Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Elysium   Listen
noun
Elysium  n.  (pl. E. elysiums, L. elysia)  (Anc. Myth.)
1.
A dwelling place assigned to happy souls after death; the seat of future happiness; Paradise.
2.
Hence, any delightful place. "An Elysium more pure and bright than that of the Greeks."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Elysium" Quotes from Famous Books



... into evidence of a soul dismissed facts of color, contour, and line as matters of no importance. If there was wickedness in his glance, there were also awe and wonder. He had a tortured look, the look of a man who has fallen from unknowable heights—from an Elysium which he regrets and desires with all a strong man's strength, but to which the way back is irrevocably barred by the degradation and the sin of the descent—and who, all but overwhelmed by the knowledge that he can never return whence he came, yet bears his eternal loss with an iron courage ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... delighted with the climate and the country, takes note of the deficiencies or peculiarities of Anglo-Indians, and has a very short memory for their hospitality. The narrative carries us, as a matter of course, to a Himalayan Elysium, with its balls, picnics, and its flirtations, among which the leading lady of the piece is drawn to the brink of indiscretion, but steps happily back again into the secure haven of domestic felicity. A good deal of excellent light comedy and sparkling ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... at your delicate bosom, let death Come to me Where night has made a warm Elysium, Lulled by a soft, ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells

... you will not find a more striking example of sublime isolation. Those penguins had been living in a penguin's paradise. The sea-leopard seals harmed them not, and until the arrival of the irrepressible British explorer the spell of that antarctic elysium ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... "What do the British want in this country? Is it the intention of the Government to do away with capital punishment and send all felons here? I am not surprised the camel has the hump. I would develop one here myself. What an accursed country!" Yes, it is not an elysium; and when one allows the dirt, heat, and discomfort to wither all power of endurance, the Soudan becomes a horror and anathema, particularly in the summer time. Now, the camel is to me the personification ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... clouded eyes Speak thee a martyr to love's cruelties, Whither away? Amor. What pitying voice I hear, Calls back my flying steps? Cord. Pr'ythee, draw near. Amor. I shall but say, kind swain, what doth become Of a lost heart, ere to Elysium It wounded walks? Cord. First, it does freely flye Into the pleasures of a lover's eye; But, once condemn'd to scorn, it fetter'd lies, An ever-bowing slave to tyrannies. Amor. I pity its sad fate, since its offence Was but for love. Can tears recall it thence? Cord. ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace

... it is only preparatory to the end. "Conviction astonishes and torments—destiny prescribes and falsifies— attraction drives us away—humiliation supports our energies. Thus do we recede into the present, and shudder at the Elysium of posterity." ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... With the scenery, indeed, they were enraptured. "We found," says Madame Sand in her little volume, Un Hiver a Majorque, published the following year, "a green Switzerland under a Calabrian sky, with all the solemnity and stillness of the East." But though a painter's Elysium, Majorca was wanting in the commonest comforts of civilized life. Inns were non-existent, foreigners viewed and treated with suspicion. The party thought themselves fortunate in securing a villa some miles from Palma, furnished, though scantily. "The country, nature, trees, sky, sea, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... Waddledot three times, but I yielded at last; take courage from that, and 24, Pleasant Terrace, may shortly become that Elysium—a woman's home," whispered Mrs. W., as she rolled gracefully to a card-table; and accidentally, of course, cut the ace of spades, which she exhibited to Collumpsion with a very mysterious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various

... see her were worth all the honor and glory that he had ever aspired to in his wildest dreams; and that to be near her always and to feel that he were much—nay, everything—to her, as before God he felt that at that moment she was to him, would make his life one long Elysium, and to death would add ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... people, while there is a circle of county people as patients. There are hundreds of such practices in England, where a doctor, although scarcely known outside his own district, is in a position which Harley Street, with all its turmoil of fashionable fads and fancies, envies as the elysium of what life should be. The village doctor of Little Perkington may be an ignorant old buffer; but his life, with its three days' hunting a week, its constant invitations to shoot over the best preserves, and its free fishing whenever in the humour, ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux

... little more idea or interest than if they were the characters of an unknown tongue, till the eye closes on vacancy, and the book drops from the feeble hand! I would rather be a wood-cutter, or the meanest hind, that all day 'sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and at night sleeps in Elysium,' than wear out my life so, 'twixt dreaming and awake.' The learned author differs from the learned student in this, that the one transcribes what the other reads. The learned are mere literary drudges. If you set ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... I offered to get his friend admittance in an instant; the offer was delightedly accepted, and I soon procured a small piece of pencilled paper from Lady—, which effectually silenced the Charon, and opened the Stygian via to the Elysium beyond. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Then follows another chapter from Book xix., which contains the history of Anna Boleyn, and the whole breaks off abruptly. Its best portion is undoubtedly the first ten chapters, which relate the writer's progress to Elysium, and afford opportunity for many strokes of satire. Such are the whimsical terror of the spiritual traveller in the stagecoach, who hears suddenly that his neighbour has died of smallpox, a disease he had been dreading all his life; and the punishment of Lord Scrape, the miser, who is doomed ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... corroborated history on many points, and backed up the gossipy Vasari in a valuable way. It is very doubtful whether either of these gentlemen had ever the felicity of reading the other's book, unless there be books in Elysium—as Charles Lamb thought there were—but sure it is that they render sidelights on the times that are much to our profit. Vasari and Cellini had been close friends in youth, working and studying together. Vasari was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... the latter, and below, between it and the Annandale race-course, is a fine glen, where the visitor in April from the dry and dusty plains can gather yellow primroses (Primula floribunda) from the dripping rocks. The beautiful Elysium Hill is on a small spur running northwards from the main ridge. Simla is 58 miles by cart road from Kalka, at the foot of the hills, and somewhat further by the narrow ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... family dinners now being drawn to a close, of the good wishes uttered, and the presents made, quite valueless in themselves, yet felt to be invaluable from the feelings from which they spring; of the little children, by sweetmeats lapped in Elysium; and of the pantomime, pleasantest Christmas sight of all, with the pit a sea of grinning delight, the boxes a tier of beaming juvenility, the galleries, piled up to the far-receding roof, a mass of ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various

... down on the place which she had occupied. She had looked at me for one moment when she kissed my hand. I forgot Ambrose and his confession; I forgot the coming trial; I forgot my professional duties and my English friends. There I sat, in a fool's elysium of my own making, with absolutely nothing in my mind but the picture of Naomi's face at the moment when she had ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins

... off his forensic knowledge. He gave a near guess at the names of the four counsel whose heads were visible, merely from the different shades and shapes of their wigs. Then he particularised the inferior angels of that busy Elysium. ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... which my young friend revels in his first sunny dream of bliss. Your royal highness must confess that this is cruel work; but I am ready to undertake it, and place myself, like the angel with the flaming sword, before the door, ready to slay any serpent who dares undertake to enter this elysium." ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach

... day, sooner or later, every man meets his fate, and when he does meet that one of all others, his whole life changes. The past, with all those whom he has met and fancied before, is as nothing to him now, and his dreams are only of the future and that elysium where he is to wander hand in hand ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey

... with good cigars. There was a black one of the Valle Nacional in his mouth, and also in his mouth there was a wisp of straw. The steel-blue smoke floated out lazily, which his steel-blue eyes regarded with appreciation. It was an Elysium of indolence. The cigar, the not having to kill anybody for a few minutes, and a place to lean against, these were content. Troubadour phrases droned soothingly in his brain. Of course he had to apostrophize ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... existence was of short duration. Rumors of war reached us in our western elysium, and I turned my face homeward, as did many another son of Virginia. My brother was sensible enough to remain behind on the new farm; but with nothing to restrain me I soon found myself in St. Louis. There ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams

... religion harmonizes and directs the social relations of life, viz., a faith in a future state, and in the providence of superior powers, who, surveying as judges the affairs of earth, punish the wicked and reward the good [41]. It has been plausibly conjectured that the fables of Elysium, the slow Cocytus, and the gloomy Hades, were either invented or allegorized from the names of Egyptian places. Diodorus assures us that by the vast catacombs of Egypt, the dismal mansions of the dead— were the temple and stream, both called Cocytus, the foul canal of Acheron, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Garie's letter, Mrs. Ellis and Caddy had been busily engaged in putting the house in a state of preparation for their reception. Caddy, whilst superintending its decoration, felt herself in Elysium. For the first time in her life she had the supreme satisfaction of having two unfortunate house-cleaners entirely at her disposal; consequently, she drove them about and worried them to an extent unparalleled in any ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... my melancholy, occasioned by the excess of my transports, I had composed for the last parts of Eloisa several letters, wherein evident marks of the rapture in which I wrote them are found. Amongst others I may quote those from the Elysium, and the excursion upon the lake, which, if my memory does not deceive me, are at the end of the fourth part. Whoever, in reading these letters, does not feel his heart soften and melt into the tenderness by which ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... of the press. Here the iron entered into my soul; for be it known, I loved Bohemia! This roving commission, these vagabond habits, this life in the open air among the armies, the white tents, the cannon, and the drums, they were my elysium, my heart! But to be driven away, as one who had broken his trust, forfeited favor and confidence, and that too on the eve of grand events, was something that would ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... conducted only as far as the Tiber. In a short time they were returned to the possessor, and the greatest part of them, except a few jewels, still remain in the old location. Winckelmann might have witnessed the first sad fate of this Elysium of art and its extraordinary return; but happily for him, death spared him this earthly suffering for which the joy of the restoration would ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... And yet I am as much a piece of property of that woman whom I hate, as this chair or casket. I have a right to no hope, no ambition, no desire, no reward. I can only aspire to live without brutal treatment. That would be a sort of Elysium. If I was brave enough, I would kill myself, and go to sleep and forget it all. But I am weak and cowardly, and ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... here he was—who upon woman's breast, Even from a child, felt like a child; howe'er The man in all the rest might be confest, To him it was Elysium to be there; And he could even withstand that awkward test Which Rousseau points out to the dubious fair, 'Observe your lover when he leaves your arms;' But Juan never left them, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... tore our dresses to pieces, and our hats got pulled off in a tree and some of our hair with them; but at last we reached the spring. It was such a scene as one might have dreamed of in some forest in a fabulous Elysium. It was a large, deep basin of pure white sand, covered with clear water, and seven powerful springs, each about a foot high, rose from it; and trees had fallen over it, and were covered with bright green moss, and others bent over it ready to fall; and above them ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... visions—then oblivion, which did not pass away until the morning sun was shining. But with the new day came a new access of pain and gloom, and the aid of the magic little instrument was invoked once more. Again within a few moments the potent drug produced a tranquil elysium and a transformed world of grand possibilities. With a vigor which seemed boundless, and hopes which repeated disappointments could not dampen, he continued his quest for employment until in the declining day his spirits and energy ebbed as strangely as they had risen in the ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... East gives warning, 'Tis the wished-for nuptial morning. Sweetest truant from Elysium, Golden morning of the May! All the guests are in their places— Lilies with pale, high-bred faces— Hawthorns in white wedding favours, Scented with celestial savours— Daisies, like sweet country maidens, Wear white scolloped ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy

... people think attentively they naturally rest their bodies in some easy attitude, that more animal power may be employed on the thinking faculty. In this group of figures there is great art shewn in giving an idea of a descending plain, viz. from earth to Elysium, and yet all the figures are in reality on an horizontal one. This wonderful deception is produced first by the descending step of the manes or ghost; secondly, by the arm of the sitting figure of immortal life being raised up to receive him as he descends; and lastly, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... call me an enthusiast: you will tell me that I have not well considered what I am undertaking. But I have considered, and counted the cost. I go to Liberia, not as an Elysium of romance, but as to a field of work. I expect to work with both hands,—to work hard; to work against all sorts of difficulties and discouragements; and to work till I die. This is what I go for; and in this I am quite sure I shall ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... seem to see, Master, to companion thee; Horace and Fielding here are come To bid thee to Elysium. Last comes one all golden: Fame Calls thee, Master, by thy name, On thy brow the laurel lays, Whispers low—"In ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... the main, adopted the Socratic proposition that you and I are here. That is, we have made progress by getting away from narrow theology and recognizing humanity. We do not know anything about either Olympus or Elysium, but we ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard

... and those pursuing Claws A space is opening; see! red Scorpio's self His arms draws in, yea, and hath left thee more Than thy full meed of heaven: be what thou wilt- For neither Tartarus hopes to call thee king, Nor may so dire a lust of sovereignty E'er light upon thee, howso Greece admire Elysium's fields, and Proserpine not heed Her mother's voice entreating to return- Vouchsafe a prosperous voyage, and smile on this My bold endeavour, and pitying, even as I, These poor way-wildered swains, at once begin, ...
— The Georgics • Virgil

... and the slowly increasing power of the sun were inexpressibly consoling to me who had had so much of the cold that I do protest if Elysium were bleak, no matter how radiant, and the abode of the fiends as hot as it is pictured, I would choose to turn my back upon the angels. I cannot say, however, that the schooner was properly thawed until we ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... onward, still; he was exulting, he had conquered, he was bold and hard as ever. He got nearer, now within some dozen miles; it was an indistinct distance, but green at any rate; huzza—never mind night-fall; he cannot wait, nor rest, with this Elysium before him: so he toiled along through all the black night, and a friendly storm of rain refreshed him, as his thirsty pores drank in the cooling stream. Aha! by morning's dawn he should be standing on the edge of that green paradise, fresh as a young lion, and no thanks to any one but his ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... Elysian temple. Temple of bliss. In Greek mythology, Elysium was the abode of the blessed ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... sparkling water in days gone by. She forgot lovelorn youths, and the cayenne speeches of malicious neighbors, and all the problems of her girlish existence. In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of "faery lands forlorn," where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart's Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... was oppressive, and Alf and Ned were rolling on the grass under a tree, quite satiated for a time with two elements of a boy's elysium, fire-crackers and cherries. The family gathered in the wide hall, through the open doors of which was a slight draught of air. All had donned their coolest costumes, and their talk was quite as languid as the occasional ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... about the dwellers in Elysium. On the banks of the river Lethe—the river of forgetfulness—was a countless multitude of spirits which, he said, were yet to live in earthly bodies. They were the souls of unborn generations of men. Amongst them, he pointed out to AEneas, the spirits of many ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke

... little lump! Not very hard. I can dash it on the floor and it dissolves in dust. And yet, and yet—all Elysium, all Tartarus, are pent up for me in just this ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... here, in spite of the hatred in which it is held by the inhabitants, is the fox, which likewise finds the valley an Elysium on account of the convenient neighbourhood of the rocks pierced with multitudinous holes. Badgers and foxes, with all their vices, are preferable to the hyenas which used to infest this part of France, as is proved by the bones found in ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. "Rosy hit the fire-escape on time to a second, and we was under the wire at the Reverend's at 9.3O 1/4. She's up at the flat—she cooked eggs this mornin' in a blue kimono—Lord! how lucky ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... taste grows with the child's growth, and ere the fair girl has reached her seventeenth year, her ideal of perfect bliss is to find herself in a room with mirrors on every side. There is indeed a room in the Palace of Versailles which is the elysium of the Frenchwoman. It is a long room with looking-glasses from ceiling to floor, and the said floor is polished so that it reflects, at any rate, ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes

... the Russians should ever reach Kohistan, we will answer for their being exceedingly surprised at finding an English camp in that region for the purpose of entertaining themselves. In reality no lunatic projector, not Cleombrotus leaping into the sea for the sake of Plato's Elysium, not Erostratus committing arson at Ephesus for posthumous fame, not a sick Mr Elwes ascending the Himalaya, in order to use the rarity of the atmosphere as a ransom from the expense of cupping in Calcutta, ever conceived so awful a folly. Oh, playful Sir John ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... Newcastle, and some pique between him and Lord Bute on account of the Hampshire election. People were much diverted with the answer he is said to have made to the Duke of Newcastle when he went to demand the seal of his office. He compared his retirement to Elysium, and told the Duke he thought he might assure their common friends there, that they should not be long without the honour of his Grace's company; however, he seems to be out in his guess, for the Newcastle junta, strengthened ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.01 • Various

... by Robinson, with marks of adhesion from Brown and Jones. "Oh, if there be an Elysium on earth, it is ...
— The Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown, Jones and Robinson • Richard Doyle

... Challenges and menaces to the wide sky. With loud long laughter then a woodpecker Ridiculed the sadness of the owl's last cry. And through the valley where all the folk astir Made only plumes of pearly smoke to tower Over dark trees and white meadows happier Than was Elysium in that happy hour, A train that roared along raised after it And carried with it a motionless white bower Of purest cloud, from end to end close-knit, So fair it touched the roar with silence. Time Was powerless ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas

... fears! He stakes all who Elysium clips. What tho' the fruit be tares and tears!— Give me ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor

... of the minister, Count Hoym, whose easy disposition had, like insidious poison, utterly enervated the people. The government officers, as if persuaded of the reality of the antiquarian whim which deduced the name of Silesia from Elysium, dwelt in placid self-content, unmoved by the catastrophes of Austerlitz or Jena. No measures were, consequently, taken for the defence of the country, and a flying corps of Bavarians, Wurtembergers, and some French under Vandamme, speedily ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... who for so many years has crossed the same well-beaten path. The calm serenity of the place, the hour and the solemnity of the scene was overpowering. I dared not wait until the ethereal sweetness of the music would cease. I took one lingering gaze and murmured: This is indeed Elysium—a step nearer Heaven, and with feelings of reverential awe set forth ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... and his description of the adventures and mishaps of a pleasure party on the banks of the Dove suggest that the incorrigible bachelor was still sensitive to the allurements of life; and liable to wander over the "dead-line" of matrimonial danger. He confesses that he was all day in Elysium. "When we had descended from the last precipice," he says, "and come to where the Dove flowed musically through a verdant meadow—then —fancy me, oh, thou 'sweetest of poets,' wandering by the course of this romantic stream—a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... their engagements and oaths, they are most scrupulous. They seem to have some idea of a future life, and that on the road to their elysium they have to pass over a long tree, which requires the assistance of all those they have slain in this world. The abode of happy spirits is supposed to be on the top of Kini Balu, one of their loftiest mountains, and the portals are guarded by a fiery serpent, who does not suffer any ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... as Dido; and Turnus as the popular Antony. The love and death of Dido, the passionate victim of an unrequited love, give occasion to the poet to sing the victories of his countrymen over their Carthaginian rivals; the Pythagorean metempsychosis, which he adopts in the description of Elysium, affords an opportunity to exalt the heroes of Rome; and the wars of Aeneas allow him to describe the localities and the manners of ancient Latium with such truthfulness as to give to his verses the authority of historical quotations. In style, the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... her female servants. And perhaps the other and nobler Charlotte of the Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) would not have detained us so long with her moss hut, her terrace, her park prospect, if Julie had not had her elysium, where the sweet freshness of the air, the cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance and colour, water running with soft whisper, and the song of a thousand birds, reminded the returned traveller ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... position and their form, rarely extending over a very wide area. They frequent by preference a few regions, such as the islands of the Mare Australe, and on the continents the regions designated on the map with the names of Elysium and Tempe. Their brilliancy generally diminishes and disappears at the meridian hour of the place, and is re-enforced in the morning and evening with very marked variations. It is possible that they may be layers of ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... and Cenis, and the Phoenician Dido. Then I went through the dusty plains reserved for famous warriors. Beyond them open two ways. That to the left leads to Tartarus, the abode of the wicked. I took that to the right, which leads to Elysium and to the dwellings of Dis. Having hung the sacred branch at the goddess's door, I reached pleasant fields flooded with purple light. The shades of philosophers and poets hold grave converse there. The Graces and the Muses formed sprightly choirs upon ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... her father had left her, but there was in her song, as there had been in her laughter, a little tremble of unrest. The garden was a delicious place, whose fragrance beat up in waves of sweetness at every turn. All the flowers were in their luxuriant last bloom. There were great roses and sweet elysium, mignonette, peppermint pinks, crepe myrtle, riotous vines and creepers. Long ago she had taken everything out of the garden that was not sweet. She had a fancy that fragrance was one of the spirit's tremulous paths into heaven, and out in the ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... the abnormal has imparted to the modern sublime a something purer, grander, more sublime, in short, than the beautiful of the ancients; and that is as it should be. When art is consistent with itself, it guides everything more surely to its goal. If the Homeric Elysium is a long, long way from the ethereal charm, the angelic pleasureableness of Milton's Paradise, it is because under Eden there is a hell far more terrible than the heathen Tartarus. Do you think that Francesca da Rimini and Beatrice would be so enchanting in a poet who should not confine us in the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... soothed and steeped in Elysium during this rapid transit. The eye lazily runs over the squat-looking red houses with flat roofs which line the shore, to rest on the dark cypress trees which fill the intervening spaces, with the gilded balconies of some pleasure-palace of sultan or high Turk ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... suffocation and death. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or on earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape? The white-robed harp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table elysium represented in Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, as the final consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this respect,—lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all.[7] We look upon them from this delicious mess ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... sluggish air. It was a season of general repose, just such a day, I think, as a saint would choose to assist his fancy in describing the sunny regions whither his thoughts delight to wander, or a poet would select to refine his ideas of the climate of Elysium. At length I arrived at the old meeting-house where I had often gone, when a lad ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight

... thinking the barely believable fact that this little miracle of beauty—this pocket-Venus, as he was wont to call her—actually belonged to him remained one of the insoluble mysteries of life. He could not, in the thraldom of his present Elysium, be expected to remember, even if he had ever fully realized, that he himself was tall, broad-shouldered, clean-cut, and clean-lived, with the unmistakable stamp of the American gentleman on his linen and his simple, well-fitting ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... must look forward to a worse fate after death. There is a special god, named Nangganangga—"the bitter hater of bachelors"—who watches for their souls, and so untiring is his watch, as Williams was informed (206), that no unwedded spirit has ever reached the Elysium of Fiji. Sly bachelors sometimes try to dodge him by stealing around the edge of a certain reef at low tide; but he is up to their tricks, seizes them and dashes them to pieces on the large black stone, just as ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... banter, valiant though with a hint of disillusion as to their common type. "I tell you, Speed, our forebodings (for which you and I are peculiar) are all the worst sort of nonsense. . You say you much fear that that elysium of which you have dreamed so much is never to be realized. Well, if it shall not, I dare swear it will not be the fault of her who is now your wife. I have no doubt that it is the peculiar misfortune of both ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... Contrive to bribe the judge's vote; To Cerberus they give a sop, His triple barking mouth to stop; Or, in the ivory gate of dreams,[8] Project excise and South-Sea[9] schemes; Or hire their party pamphleteers To set Elysium by the ears. Then, poet, if you mean to thrive, Employ your muse on kings alive; With prudence gathering up a cluster Of all the virtues you can muster, Which, form'd into a garland sweet, Lay humbly at your monarch's ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... mummies be in all their parts true representations of the human form, may we not refer them to the future rather than the past? May we not be looking into the womb of Nature, and not her grave? May not these images be like the shades of the unborn in Virgil's Elysium—the archetypes of men not ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... his chin thoroughly kept off the crisp coolness of the air on the high plateau of a country where the sun was broiling by day. Youth, health, exercise and an open-air life did the rest to make that sleeping place a perfect Elysium. ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn

... easy," but of "right versus wrong". Moreover, as we are finding out, that which seems easiest at the moment, often turns out hardest in the long run. It is no longer contended that re-marriage after a State-divorce is that universal Elysium which it has always been confidently ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes

... natures I know in them) are always lurking to avenge themselves on the new by tempting us to a little retrograde infidelity. A schoolgirl in Fallow field, the tailor's daughter, had sighed for the bliss of Beckley Court. Beckley Court was her Elysium ere the ardent feminine brain conceived a loftier summit. Fallen from that attained eminence, she sighed anew for Beckley Court. Nor was this mere spiritual longing; it had its material side. At Beckley Court she could feel her foreign ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... aye, and miracle, too! You know him, Governor—a man whose nerves Are gossamers, too fine to sift the music Of the blasts that blow about our burly world, And only fit for harps whereon Zephyrus In Elysium might breathe.—And yet this man— Oh! you'd not believe ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith

... a dream, this grand old Stadthaus, this old-world quiet, this quaint life; but when it fades I think I shall have a memory of having been "once in Elysium." Still, Elysium should have no mosquitoes, and they are nearly insupportable here; big spotted fellows, with a greed for blood, and a specially poisonous bite, taking the place at daylight of the retiring nocturnal host. The ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... example of this kinship with ancient and well-known legends. Kunigseq comes to the land of shades, and meets there his mother, who is dead. But she must not kiss him, for "he is only here on a visit." Or again: "If you eat of those berries, you will never return." The under-world is partly an Elysium of existence without cares; partly Dantesque: "Bring ice when you come again, for we thirst for cold water down here." And the traveller who has been away from earth for what seems an hour, finds that years of earthly time ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown

... shun the first and last extreme. Ordaining that thy small stock find no breach, Or to exceed thy tether's reach: But to live round, and close, and wisely true To thine own self, and known to few. Thus let thy rural sanctuary be Elysium to thy wife and thee; There to disport yourselves with golden measure: For seldom use commends the pleasure. Live, and live blest, thrice happy pair; let breath, But lost to one, be the other's death. And as there is one love, one faith, one troth, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... may control the heart by this process!) Thomas crossed the corridor and entered the other room; entered prepared for any emergency. If Jameson awoke, so much the worse for him. The gods owe it to the mortals they keep in bondage to bestow a grain of luck here and there along the way to Elysium or Hades. His cabin-mate's stentorian breathing convinced the trespasser that it was the stupidest, ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath

... Happiness, an honest breast. But most we mark the wonders of her reign, When Sleep has lock'd the senses in her chain. When sober Judgment has his throne resign'd, She smiles away the chaos of the mind; And, as warm Fancy's bright Elysium glows, From Her each image springs, each colour flows. She is the sacred guest! the immortal friend! Oft seen o'er sleeping Innocence to bend, In that dead hour of night to Silence giv'n, Whispering seraphic visions of her heav'n. ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers

... publication, whence our late biographers have drawn their notices; a juvenile production, which happened to excite the attention of the late BARRY, then not personally known to me; and he gave all the immortality his poetical pencil could bestow on this man of genius, by immediately placing in his Elysium of Genius MENDELSSOHN shaking hands with ADDISON, who wrote on the truth of the Christian religion, and near LOCKE, the English master ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... cherub, but of earth; Fit play-fellow for fays, by moonlight pale, In harmless sport and mirth, (That dog will bite him if he pulls his tail!) Thou human humming-bee, extracting honey From every blossom in the world that blows, Singing in youth's Elysium ever sunny, (Another tumble!—that's his precious nose!) Thy father's pride and hope! (He'll break the mirror with that skipping rope!) With pure heart, newly stampt from nature's mint, (Where did he learn that squint?) Thou young domestic dove! (He'll have that jug off with another ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... least deviation from the text; and if he wandered for a moment, which might also be detected by the eye as well as the ear, in some strange contortion of visage, and some ominous flourish of his bow, a gentle and admonitory murmur recalled the musician from his Elysium or his Tartarus to the sober regions of his desk. Then he would start as if from a dream, cast a hurried, frightened, apologetic glance around, and, with a crestfallen, humbled air, draw his rebellious instrument back to the beaten track of the glib monotony. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... at the same time with the artlessness and simplicity of diction of a child. When speaking of some lovely scene among the groves, or along the flowery shores of these favored islands, he says, "One could live there forever." Cuba broke upon him like an elysium. "It is the most beautiful island," he says, "that ever eyes beheld, full of excellent ports and profound rivers." A little discount must be made on such a statement. Granting all that is to be said of Cuba's scenic charms, ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson

... cases in a legitimate way, as an anaesthetic, the surprisingly pleasant effect is sought for again by the one who has had a glimpse at the portals of the elysium. This is the beginning of the terrible habit. The effect is a sense of exhilaration followed by a quiet, dreamy state that causes the worried man to forget his troubles, and the sufferer his pain. Once this freedom from physical and mental sickness has been experienced, the cocaine ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... gardening. "In the first character," says Mr. Walpole, "he was below mediocrity; in the second, he was the restorer of the science; in the last, an original, and the inventor of an art that realizes painting and improves nature. Mahomet imagined an Elysium, but Kent created many." He frequently declared, it is said, that he caught his taste in gardening from reading the picturesque descriptions of Spencer. Mason, noticing his mediocrity as a painter, pays this fine tribute to his excellence in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various

... history of English Puritanism, the last of all our heroisms. At bottom, perhaps, no nobler heroism ever transacted itself upon this earth; and it lies as good as lost to us in the elysium we English have provided for our heroes! The Rushworthian elysium. Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Puritanism is not of the nineteenth century, but of the seventeenth; it is grown ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... revolution, of pioneer State-building; and then the advent of the restless, the cranky, the invalid, the fanatic, from every other State in the Union. The first experimenters in making homes seem to have fancied that they had come to a ready-made elysium—the idle man's heaven. They seem to have brought with them little knowledge of agriculture or horticulture, were ignorant of the conditions of success in this soil and climate, and left behind the good industrial maxims of the ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... attached to that benevolent lady; and with sad looks, but respectful welcoming, they saw Mr. Constantine re-enter their humble home, and assured him of its retirement as long as he might wish to abide in the neighborhood of the Abbey. Any prospect of repose promised elysium to him; and with harassed and torn nerves he took possession of his apartment, which looked down the road that led from the old monastic structure to the town of Grantham. The rapidity of the recent events bewildered his senses, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... not palpable to sense, to recognize no favors that are not of marketable value, to acknowledge no wealth unless it can be counted with the five fingers? If we admit the mind to be the sole depositary of genuine joy, where is the bosom that has not been elevated into a temporary Elysium by the magic of the Lottery? Which of us has not converted his ticket, or even his sixteenth share of one, into a nest-egg of Hope, upon which he has sat brooding in the secret roosting-places of his heart, and hatched it into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... wait for the English translation of Mallet's book. In a letter to Mason, dated in 1758, and inclosing some criticisims on the latter's "Caractacus" (then in MS.), he wrote, "I am pleased with the Gothic Elysium. Do you think I am ignorant about either that, or the hell before, or the twilight.[3] I have been there and have seen it all in Mallet's 'Introduction to the History of Denmark' (it is in French), and many other places." It is a far cry ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... is vanished to Whither the swans and turtles go; In fair Elysium to endure With milk-white lambs and ermines pure. O, do not run too fast, for I Will but bespeak ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered—the poor people liked it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work. 'Oho!' said the board, looking very knowing, 'we are the fellows to set this to rights; we'll stop it all, in no time.' So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne

... growls of these grumblers and carpers and snarlers did not count in the general and genial applause that our youth gave to mellifluous numbers and lovely love, and the thousand beautiful things and thoughts that make this poor life of ours seem for a season Elysium. So they feasted and prattled, and I ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... go to the front. A year later, when the soldiers of the Nineteenth were staggering along the Pamunkey, with heavy loads and blistered feet, or throwing up breastworks with their coffee-pots all night under fire in front of Petersburg, they looked back to the Defences of Washington as to a lost Elysium." ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill

... a half-mile, no farther. As I went on, the misty horizon receded. The valley was larger than I had imagined. It was like Elysium, where the shades of dead men stroll in the Garden of Proserpine. Streamlets ran through the blue moss at intervals, chill as death from the snowy plains hidden in the fog. "A sleepy ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner

... and they were full of plans for their future. No attempt had been made to repair the damage done by the fire. It was settled—so far as anything was settled—that they were to let the flat, let Thorneytoft too, and go away from London, from England perhaps, to some Elysium to be agreed on by them both. It was to be a second honeymoon—or was it a third? There was nothing like beginning all over again from the very beginning. They talked of ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair

... alternative is not so bad," a young officer who was standing next to him said. "Hannibal has thousands of Roman prisoners in his hands, and we may well hope to be exchanged. After the last twelve hours any place on shore, even a Roman prison, is an elysium compared to the sea." ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... became a meek and patient Grissel to the unfeigned delight of the superior mind. So the pair forgot Mosk and his wretched death, forgot Miss Whichello and her strange conduct, and retreated from the world into their Arcadia—Paradise—Elysium, in which it is best that all sensible people should leave this pair ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... we have dreamed about this earthly paradise like a saint having visions of heaven and counting it as won already because he is predestined to obtain it. Belief in inevitable progress has thus acted as an opiate on many minds, lulling them into an elysium where all things come by wishing and where human ignorance and folly, cruelty and selfishness do not impede the peaceful flowing of their dreams. In a word, the idea of progress has blanketed the sense of sin. Lord Morley spoke once of "that ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... doth my mind perplex: For, who is this, I ask, that dares With manhood's wounds, and virtue's wrecks, And tangled creeds, and subtle cares, Affront the look, or speak the name Of one who from Elysium came. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... been out of London, thought the world of the Parks. After the barren pavements, for him the great greenswards made up a Land of Promise more than fulfilled. The magic carpet of the grass, stuffed with a million scents, was his Elysium. A bookworm made free of the Bodleian could not have been more exultant. The many trees, too, were more accessible, and there were other dogs to frolic with, and traffic, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... words from Mr. Enwright about Chelsea had sufficed to turn Chelsea into Elysium, Paradise, almost into Paris. No other quarter of London was inhabitable by a rising architect. As soon as Haim had gone George had begun to look up Chelsea in the office library, and as Mr. Enwright ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... thing, O hero, most renowned by thy achievements, whose right hand has been proved by the sword, whose affection {has been proved} by the flames. Yet, Trojan, lay aside {all} apprehension, thou shalt obtain thy request; and under my guidance thou shalt visit the abodes of Elysium, the most distant realms of the universe, and the beloved shade of thy parent. To virtue, no path ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... and trust Him, and then your life on earth will be a blessed seeking and a blessed finding of Him whom to seek is joyous effort, whom to find is an Elysium of rest. You will walk here not parted from Him, but with your thoughts and your love, which are your truest self, going up where He is, until you drop 'the muddy vesture of decay' which unfits you whilst you wear it for the presence-chamber of the King, and so you ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... foot, and the piercing steel ran down his limbs and smote deep into his ribs. By Hercules! No man ever seemed to me stronger than he. For he sank down half-conscious, and, leaning on his elbow, welcomed death with a smile, and spurned destruction with a laugh, and passed rejoicing in the world of Elysium. Mighty was the man's courage, which knew how with one laugh to cover his death-hour, and with a joyous face to suppress utter anguish ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... in marriage, might have solaced themselves a little by transporting such pictures into their own future; but even if Gwendolen's experience had led her to dwell on love-making and marriage as her elysium, her heart was too much oppressed by what was near to her, in both the past and the future, for her to project her anticipations very far off. She had a world-nausea upon her, and saw no reason all through her life why she should wish to live. No religious view of trouble ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... these details are said to have been revealed by men or women who died, but did not (like Persephone) taste the food of the dead; and so were enabled to return to earth. The initiate, at Eleusis, were guided along a theatrically arranged pathway of the dead, into a theatrical Elysium. {89b} Now as such ideas as these occur among races utterly removed from contact with Egypt, as they are part of the European folk-lore of the visits of mortals to fairyland (in which it is fatal to taste fairy food), I do not see that Eleusis need have ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... tenor of Wood's life testifies, as he himself tells us, that "books and MSS. formed his Elysium, and he wished to be dead to the world." This sovereign passion marked him early in life, and the image of death could not disturb it. When young, "he walked mostly alone, was given much to thinking and melancholy." The deliciae of his life were the more liberal studies ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... abandon to its soothing swell. I had neither the power nor the wish to move, but under the influence of this ravishing dream, floated along in happy silence, a blest being, attended by an angel throng, whose voluptuous forms delighted, and whose pleasing voices lulled into all the joys of fancied elysium. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... seldom go beyond a gentle reminder that their life is not an Elysium. They offer a strange contrast to the activities of Parliamentary grousers and scapegoat hunters. If the Germans were in occupation of the Black Country, if Oxford were being daily shelled as Rheims is, and if with a favouring breeze London could hear the dull rumble ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... Laureate Jonson shared the fate of all potentates, and was gathered to the laurelled of Elysium. The fatality occurred in 1637. When his remains were deposited in the Poet's Corner, with the eloquent laconism above them, "O Rare Ben Jonson!" all the wits of the day stood by the graveside, and cast in their tribute of bays. The rite over, all the wits of the day ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... require all of one's will to succumb to; and he who resists not the current of his being, nor attempts to dam the fountain of life for another, shall be crowned with bay and be fed on ambrosia in Elysium. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... bride. I floated o'er them snowily, They felt my beauty in the sky, Their eyes, their souls, their joy were one, I would not cross their happy sun. I love this life of calm and use— No bonds but windy ribbons loose, No gifts to ask but all to give, Secure Elysium fugitive. ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall

... second brood revealed no genius, at sight of which the defunct Mr. Green from his seat in Elysium must have chortled in glee, assuming, of course, that disembodied spirits are cognizant of the doings of their late partners, as John Fiske seemed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... Victoria Regia—Van Hielen was doubtful if he had ever before beheld such a magnificent specimen. The silvery moonlight, falling on its white and pink petals, threw into relief all the exquisite delicacy of their composition, and gave to them a glow which could only have been rivalled in Elysium. Indeed, the whole scene, enhanced by the glamour of the hour and the sweet scent of plants and flowers, was so reminiscent of fairyland that Van Hielen—enraptured beyond description—stood and gazed in ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... events. The very first downpour wetted every young man and woman to the bone and filled thin boots with water. The worst of it was that they had not yet eaten. They had brought up with them two burros laden with supplies, and two mule teams, which had dragged them up into the wooded elysium beside the tumbling creek of the canyon. When the storm gathered it was at a moment when the burros stood, still unloaded, and the mules attached to the two wagons still unhitched. They, the four-footed things, knew what the thunder and the darkness meant. They knew, somehow, ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... stern duty calls to arms— Go, fetch my lance! and cease those vain alarms! On me is cast the destiny of Troy! Astyanax, my child, the Gods will shield, Should Hector fall upon the battle-field; And in Elysium we shall meet ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... Surgeon is also a rain doctor, and takes charge of the Imperial gauge. If a pint more or a pint less than usual falls, he at once telegraphs this priceless gossip to the Press Commissioner, Oracle Grotto, Delphi, Elysium. This is one of our precautions to guard against famine. Mr. Caird is ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

... which encircled this elysium was enriched with curious shrubs and flowers. It was nothing in extent, every thing in grace and beauty and in variety of foliage. In one part of it you turned upon a small knoll, which overhung a deep, hollow glen. At the tangled bottom of this ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... Creator "under unfavorable circumstances, at least under such as might be advantageously modified?" Surely these reviewers must be living in an ideal world, surrounded by "the faultless monsters which our world ne'er saw," in some elysium where imperfection and distress were never heard of! Such arguments resemble some which we often hear against the Bible, holding that book responsible as if it originated certain facts on the shady ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... reward for the just carries as its corollary that of a punishment for the unjust, but in spite of the logical connection between the two notions, we cannot affirm that the Elysium of these Semites had a Tartarus by its side. No allusion to such a place has been found in any of the texts already translated. On the other hand, we find some evidence that the Assyrians believed in the resurrection of the dead. Marduk ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot



Words linked to "Elysium" :   mythical place, fictitious place, heaven



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com