were fought in Heav'n; wherein remaind (For what could else) to our Almighty Foe Cleer Victory, to our part loss and rout 770 Through all the Empyrean: down they fell Driv'n headlong from the Pitch of Heaven, down Into this Deep, and in the general fall I also; at which time this powerful Key Into my hand was giv'n, with charge to keep These Gates for ever shut, which none can pass Without my op'ning. Pensive here I sat Alone, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... 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, ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... But I fancy it rather points to the condition of greater relative equality. Our Russian friend was accustomed to the patronising kindness of the superior to the inferior, of the master to the servant. It is easy, on an empyrean rock, to be "kind" to the mortals toiling helplessly down below. It costs little, to use Mr. Bellamy's parable, for those securely seated on the top of the coach to subscribe for salve to alleviate the chafed wounds of those ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... waxing pestiferous with the awful odor of decaying human bodies. Buzzards, invited by their disgusting instinct, gather for a promised feast, and sit and glower on neighboring perches or else circle round and round in the blue empyrean over the location of unfriended corpses, known only to their keen sense of smell ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... 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 Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... intrusion. Cattle-food, indeed! As if beans, oats, warm mashes, and a ball, are to be pushed down a man's throat just as he is meditating on the great social problem, or (for I think it was my epic I was going to touch up) just as he was about to soar to the height of the empyrean! ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... says a 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 first rising into ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... sweet; And the point is paradise, Where their glances meet: Their 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 the ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... divine angel!" cried Zadig, humbly prostrating himself on the ground," hast thou then descended from the Empyrean to teach a weak mortal to submit to the ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... a Biographic work, mere Conjecture must for most part return answer. "It was appointed," says our Philosopher, "that the high celestial orbit of Blumine should intersect the low sublunary one of our Forlorn; that he, looking in her empyrean eyes, should fancy the upper Sphere of Light was come down into this nether sphere of Shadows; and finding ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... splendour. This 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, and in some measure, his ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... from an empyrean flight of poetic imagery to remember his torn and soiled silk polo-shirt with its rolled-up sleeves, his earth-stained cords, girt with a belt of vari-coloured webbing, his muddy leather leggings and boots with their caked and dusty spurs, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... self-interest, pusillanimity 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
... flow over masses of turf and flowers. The rivulet of Ain-Tabiga makes a little estuary, full of pretty shells. Clouds of aquatic birds hover over the lake. The horizon is dazzling with light. The waters, of an empyrean blue, deeply imbedded amid burning rocks, seem, when viewed from the height of the mountains of Safed, to lie at the bottom of a cup of gold. On the north, the snowy ravines of Hermon are traced in white lines upon the sky; on the west, the high, undulating plateaux of Gaulonitis and Perea, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... (sad duty!) The fragments over into nothingness, With tears unavailing Bewailing All the departed beauty. Lordlier Than all sons of men, Proudlier Build it again, Build it up in thy breast anew! A fresh career pursue, Before thee A clearer view, And, from the Empyrean, A new-born ...
— Faust • Goethe
... 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
... and thickness. One saw the sky beyond the edge of the world getting purer as the vault rose. But right up—a belt in that empyrean—ran peak and field and needle of intense ice, remote, remote from the world. Sky beneath them and sky above them, a steadfast legion, they glittered as though with the armour of the immovable armies of Heaven. Two days' march, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... of our 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, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... Cherishing, it may be, the 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 days in conflicts ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... 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, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hero—expendere Hannibalem—a prince a la Corneille, who carried his gaze to the stars, and only spoke to mortals from the summit of his trophies. His sister, Madame de Longueville, had also in the same fashion soared into the sphere of a goddess. The one and the other, in the empyrean, no longer distinguished their fellow mortals from such a height save with a smile of disdain. Great folks, as a contemporary tells us, kicked their heels in their antechambers for hours, and, when granted an audience, were received with yawning ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... empyrean, azure, the heavens. Associated words: meridian, zenith, nadir, horizon, uranology, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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 ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... soul goes down thy far, untrodden paths, To the dim verge of being. There its step Touches the threshold of sublimer life, And through the boundless empyrean leaps Its prayer, borne like a faint, expiring cry, To angel-warders, listening as they pace The crystal walls of Heaven. Down the blue fields Of the untraveled Infinite, they come: Beneath their wings one sweet, dilating wave Thrills the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... 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 ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... cling to; so she clung to the man who struck her low. Love, then, was earthly; its depth could be probed by science! A man lived who could measure it from end to end; foretell its term; handle the young cherub as were he a shot owl! We who have flown into cousinship with the empyrean, and disported among immortal hosts, our base birth as a child of Time is made bare to us!—our wings are cut! Oh, then, if science is this victorious enemy of love, let us love science! was the logic of the lady's heart; and secretly cherishing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren |
