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Ethereal   /ɪθˈɪriəl/   Listen
Ethereal

adjective
1.
Characterized by lightness and insubstantiality; as impalpable or intangible as air.  Synonyms: aerial, aeriform, aery, airy.  "Aerial fancies" , "An airy apparition" , "Physical rather than ethereal forms"
2.
Of or containing or dissolved in ether.
3.
Of heaven or the spirit.  Synonyms: celestial, supernal.  "Ethereal melodies" , "The supernal happiness of a quiet death"
4.
Characterized by unusual lightness and delicacy.  Synonym: gossamer.  "Gossamer shading through his playing"






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"Ethereal" Quotes from Famous Books



... immaterial soul emanates from the ethereal celestial part of the cosmos and consists of yang substance. When operating actively in the living human body, it is called khi or "breath," and hwun; when separated from it after death it lives forth as a refulgent spirit, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... and saw the girl. The phantasmagoria of his brain vanished at sight of her. She was a pale, ethereal creature, with wide, spiritual blue eyes and a wealth of golden hair. He did not know how she was dressed, except that the dress was as wonderful as she. He likened her to a pale gold flower upon a slender stem. No, she was a ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... eyes. They were fine eyes notwithstanding, piercing by nature but just now misty with a feeling that took away all her fear. He was going to like her; she saw it in every trembling line of his countenance, and at the thought a smile rose to her lips which, if fleeting, lent such an ethereal aspect to her beauty that he forgave Oliver then and there for a love which never could be crowned, but which henceforth could no longer be regarded by ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... as did we, too early for the crowd of sightseers; but when the 'long light shakes across the lakes,' the blackest arts of the tourist (and they are as black as they are many) cannot break the spell. Sitting on one of these hillsides, we heard a bugle-call taken up and repeated in delicate, ethereal echoes,—sweet enough, indeed, to be worthy of the fairy buglers who are supposed to pass the sound along their lines from crag to crag, until it faints and dies in silence. And then came the 'Lament for Owen Roe O'Neil.' We were thrilled to the very heart with the sorrowful strains; and when ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... and heaven, By the banks of heaven's river[146] All the mighty gods assembled, All the mighty gods in council. And, for that her sov'reign grandeur The great goddess of the day-star Rul'd th' ethereal realms of heaven, Downward through the many-piled Welkin did they waft her grandson, Bidding him, till earth and heaven, Waxing old, should fall together, O'er the middle land of reed-plains, O'er the land of waving rice-fields, Spread abroad his ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various

... pleasure at the wild and the sublime outline of the surrounding mountains with their varied combinations, while the richness and beauty of colouring thrown over and around the whole, by the purple and rose colours and ethereal blue of the sky, imparted to the scene a beauty which no fancy sketch of fairyland could surpass. As they turned their eyes towards the nearest shore of the main land, they saw the beach and fringing ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston

... his features assume an expression of repose and relaxation as if here indeed were his true home. He has chosen his seat in full view of a picture that hangs on the wainscoted wall, near his mother—a picture whose pure ethereal tinting, of colour limpid as the rainbow, yet rich as the most glowing flower-beds; and its soft lovely pose, and rounded outlines, prove it to be no produce even of one of the great German artists of the time, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... lets the rein go entirely; it gives itself up to the reader and hence it takes possession of him. Resistance is impossible; the contagion is too overpowering. A creature of air and flame, the most excitable that ever lived, composed of more ethereal and more throbbing atoms than those of other men; none is there whose mental machinery is more delicate, nor whose equilibrium is at the same time more shifting and more exact. He may be compared to those accurate scales that are affected by a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... shallower, nothing narrower, is religion in its perfection; and the measure in which we have attained to this harmony with God, is the measure in which we are Christians. As two stringed instruments may be so tuned to one keynote that, if you strike the one, a faint ethereal echo is heard from the other, which blends undistinguishably with its parent sound; so, drawing near to God, and brought into unison with His mind and will, our responsive spirits vibrate in accord with His, and give forth tones, low and thin indeed, but still repeating the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... now cast aside in a careless fold of soft drapery over her shoulders, and her face in its ethereal delicacy of feature and brilliant coloring looked almost too beautiful to be human. Dr. Dean did not reply for a moment; he was thinking what a singular resemblance there was between Armand Gervase and one of the figures on a certain Egyptian fresco ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... glinted or glowed in miniature. Close on our right two toy towers stood boldly up to grace a townlet. Due east a long, straight baby avenue led to a midget city. Northward a tiny train stole like a snail into the haze of distance. Far to the south the mountains, blurred, snowy, ethereal, rose like a beckoning dream ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... is like ethereal champagne in Virginia City, and on a late summer's evening, after the sun's honeyed freshness has been strained through miles of it, it has a quality that ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and sing a 'stev' together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow tones of the poet's voice in the poet's verse. These were most characteristic of him, and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal wall beyond which he is rapt ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... himself hurriedly to his feet; the shade passed from his brow. The group came close; he stepped out, and Isabel, meeting him, laid her two hands in his, while the halting cluster ceased their song suspensively on a line that pledged loves and friendships too ethereal to clash. ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable

... on his ear,—he soon heard a door open. Maulear fixed his eyes on the point of the terrace from which the sound proceeded—his whole existence seemed concentrated in the single sense of sight. Something cloudlike, vapory and undefinable, which seemed too ethereal for earth, gradually appeared at the extreme end of the terrace. This mysterious figure seemed to glide, rather than walk, towards the place where Maulear was concealed; it approached him slowly, without motion or sound to betray its steps. Wrapped in long white drapery, like a mantle of vapor, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... de Universis Philosophia, 1591), who, combining Neoplatonic and Telesian principles, holds that the incorporeal or spiritual light emanates from the divine original light, in which all reality is seminally contained; the heavenly or ethereal light from the incorporeal; and the earthly or corporeal, from the heavenly—while the original light divides into three persons, the One and All (Unomnia), unity or life, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... guilty of overweening arrogance and its attendant, presumption; she could not see the form ethereal to which he bowed. To Richard, Dorothy appeared the dupe of superstition; he could not see the god that dwelt within the idol. To Dorothy, Richard seemed to be one who gave the holy name of truth to nothing but the offspring of his own vain fancy. To Richard, Dorothy appeared one ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... luxury of the chamber which was destined to serve me as my study. I had ever held that it was best for my mind to be surrounded by such objects as would be in harmony with the studies which occupied it, and that the loftiest and most ethereal conditions of thought are only possible amid surroundings which please the eye and gratify the senses. The room which I had set apart for my mystic studies was set forth in a style as gloomy and majestic ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... an unselfish love for his fellow-men, with an aggressive eagerness for martyrdom in their behalf; his nature was unusually, even abnormally, fine and sensitive; and his poetic quality was a delicate and ethereal lyricism unsurpassed in the literature of the world. In both his life and his poetry his visionary reforming zeal and his superb lyric ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... the balcony and stood before it. At this the figure raised its head and looked at us. It was beautiful, it was young; but its substance seemed to be of an ethereal quality which we had never seen or known of. With its full, soft eyes fixed ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... young girl. He seems now, for the first time, to have learned that a maiden can be pure, and in his old idealizing way which went with him to the end, he deified her. Judith became a symbol to him, and he lent her the ethereal grace of abstract beauty. In "Pericles" she is Marina; in "The Winter's Tale" Perdita; in "The Tempest" Miranda. It is probable when one comes to think of it, that Ward was right when he says that Shakespeare spent his "elder years" in Stratford; he was too broken to ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... gardens, blue waters, flaxen plains, and the mountains. Did he pause on the steps at sunset, the two harbours, rounded cup-shape, shone, rimmed by the quays, like lenses of ruby. To the left, the Lake of Tunis, stirless, without a ripple, as rich in ethereal lights as a Venetian lagoon, radiated in ever-altering sheens, delicate and splendid. In front, across the bay, dotted with the sails of ships close-hauled to the wind, beyond the wind-swept and shimmering intervals, the mountains of Rhodes raised their ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... woman! Not the beauty of Greece, on which we gaze as upon some wondrous flower wafted from Elysian Fields, and too ethereal for this gross world; nor that of Rome, with Pallas' snow-clad bosom and retrospective eye; but the sensuous beauty of the far south, that casts a Circean spell upon the souls of men. Her eyes are not dove's eyes that softly shine along the path ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... paper. These are chiefly landscapes of an imaginative cast—such as the fairy grottoes of Stanfield, or the lake of the Dismal Swamp of Chapman. There are, nevertheless, three or four female heads, of an ethereal beauty-portraits in the manner of Sully. The tone of each picture is warm, but dark. There are no "brilliant effects." Repose speaks in all. Not one is of small size. Diminutive paintings give that spotty look to a room, which is the blemish of so many a fine work of Art overtouched. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... must not disparage this style of writing—it is not bad—there is a great art in it. It may be termed writing intellectual and ethereal. You observe, that it never allows probabilities or even possibilities to stand in its way. The dross of humanity is rejected: all the common wants and grosser feelings of our natures are disallowed. It is a novel ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... breathing on a formless void to kindle it into a vital and splendid cosmos, and between the dawn's fog and the radiance of full day lay a dozen miracles. Through rifts in the streamers, patches of hillside and sky showed for an ethereal moment or two in tender and transparent coloration, like spirit-reflections of emerald and sapphire.... Lescott heard a ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... where we had crabs, divine though devilled, and omelette au rhum floating in flames of the blue I should like my eyes to be when angry; there's a post-office, and—nothing else that I can think of, except circling hills, a golden sweep of beach, and sea of ethereal azure creaming against contorted rocks. That's all; but it's a ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... men have tried to exorcise in vain The turbulent spirits abroad; As well might we deal with the fetterless main, Or conquer ethereal essence with sword; Like the devils of Milton, they rise from each blow, With ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... cowslips, and laved by the crystal stream? May she never view the silver fish as he leaps up, and "dumbly speaks the praise of God?" May she never wander abroad for the sake of wandering, or ride for the sake of riding; or gaze on the blue ethereal by day, or the star-spangled ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott

... resembling them. They are not love! Comes love (that subtle essence, without which Life were but leaden dulness!—weariness! A plodding trudger on a heavy road!) Comes it of title-deeds which fools may boast? Or coffers vilest hands may hold the keys of? Or that ethereal lamp that lights the eyes To shed the sparkling lustre o'er the face, Gives to the velvet skin its blushing glow, And burns as bright beneath the peasant's roof As roof of palaced prince? Yes, Love should ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles

... as it were—as I was saying, my dear madam, these angelic angels of our homes are too ethereal, too dainty, to mingle with the rude crowds. We political men would fain keep them as they are now: we are willing to stand the rude buffetings of—of—voting, in order to guard these sweet, delicate creatures from any hardships. Sweet, tender ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... a silvery music is ringing! Hark! What a careless and jubilant singing! See on ethereal azure waves swinging, Now the glad lark to her South-land is winging! Silence, O Life full of doubting and fears, Hushed first of all be ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi

... a pretty woman of that ethereal type of beauty that is not noticeably diminished by fragility. Persis, looking her over, estimated that the thirty pounds the doctor credited her with losing had been appreciably increased since he made his appeal for aid. At the same time, the dressmaker admitted with grudging ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... wondering how the subtle Fiend had stoln Entrance unseen. Soon as th' unwelcome News From Earth arriv'd at Heaven-Gate, displeased All were who heard: dim Sadness did not spare That time Celestial Visages; yet mixt With Pity, violated not their Bliss. About the new-arriv'd, in multitudes Th' Ethereal People ran, to hear and know How all befel: They tow'rds the Throne supreme Accountable made haste to make appear With righteous Plea, their utmost vigilance, And easily approved; when the Most High Eternal Father, from ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... personified, when it conveys an idea strictly individual, should begin with a capital; as, "Upon this, Fancy began again to bestir herself."—Addison. "Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come."—Thomson. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... fool's paradise. V. vanish, evaporate, fade, dissolve, melt away; disappear &c. 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c. (imaginary) 515; immaterial &c. 137; spectral &c. 980; dreamy; shadowy; ethereal, airy; cloud built, cloud formed; gossamery, illusory, insubstantial, unreal. vacant, vacuous; empty &c. 187; eviscerated; blank, hollow; nominal; null; inane. Phr. there's nothing in it; "an ocean of dreams without a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... unalloyed, shrinking delicacy, sometimes exist in the female bosom, to an extent that but few men are happy enough to discover, and that most men believe incompatible with the frailties of human nature. Grace Chatterton possessed no little of what may almost be called this ethereal spirit and a visit to Bolton parsonage was immediately proposed by her to Emily. The latter, too innocent herself to suspect the motives of her cousin, was happy to be allowed to devote a fortnight to Clara, uninterrupted by the noisy round of visiting and congratulations which had attended her first ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper

... blotting out the shape of things, powdering everything with an icy froth; and in the utter stillness of the town, quiet and buried under its winter pall, nothing was audible but this faint, fluttering, and indefinable rustle of falling snow—more a sensation than a sound—the intermingling of ethereal atoms seeming to fill space, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... a laugh so near him and so soft that he believed himself to be dreaming, but he looked round and quickly rose to his feet, and there at the other side of the tree he saw standing the ethereal figure of a girl, while her filmy gray garments seemed to ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn

... Having reached these ethereal heights, the two genii saw a bright light, and Hsuean-hsuean Shang-jen appeared before them. The two genii bowed to do him homage and to express their gratitude. "You cannot better show your gratitude," ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner

... us the transmigration is not veiled in darkness and mystery as with you. We can watch the transformation; we can see the spirit emerge from its old casement more ethereal than ourselves, but still visible; and we can hold ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... of tender light, She floated through the ethereal blue, A softer sun, that shone all night Upon the gathering beads ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant

... well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky; our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains; our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers, and mountains, and forests, and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... he gone now? Has he joined his compeers? Is he conversing in ethereal regions with Alexander, Caesar, Frederick? Is he sweeping over land and sea in the whirlwind and the thunder-cloud? Or may we hope that he is still working out the task which, in spite of all the imperiousness of his nature, was the essence of his earthly life—the task of making ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... fortress of security; but he wisely kept his own counsel, believing in the eternal value of silence. In truth, the gentle monk lived so much in the unreal and celestial world of Beauty, that he was by no means a skilful guide for the passes of common life. Love, other than that ethereal kind which aspires towards Paradise, was a stranger to his thoughts, and he constantly erred in attributing to other people natures and purposes as unworldly and spiritual as his own. Thus had he fallen, in his utter simplicity, into the attitude ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... less ethereal, for the exigencies of the situation demanded that the King should get out of the window and claim the hand of the beggar-maid in the public street. But the nun who had composed the music could not ...
— Muslin • George Moore

... Marjorie entered a small low bedroom, clean enough, though rather faded and shabby. In a cot bed by the window lay Eric, white as his pillow, a frail ethereal being all dark eyes and shining golden curls. He stretched out two ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... after the various trunks and boxes of the Frosts that were to go by the transport were packed and ready, and Mrs. Frost, looking stronger at last, though still fragile, almost ethereal, was returning from a drive with one of her friends, the attention of the two ladies was drawn to a crowd gathering rapidly on the sidewalk not far from the Baldwin Hotel. There was no shouting, no commotion, nothing but the idle curiosity of men and boys, for a young soldier, a handsome, slender, ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King

... dreading, at every step, that I should commit some extravagance. In walking, I was hardly sensible of my feet touching the ground, it seemed as if I slid along the street, impelled by some invisible agent, and that my blood was composed of some ethereal fluid, which rendered my body lighter than air. I got to bed the moment I reached home. The most extraordinary visions of delight filled my brain all night. In the morning I rose, pale and dispirited; my head ached; my body was so debilitated that I was obliged to remain on the sofa all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various

... small, and however light, buoyant, and ethereal they may seem, are subject to this force: the tiniest speck in a sunbeam and the most volatile vapour, equally with the heaviest metal and the hugest block, the particles of bodies as well as the bodies themselves. The rising of a ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness

... loveliness—and when I say that they were lovely enough to be worthy of the lady to whom they were addressed, I give them the highest praise and the praise that Dante would most have cared to accept—were too ethereal for my work-a-day humors. I liked better to write verses to the laughing, facile lasses with whom my way of life was cast—jolly girls who would kiss to-day and sigh to-morrow, and forget all about you the third day if needs were, and whom it was as easy for their lover to forget, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... the insurgents, each party inflamed more or less by religious fanaticism, were each disposed to regard the ethereal battle as waged between the spirits of light and the spirits of darkness, angels against fiends. Each party, of course, imagined itself as represented by the angel bands, which doubtless conquered. The phenomenon was thus, to both, the omen of success, and inspired ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... own way, a problem that has puzzled wiser heads than ours—how three distinct individuals (the worm, the chrysalis, and the butterfly) could be one and the same creature, and how from a low-born worm that groveled and crawled could be born this bright ethereal being—all light and beauty and color—that seemed ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... law of association that revived it; but it seemed the whispering of some one in the air—some ethereal spirit, if you please—which instituted it, and advanced the following problem: "Nitrous oxide gas is composed of the same elements as ordinary air, with a larger equivalent of oxygen, except it is a chemical compound, not a mechanical mixture, and its ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various

... now past twenty-four—that he saw for the first time 'Patty,' his future wife. She was walking on a footpath across the fields, while he was lying in the grass not far off, dreaming worlds of beauty and ethereal bliss. Patty stepped right into his ideal realm, and thus, unknown to herself, became part and parcel of it. She was a fair girl of eighteen, slender, with regular features, and pretty blue eyes; but to Clare, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin

... from the soul, shadow, or double of a man; his body, indeed, was moulded out of a more rarefied substance, and generally invisible, but endowed with the same qualities, and subject to the same imperfections as ours. The gods, therefore, on the whole, were more ethereal, stronger, more powerful, better fitted to command, to enjoy, and to suffer than ordinary men, but they were still men. They had bones,[**] muscles, flesh, blood; they were hungry and ate, they were ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... the high-born loftier part, Th' ethereal energies that touch the heart, Conceptions ardent, laboring thought intense, Creative fancy's wild magnificence, And all the dread sublimities of song: These, Virtue, these to thee alone belong: Chill'd, by the breath of vice, their radiance dies, And brightest burns when lighted ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... that slope a for mounted to its crown of rocks. The ground there was covered with a mist of bluebells, and nearly a score of crab-apple trees were in full bloom. He threw himself down on the grass. The change from the buttercup glory and oak-goldened glamour of the fields to this ethereal beauty under the grey for filled him with a sort of wonder; nothing the same, save the sound of running water and the songs of the cuckoos. He lay there a long time, watching the sunlight wheel till ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... merely a place separated and set apart to religious uses by a solemn act of dedication. When the augur moved his wand aloft and designated the portion of the heavens in which he was to make his observations, he called the circumscribed area of the ethereal blue a temple, and when the medival astrologer did the same, he named the space a "house." On the Roman temple an altar was set up, and there, perhaps beneath the spreading branches of a royal oak, sacred to Jupiter, the king of the gods, or of an olive, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... of the fireworks had set fire to houses and were threatening them with destruction; for this reason men could be seen on the ridges of the roofs carrying buckets of water and long bamboo poles with cloths tied on the ends. Their dark shadows seemed descended from ethereal space to be present at the rejoicings of human beings. An enormous number of wheels had been burned, also castles, bulls, caraboas and other pieces of fireworks, and finally a great volcano, which surpassed ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... and market, which with wonderfully little difference of sentiment and movement also inspired Burns. He must have had a mind full of variety and wide human sympathy almost Shakspearian, who could step from the musings of Windsor and the beautiful heroine, all romance and ethereal splendour, to the lasses in their gay kirtles, and Hob and Raaf with their rustic "daffing," as true to the life as the Ayrshire clowns of Burns, and all the clumsy yet genial gambols of the village festival. It is one of the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... for the radiant wanderer. The inhospitable saurian dives with embarrassing suddenness and dips the airy visitor into the "rank water." The butterfly finds no charm in the gloomy place and flies away, which less ethereal wanderers might likewise be fain to do. Now and then the stillness that reigned over that home of malign things was broken by the sound of a boat-horn on a lumber raft floating ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... saddle-horn. Her gloves were tucked in her belt. She had loosened the neck of her blouse and rolled back her sleeves, at the spring above, to bathe her face and arms in the chill overflow. Her hair shone with a soft golden radiance that was ethereal in the flicker of afternoon sunlight through the live-oaks. From her golden head to the tip of her small riding-boot she was a harmony of vigor and grace, of exquisite coloring and ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... and climate had been effected by the skill of the Vril-ya, and that the agency of vril had been successfully employed in such changes. She described a subtle and life-giving medium called Lai, which I suspect to be identical with the ethereal oxygen of Dr. Lewins, wherein work all the correlative forces united under the name of vril; and contended that wherever this medium could be expanded, as it were, sufficiently for the various agencies of vril to have ample play, a temperature congenial to the highest forms of life could be secured. ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... traits of character are in perfect harmony with all the facts and conclusions already presented. Such characteristics were the natural product of the warm and genial sunlight, the elastic bracing air, the ethereal skies, the glorious mountain scenery, and the elaborate blending of sea and land, so peculiar to Greece and the whole of Southern Europe.[31] These characteristics were shared in a greater or less degree by all the nations of Southern Europe in ancient times, and they are still distinctive traits ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... We may also state here that the teachings of most philosophies of the life after death hold that the decarnate human soul is not entirely devoid of a body, but rather occupies a body composed of some ethereal substance; this ethereal body being called the "astral body," or the ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita

... part of France is delightful; with the exception of occasional showers, very little rain falls; the sky is serene, and scarcely ever is a vagabond cloud seen in the ethereal blue to throw a shadow upon the lovely landscape beneath. For six months of the year the sun is daily refulgent in the heavens, and sets evening after evening in all his glorious majesty. But in the woods it is not thus; the storms there are sometimes ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... was speaking, Nina rose, and as she stood in the recess of the window, with the beams of the pale moon lighting up her countenance, which would otherwise have been cast in shadow, her figure appeared to grow more pure and ethereal, even to the eyes of the fierce and lawless pirate. Her fair and slender hands were clasped on her bosom, while she turned on him a look in which pain and reproach ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... know what feelings possessed me at that moment. Perhaps it was a sense of loss as I saw this woman I loved fly away into the air while I remained chained to the ground. I cannot tell. But when she came back, dropping gently down beside me, ethereal and beautiful as an angel from heaven itself, a sudden rush of love swept ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings

... act directly and preternaturally on matter, in spite of the laws of matter, perhaps matter might act on spirit. After all, were matter and spirit so absolutely different? Was not spirit some sort of pervading essence, some subtle ethereal fluid, differing from matter principally in being less gross and dense? This was the point to which they went down rapidly enough; the point to which all philosophies, I firmly believe, will descend, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... yields to night, Bright as that fibrous woof when stars indue Its transitory robe. Four shapeless shadows bright and beautiful Draw that strange car of glory, reins of light 65 Check their unearthly speed; they stop and fold Their wings of braided air: The Daemon leaning from the ethereal car Gazed on the slumbering maid. Human eye hath ne'er beheld 70 A shape so wild, so bright, so beautiful, As that which o'er the maiden's charmed sleep Waving a starry wand, Hung like a mist of ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... that our attitude and relations to each other will be purely spiritual. Socially we can never be intimate. Anything like matrimonial intentions towards her, charming as she is, would be absurd. They would spoil the ethereal character of my regard. And, indeed, I have other aims on the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... alarming. As Robert Cairn, leaping from the car, seized both her hands and looked into her eyes, it seemed to him that the girl had almost an ethereal appearance. Something clutched at his heart, iced his blood; for Myra Duquesne seemed a creature scarcely belonging to the world of humanity—seemed already half a spirit. The light in her sweet eyes was good to see; but her fragility, and a certain ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... the western sky the dim forms of mountains. The glory of the great night laid hold upon her; her eyes shone with stars; she dipped her sight into the coolness and brightness of the sky, as she might have dipped her wrist into a spring; and her heart, at that ethereal shock, began to move more soberly. The sun that sails overhead, ploughing into gold the fields of daylight azure and uttering the signal to man's myriads, has no word apart for man the individual; and the moon, ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and she drew in the air again and again, slowly and quietly, as if she could drink it, and live on its sweet taste, and never want food or other drink again, though she was not an ethereal young person, but only a perfectly healthy and natural girl. She was not tired, yet somehow she felt that she was resting body, soul and heart, for a little while, after growing up and before beginning what was ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... horsehair cap and watered black silk ribbons, her trim bodice and broad blue sash down to her knees, her little white hands crossed in the attitude of a dreamer, her long fair curls—all that was graceful, slender, and ethereal in nature. Yes, I can see Raesel now, sitting in a large leathern arm-chair, close to the blue curtain of the recess at the end of the room, smiling ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

... hunger. They fish, hunt, and plant, and are just like living men, except that they have no noses. When they first arrive in the mansions of the blest, they are laid out to dry on a sort of gridiron over a slow fire in order to purge away the grossness of the body and make them ethereal and light, as spirits should be. Yet, oddly enough, though they have no noses they cannot enter the realms of bliss unless their noses were pierced in their lifetime. For these savages bore holes in their noses and insert ornaments, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... is a short, glowing, and generous sketch, from the hand of Franz Liszt, (who, considered in the double light of composer and performer, has no living equal,) of the original and romantic Chopin; the most ethereal, subtle, and delicate among our modern tone-poets. It is a rare thing for a great artist to write on art, to leave the passionate worlds of sounds or colors for the colder realm of words; rarer still for him to abdicate, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt

... field. You could not see the water at a little distance, the river being narrow. We could almost jump from our deck to the banks. We felt in perfect safety. Contrasting that with the night before in that terrible hurricane and in the death struggles for our lives, it produced a supreme feeling of ethereal ideal happiness that this earth seemed almost a Paradise. The captain informed me that there was one place on the river where we might have to anchor. It was called the Devil's Elbow. There was a sharp turn in ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower

... flies,—the wonderfully ingenious webs which sparkle with dew among the grasses or stretch from bush to bush. The framework is of strong webbing and upon this is closely woven the sticky spiral which is so elastic, so ethereal, and yet strong enough to entangle a good-sized insect. How knowing seems the little worker, as when, the web and his den of concealment being completed, he spins a strong cable from the centre of the web to the entrance of his watch-tower. Then, when a ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... expression of arbitrary power which one might ardently wish directed elsewhere. From the moment that the echoes of the Cove caught the first elusive strain of the trumpet, infinitely sweet and clear and compelling, yet somehow ethereal, unreal, as if blown down from the daylight moon, a filmy lunar semblance in the bland blue sky, the denizens of Tanglefoot began to tremulously confer together, and to skitter like frightened ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... transforms into objects of mysterious beauty all unsightly things, or hides them clean away; while the nobler works of man, those facades and cornices and full-bellied balconies of cunningly wrought iron rise up, under its enchantment, ethereal as the palace of fairies. And coming, as I then did, from the sun-baked river-beds of Calabria, this place, with its broad and well-paved streets, its glittering cafes and demure throng of evening idlers, seemed a ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... farthest corners. Their glowing crimson flushed the granite to a scarcely perceptible rose. Portions of the noble arches, parts of the architrave, sculptured cornice and keystone, drums, pediments and capitals, stone mullions, here and there a huge monolith, caught the ethereal flush and transformed Shed Number Two into a ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... was over they all returned to the piazza. At the physician's request she was placed in her old seat, and they all sat down to watch. The moon rose higher and higher, made her hair more silvery, touched her still face with a strange, ethereal beauty, and threw the swaying shadow of a spray of woodbine across her motionless figure—so motionless that she seemed a sculptured ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... directing Mind of All ordains. All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul; That changed through all, and yet in all the same, Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame, Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees; Lives through all life, extends through all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent; Breathes in our soul, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... substitute brotherly love for the present laws and conventions of society. Such is his philosophy; but the beginner will read this poem, not chiefly for its thought, but for its youthful enthusiasm, for its marvelous imagery, and especially for its ethereal music. Perhaps we should add here that Prometheus is, and probably always will be, a poem for the chosen few who can appreciate its peculiar spiritlike beauty. In its purely pagan conception of the world, it suggests, by contrast, Milton's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... parted for a little space, and there was a sudden and fitful glimmer of a stormy blue sky. Then a strange soft yellow and vaporous light shot across to the Barvas hills, and touched up palely the great slopes, rendering them distant, ethereal and cloud-like. Then a shaft or two of wild light flashed down upon the landscape beside them. The cattle shone red in the brilliant green pastures. The gray rocks glowed in their setting of moss. The stream going by Barvas Inn was a streak of gold in its sandy bed. And then the sky above ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... part of the color plan. From a central position in the court, where one can look down the broad approach leading from the bay, Nature spreads before the beholder two expanses of color, the deep blue of salt water sparkling in the sun, and the not less deep, but more ethereal, blue of the California sky. With this are the browns and greens of the hills beyond the bay, and, nearer at hand, the vivid verdure of lawns and trees and shrubs. All these the designer used as though they were colors from his own ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... translucent opal tints which make of New Mexico a land of enchantment. The far hills enveloped themselves in a faint, purplish haze through which they seemed to blush unwittingly. The mesa, no longer showing itself an and waste of heat and untracked wilderness, lay soft under a thin veil of many ethereal tints. Away off to the northeast they heard the thin, vague clamor of a band of sheep and the staccato ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower

... of enchantment. Eastern Java spreads map-like beneath the overhanging precipice, the blue strait of Madoera curving between fretted peak and palm-clad isle. The velvety plum-colour of nearer ranges fades through tints of violet and mauve into the ethereal lilac of distant summits. The lowlands gleam with brimming fish-ponds and flooded sawas, as though the sea penetrated through creek and inlet to the heart of the green country, the vague glitter of this watery world investing the scene with dream-like unreality. Brown campongs cling to mountain ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... meaning a deified rainbow, which was given this group of plants by the ancients, shows a fine appreciation of their superb coloring, their ethereal texture, and the evanescent ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... hole in the wall," said the cat. "You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and round, and you ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain

... must remain in the grosser element. Well, a great thinker and poet is ever thus—floating between the universe of spirit and the universe of matter. By his mind he belongs to the region of pure mind,—the ethereal state; but the hard necessity of living keeps him down in the world of sense and grossness and struggle. On the other hand the butterfly, freely moving in a finer element, better represents the state of ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn

... fluorine, or even alcohol, or prussic acid. Pursuing the analogy we may say that right, if it is to gain a footing in the world and really prevail, must of necessity be supplemented by a small amount of arbitrary force, in order that, notwithstanding its merely ideal and therefore ethereal nature, it may be able to work and subsist in the real and material world, and not evaporate and vanish into the clouds, as it does in Hesoid. Birth-right of every description, all heritable privileges, every form of national religion, and so on, may ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... infirmities of the body is not one likely to be conducive to psychic development. For this reason alone many aspirants have been turned back from initiation. The constitution need not be robust, but it should at all events be free from disorder and pain. Some of the most ethereal and spiritual natures are found in association with a delicate organism. So long as the balance is maintained the soul is free to develop its latent powers. A certain delicacy of organization, ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... watery gleam — there where its edge Banks the dim vacancy, the topmost sails Of some tall ship, whose hull is yet unseen, Hang as if clinging to a cloud that still Comes rising with them from the void beyond, Like to a heavenly net, drawn from the deep And carried upward by ethereal hands. ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... The land of errors, and Egyptain gloom: Father of mercy, 'twas thy gracious hand Brought me in safety from those dark abodes. Students, to you 'tis giv'n to scan the heights Above, to traverse the ethereal space, And mark the systems of revolving worlds. Still more, ye sons of science ye receive The blissful news by messengers from heav'n, How Jesus' blood for your redemption flows. See him with hands out-stretcht upon the cross; Immense compassion in his ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley

... unutterable! She was crying with rage; but as that spent itself a great warm flood of genuine sorrow tided over her, floated her away: she cried as though her heart was breaking; and now she cried for pity, and at last she cried for very love. A pale ethereal Cino, finger on lip, rose before her; a halo burned about his head; he seemed a saint, he should be hers! Ugolino and Ridolfo, helpless and ashamed before her outburst, went out bickering to their sport; and Selvaggia, wild ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... woman is worth paying for. Our visitors, upon the whole, were not much to boast of; and yet, sitting in a corner and very much ashamed of myself and my absurd appearance, I have again and again tasted the finest, the rarest, and the most ethereal pleasures in a glance of an eye that I should never see again—and never wanted to. The flower of the hedgerow and the star in heaven satisfy and delight us: how much more the look of that exquisite being who was created to bear and rear, to madden ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... after); the artist, on the other hand, thought that the next letter would be v; that the soul intended to say that souls would recognize each other by the light—posv (ietu) that would issue from the ethereal body of the souls. The general, gloomily knitting his brow, gazed fixedly on the hands, and imagining that the saucer moved itself, pulled it toward the letter l. The young, anaemic artist, with his oily hair brushed ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy

... 'Hello, Ghostie.' 'Hey, Spirit, may I borrow a nip of brandy to make an ethereal ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston

... esenca. Establish fondi. Estate bieno. Esteem estimi. Estimable estiminda. Estimate (appraise) taksi. Estimate estimi. Estimate, appraisement taksado. Estimation estimado. Estrange forigi. Estuary estuario. Eternal eterna. Eternity eterneco. Ether etero. Ethereal etera. Ethical etika. Ethnography etnografio. Ethology etologio. Etiology etiologio. Etiquette etiketo. Etymology vortodeveno. Eucharist Euxkaristo. Eulogize lauxdegi. Eulogy ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... hot. Freeman had been accustomed to torrid suns in the Isthmus; but this was a sun indefinitely multiplied by reflections from the dusty surface underfoot. Nor was it the fine, ethereal fire of the Sahara: the atmosphere was dead and heavy; for the rider was already far below the level of the Pacific, whose cool blue waves rolled and rippled many leagues to the westward, as, aeons ago, they had rolled and ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne

... such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... place, he was scandalized to see the Deity represented as he is by Michael Angelo, in human form and feature. It was his opinion that thought dare not give Him shape and figure, and that hardly at the very bottom of the soul could be found an idea sufficiently intellectual, sufficiently ethereal to elevate it to the Supreme Being; as to subjects taken from the Holy Scripture, it seemed to him that the expression and the images left much to be desired. He thought, with Corinne, that religious meditation is the most intimate sentiment that man can experience; and in this ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael

... carefully in Mary's rush basket and covered it with a corner of the cloth. Had she been a 'nowadays aunt' she might have thought that Mary was not unlike a windflower herself. The girl's small white face was flushed faintly, like the ethereal white sepals; there was a delicate, fragile fragrance about her as if a breath might blow her away, yet there was an unconquerable air of determination also in her every movement and gesture. But Joan Dewsbury was not a 'nowadays ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

... strength was inadequate to life's voyage. They, having weathered many a storm, hoped to gain the peaceful harbor. But, alas! they are overcome at last, and, lamenting the day they ever set sail, they go down without hope. From the ethereal heights of inspiration I hear a chiding voice saying, "O had ye hearkened unto me, then had your peace been as a river, and your righteousness as ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr

... thing fugitive, relative, full of fine gradations: he tries to fix it in absolute formulas. The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, are [73] efforts to propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less ethereal fabric of a written book; and it is only here or there that the poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... tenderly addressing the photograph of the airy but not ethereal Dolly. The words were not for the ears of others. Even the infatuated lover would have despised the strain of softness in his tones had he known ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon

... Alice? I remember her; a willowy, shadowy creature, with a sort of ethereal loveliness which appealed very strongly to my imagination when I ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... account of Ophelia, a shrewd New-England cousin, who managed the household affairs, must be considered the best, or at least the most amusing portion of the work. The authoress also dwells with fondness on the character of the gentle Eva, a child of uncommon talents, but so delicate in health, so ethereal, that while still on earth, she seems already an angel of paradise leading and beckoning to Heaven. Eva was kind to everybody—kind even to Topsy, a negro girl whom St Clare had one day bought out of mere charity, on seeing her cruelly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various

... world of sense Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere Wafts through these earthly mists and vapors dense A vital breath of more ethereal air. ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various

... Will dare displace them. Cup-bearer, attend! Serve all with wine, that, first, libation made, We may religiously lay down the bow. Command ye too Melanthius, that he drive Hither the fairest goats of all his flocks At dawn of day, that burning first, the thighs To the ethereal archer, we may make New trial, and decide, at length, the strife. So spake Antinoues, and his counsel pleased. The heralds, then, pour'd water on their hands, 320 While youths crown'd high the goblets which they bore From right to left, distributing to all. When each had made libation, and ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... the 'Hamlet,' or the 'De Rerum Natura,' and superior to any of the three in artistic finish and metaphysical truth and religious feeling—a work ranking immediately beside the 'Paradise Lost;' but he has, instead, shed on us a shower of plumes, as from the wing of a fallen angel—beautiful, ethereal, scattered, and tantalizing. Southey's poems are large without being great—massive, without being majestic—they have rather the bulk of an unformed chaos than the order and beauty of a finished creation. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... nor of his train am I. Three brothers, deities, from Saturn came, And ancient Rhea, earth's immortal dame; Assigned by lot our triple rule we know; Infernal Pluto sways the shades below: O'er the wide clouds, and o'er the starry plain Ethereal Jove extends his high domain; My court beneath the hoary waves I keep, And hush the roaring of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... very sound of his voice that he did not—could not—love Gertrude. Only a poet could do that. Trefusis was no poet, but a sordid brute unlikely to inspire interest in anything more human than a public meeting, much less in a woman, much less again in a woman so ethereal as Gertrude. She was proud too, yet she had allowed the fellow to insult her—had forgiven him for the sake of a few broad compliments. Erskine grew angry and cynical. The situation did not suit his poetry. Instead of being ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... The ethereal beauty of the asters in the moonlight, the glimmer of the little spring, the soft croon of the brook, the wavering grace of the brackens all wove a white magic round John Meredith. He forgot congregational worries ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... colouring and atmosphere. The sky effects were radiant enough to set the soul of an artist singing, because of the opal lights, the violet banks of cloud with ragged, crystal fringes of rain, the diamond gleams struck out from snow peaks; and yet, despite this ethereal radiance, there was a strange solemnity about the wide reaches of Spanish country, a rich gloom that brooded over the landscape with its thoughtful colouring, never for a ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... beauty of that moonlight midnight seemed supernal. Becalmed, the island lay steeped in floods of ethereal silver, its sky an iridescent dome, its sea a shimmering shield of opalescence, its lawns and terraces argentine shadowed with deepest violet. There was never a definite sound, only the sibilance of a stillness made of many interwoven ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... grain, that gladdens the eye as far as it can pierce through the soft, rich atmosphere of Egypt; I shall not speak of the vision of the Pyramids seen at a distance of five and twenty miles, for the picture is too ethereal to be limned by an uninspired pen; I shall not tell of the crowds of dusky women who flocked to the cars when they stopped a moment at a station, to sell us a drink of water or a ruddy, juicy pomegranate; I shall not tell of the motley multitudes and wild costumes that graced a fair we ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... thrived. Perhaps the invigorating climate of the mountain camp was compensation for material deficiencies. Nature took the foundling to her broader breast. In that rare atmosphere of the Sierra foot-hills,—that air pungent with balsamic odor, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating—he may have found food and nourishment, or a subtle chemistry that transmuted ass's milk to lime and phosphorus. Stumpy inclined to the belief that it was the latter and good nursing. ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... sun rose white and hot in a blue and cloudless sky. And then soon the horizon line showed creamy clouds that rose and spread and darkened. Every afternoon storms hung along the ramparts and rainbows curved down beautiful and ethereal. The dim blackness of the storm-clouds was split to the blinding zigzag of lightning, and the thunder rolled and boomed, like ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... meet her and welcomed her with a smile that coming upon this feeling set Fleda's heart a quivering. Hugh's smile was always one of very great sweetness, though never unshadowed; there was often something ethereal in its pure gentleness. This time it seemed even sweeter than usual, but though not sadder, perhaps less sad, Fleda could hardly command herself to reply to it. She could not at the moment speak; her eye glanced at ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... Cynthia late Rises in her silver state, Through her brother's roseate light, Blushing on the brows of night; Then the pure ethereal air Breathes with zephyr blowing fair; Clouds and vapours disappear. As with chords of lute or lyre, Soothed the spirits now respire, And the heart revives again Which once more for love is fain. But the orient evening star Sheds with influence kindlier far Dews ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various

... "Ahem, as it were. As I was saying, my dear madam, these angelic angels of our homes are too ethereal, too dainty to mingle with rude crowds. We political men would fain keep them as they are now; we are willing to stand the rude buffetin' of—of—voting, in order to guard these sweet delicate creatures from any hardships. Sweet tender beings, we would ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley

... covers the whole range, and one would suppose that the glory of the sunset was past. In about a quarter of an hour, however, commences the most beautiful transformation of all, and one which I think is peculiar to the Nile Valley, for a second glow, more beautiful and more ethereal than the first, overspreads the hills, which shine like things translucent against the purple earth-shadow which slowly mounts in the eastern sky. The sails of the boats on the river meanwhile have taken on a tint like old ivory, while perhaps a full moon appears above the hill-tops, and in ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly

... with inexpressible disgust. "Can you find no better use for this ethereal fire than to cherish a loathsome reptile in it? Yet there are men who abuse the sacred fire of their own souls to as foul and ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... gifted beings have rarely appeared on this earth. Their relations of spirit were sensitive and organic, far beneath the reach of intellectual consciousness. They seemed able to communicate tidings through the ethereal medium by some subtile telegraphy of feeling, which transcends understanding, and belongs to a miraculous region of life. For, when Fanny died in her German home, Felix, amidst a happy company in England, suddenly aware of some terrible calamity, from the disturbance of equilibrium and dread sinking ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... parade of tall, deep bosomed, gleaming women, one caught the type and longed, sometimes for the sight of a more ethereal beauty—for the suggestion of soul within which belongs to a New England woman on whom a hard soil has bestowed a grudged beauty—for the mobility, the fire, which belongs to the Frenchwoman. The second generation of France was in this crowd, it is true; but ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin

... silence!"—nothing more. I felt strongly tempted to start on a flight through the air towards the city, and why I did not launch forth on the impulse I know not. My blood rushed through my veins with maddest energy, and my brain seemed to have been replaced by some ethereal substance, and to be capable of floating me off as if it were a balloon. Yet I clung and looked, my whole soul in my eyes, and had no thought of losing the spectacle for an instant, even were it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... course, But quailed before the unbending threat of Zeus, Of whom are all things, even all comprised Within the encircling sweep of Ocean's stream, Earth and the palace-dome of burning stars. Before her went her Pleiad-harbingers, Then she herself flung wide the ethereal gates, And, scattering spray of ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... with her praise, called his characters by their christian names as though they were old friends, suggested other moves across the chessboard of his plot, until he felt that he and she, and those dear puppets of his own creations, were denizens together of some fairy and ethereal world, wandering through the fascinating maze of imaginative life. It was almost an intoxication, this wonderfully stimulating contact with a mind so receptive, so brilliant, so sympathetic. He forgot his garret, Cicely, the drear past, the passionate warnings of Drexley and Rice. As ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim

... and blue, and her soft brown hair seemed to be almost a burden to her from its great quantity. She was dressed entirely in black, and being rather tall and very slight of figure, the dress somewhat exaggerated the ethereal look that was natural to her. She seemed cold, and spread out her delicate hands to the bright flame of the blazing wood-fire. Mrs. Wyndham and Pocock Vancouver looked at her in silence for a moment. Then Mrs. ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... emotional state, yearned and prayed over her alternately. Betty, avid of excitement, spent her days in the pleasurable anticipation of a dramatic bankruptcy. It was on Dick, however, that the actual strain came. He saw Nancy growing paler and more ethereal each day, on her feet from morning till night manipulating the affairs of an enterprise that seemed to be assuming more preposterous proportions every hour of its existence. He made surreptitious estimates of expenditures and suffered accordingly, approximating ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... eye ever sees it. The crystal found deep in the earth is constructed with the same fidelity as that formed above ground. Even the tiny snowflake whose destiny is to become an apparently insignificant and a wholly unnoticed part of an enormous bank, assumes its shape of ethereal beauty as faithfully as though preparing for some grand exhibition. Planets rush with dizzy sweep through almost limitless courses, yet return to equinox or solstice at the appointed second, their ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... "never appears but as a prognostic of afterclaps," and again, as "dreadful to be seen, with bloudie haires, and all over rough and shagged at the top." Another author complacently explains that comets "were made to the end that the ethereal regions might not be more void of monsters than the ocean is of whales and other great thieving fish!" A very literal interpretation of this "hairy star" has been here embroidered, carefully fitted out with cog-wheels and all the paraphernalia of ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... long flesh fight and filled with a sluggish languor by those wearisome disappointments which arise from the constant contemplation of men's weaknesses, and from the constant back-thrusting of one's consciousness of impotence to strengthen them — thou, with thy nimble fancy, canst imagine what ethereal and yet indestructible essences of new dignity, of new strength, of new patience, of new serenity, of new hope, new faith, and new love, do continually flash out of the gorges, the mountains, and the streams, into the heart, and charge it, as the lightnings ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... illustrate in pompous and pagan symbolism the chief events in her career: all the principal figures are due to Reubens' own hand. Reynolds was wont to say of Reubens' colouring that his figures looked as if they fed on roses: these, however, would seem to have fed upon less ethereal diet. L. of entrance, 2085, The Three Fates spinning Marie's destiny; L. wall, 2088, Reception of her Portrait; R. wall, 2089, Her Marriage by Procuration to Henry—the Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany, her uncle, places the ring on her finger; L., 2090, Disembarkation at Marseilles; ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... little dark patches against the neutral-tinted sky, but when they passed the line of vision, each soft lump of crystals gleamed purest white as it joined the ever-deepening mass below. Every gate and stump and rubbish heap was a thing of beauty, glorified by the ethereal covering of the snow; the dead clumps of ragwort by the road side, the withered branches of oak, the shrivelled trails of bramble all seemed transformed by the feathery particles into ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil

... And wantons with the wind in rapid whirls, The gurgling rivulet to the vallies hies, Whilst on its bank the spangled serpent curls. * * * * * Pale rugged Winter bending o'er his tread; His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew; His eyes a dusky light congeal'd and dead, His robe a tinge of bright ethereal blue. ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... Schubert at his best and strongest. When he depicts the workings of nature—the wind roaring through the woods, the storm above the convent roof, the flash of the lightning, the thunderbolt—he does not accomplish it with the wonderful point and accuracy of Weber, nor with the ethereal delicacy of Purcell, but with a breadth, a sympathy with the passion of nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever attained to. He views natural phenomena through a human temperament, and so infuses human emotion into natural phenomena, as Wagner does ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... defunct favourites. Talking about lap-dogs, one of the best stories relative to these creatures is to be found in Madame de Crequey's Memoirs. A Madame de Blot, a French dandysette, if the term may be used, who considered her own sex as bound to be ethereal, and would pretend that the wing of a lark was more than sufficient for her sustenance during the twenty-four hours, had one of the smallest female spaniels that was ever known. She treated her like a human being, and when she ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... How liquid clear The molten gold of that ethereal tone, Floating and falling through the wood alone, A hermit-hymn poured out for God to hear! O holy, holy, holy! Hyaline, Long light, low light, glory of eventide! Love far away, far up,—up,—love divine! Little love, too, for ever, ever near, Warm love, earth love, tender love ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke

... have provided a certain immunity from the necessity of active exercise for the rounding and completion of their bodies. The lack of fresh air, however, soon tells with them a fatal story of fading complexions and departing bloom. That ethereal beauty which peculiarly marks the American woman is also the earliest to decay. As they are the prettiest, so are they the soonest passees of any Northern nation. Could they but realize that exercise in the open air is Nature's great and only cosmetic, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... so still with its oily eddies and delicate wreaths of foam, just below the Falls they have in late years woven a web of wire high in air, and hung a bridge from precipice to precipice. Of all the bridges made with hands it seems the lightest, most ethereal; it is ideally graceful, and droops from its slight towers like a garland. It is worthy to command, as it does, the whole grandeur of Niagara, and to show the traveller the vast spectacle, from the beginning of the American Fall to the farthest ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... will bother, at the sight of the most beautiful statue of an angel, concerning the construction of the limbs, the wings, and their relation to the skeleton. In certain directions, therefore, the imagination is too weak to conceive an ethereal being in human form floating in the air. Further, one authority points out that we think more frequently of centaurs than of human beings with serpentine bodies, not because centaurs are more sthetic but because horses ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... chained to the earth, creatures of clay as frail as the foliage of the woods, you unfortunate race, whose life is but darkness, as unreal as a shadow, the illusion of a dream, hearken to us, who are immortal beings, ethereal, ever young and occupied with eternal thoughts, for we shall teach you about all celestial matters; you shall know thoroughly what is the nature of the birds, what the origin of the gods, of the rivers, of Erebus, and Chaos; ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... unbiased evaluation of a report, out he went. Conversely anyone who became a believer was through. We were too busy during the initial phases of the project to speculate as to whether the unknowns were spaceships, space monsters, Soviet weapons, or ethereal visions. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... his host; with clamor loud They follow'd him, and all the distant rear Came shouting on. On the other side the Greeks Re-echoed shout for shout, all undismay'd, And waiting firm the bravest of their foes. 1015 Upwent the double roar into the heights Ethereal, and among the beams ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer



Words linked to "Ethereal" :   unsubstantial, delicate, insubstantial, chemistry, heavenly, ether, chemical science, aery, supernal, unreal



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