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Seraphic

adjective
1.
Of or relating to an angel of the first order.  Synonym: seraphical.
2.
Having a sweet nature befitting an angel or cherub.  Synonyms: angelic, angelical, cherubic, sweet.  "A cherubic face" , "Looking so seraphic when he slept" , "A sweet disposition"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Seraphic" Quotes from Famous Books



... drink in the wisdom of philosophers, and to walk with Socrates, Plato and the stoics through the groves of Academia; to be kindled by the saintly utterances of prophets and apostles, St. Paul's high reasoning of immortality, or the seraphic visions of St. John; to study the laws that govern communities with the great publicists, or the economy of nations with Adam Smith and Stuart Mill; with the naturalists, to sound the depths of the argument as to the origin of species and the genesis ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... of thy power the trace In every creature's form and face The wond'ring soul surveys: Thy wisdom, infinite above Seraphic thought, a Father's love 5 As ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... and glittering dresses, Their large black eyes, and soft seraphic cheeks, Crimson as cleft pomegranates, their long tresses, The gesture which enchants, the eye that speaks, The innocence which happy childhood blesses, Made quite a picture of these little Greeks; So that the philosophical beholder Sigh'd for their sakes—that ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... sank again, though it was easy to see that a prayer trembled on his lips. As a strain of music fades into silence, his tones fell away, fainter and fainter; and with the same seraphic light on his countenance ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... as a seraphic smile overspread her face, she added, "Leave me alone till he comes, Lizzie, but be quick. I would see him now, now; all is light, light, light! Joy, ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott

... been able to make any great constructive use of his knowledge. His gains and his losses he took with reasonable equanimity, exclaiming over and over, when he lost: "Shucks! I hadn't orter have done that," and snapping his fingers. When he won heavily or was winning he munched tobacco with a seraphic smile and occasionally in the midst of trading would exclaim: "You fellers better come in. It's a-gonta rain some more." He was not easy to trap in any small gambling game, and only lost or won when there was a free, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... insurance. I have seen an entire family lifted out of poverty and into affluence by the simple boon of a broken leg. I have had people come to me on crutches, with tears in their eyes, to bless this beneficent institution. In all my experience of life, I have seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes into a freshly mutilated man's face when he feels in his vest pocket with his remaining hand and finds his accident ticket all right. And I have seen nothing so sad as the look that came into another splintered customer's face when he found ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... lot of thousands of innocent men and women at the hands of Philip's soldiers in a country at peace with Philip, at the very moment when that monarch was protesting with a seraphic smile on his expiring lips that he had never in his whole life done injury to a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... again, whose flow And fire were more than Sapphic; Her voice was sweet, and very low; Her singing quite seraphic: ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley

... confirmation. Or we may come upon a bridal couple, in front of the solid silver balustrade; or the exquisite liturgy, exquisitely chanted by the fine choir in their vestments of scarlet, blue, and silver, with the seraphic wings upon their shoulders, and intoned, with a finish of art unknown in other lands, by priests robed in rich brocade. Or it may be that a popular sermon by a well-known orator has attracted a throng of listeners among the lofty pillars of gray Finland ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... only temporary." Nat endeavoured to assume a seraphic expression, and partially succeeded. "I'm devoting much of my time to my studies," he pursued primly; "but nevertheless feel I ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance

... is after midnight. Dolores is asleep here in my stateroom, a smile of seraphic peace on her face, but in the room next door I hear the steady murmur of M.D.'s voice reading to poor Randal, who cannot sleep, who has tried to jump overboard. Michael dares not leave him for an instant, even to ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... with a certain plaintive, if relentless, grace. The inconstant lover is invariably pursued by the furies of remorse; the brutal has always some mitigating influence in his career; the libertine retains through many vicissitudes a seraphic love ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... honor claimed Azazel as his right, a Cherube tall: Who forthwith from the glittering staff unfurl'd Th' imperial ensign, which, full high advanc't Shon like a meteor streaming to the wind, With gemms and golden lustre rich emblaz'd Seraphic arms and trophies; all the while Sonorous metall blowing martial sounds: At which the universal host up-sent A shout that tore Hell's concave, and beyond Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night. All in a moment through the gloom were seen Ten thousand banners rise into the air, With orient colours ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... It is beautifully laid out, and to us, fresh from the uncouth barbarism of our shanty and its surroundings, this place seems to breathe of the "Arabian Nights." And is there not a certain princess within, into whose seraphic presence we are now entering? We inhale a new atmosphere, and tread lightly, almost on tiptoe, speaking unconsciously in whispers, and with the blood running quicker ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... re-editing of the recently composed oratorio "Redemption," reveal him still in search of power and a personal manner. No doubt a great improvement over the works of the first period is visible. From this time there date the seraphic "Panis angelicus," and the noble and delicate "Prelude, fugue and variation" for harmonium and piano. But it was only with the composition of his oratorio "Les Beatitudes," completed in 1879, that Franck's ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... too seraphic, Seems to some that heavenward track, T'other way there's much more traffic, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... followers of St. Francis continued to contain ardent-minded men who maintained that the Franciscan reform had not produced all its due results; that that reform was superior to popes and to the dispensations issued at Rome; that the appearance of the seraphic Francis was neither more nor less than the advent of a new Christianity and a new Christ, like in all respects to the first, but superior to it by poverty. Therefore all the democratic and communistic movements of later times,—the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... paraphrastically rendered by Justansond, in his translation of the "Memoirs of Louis XV:"— "Tencin, a curse on thy seraphic zeal, Which by persuasion hath contrived the means To make the Scotchman at our altars kneel, Since which we all are poor as Capucines?] On the following day he was elected honorary churchwarden of the parish of St. Roch, upon which occasion ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... historic river swept beneath; behind were dusky, reeking walls, spotted here and there with hanging rags and flower-pots in windows; opposite, at a distance, were the bare brown banks of the stream, the huge rotunda of St. Angelo, tipped with its seraphic statue, the dome of St. Peter's, and the broad-topped pines of the Villa Doria. The place was crumbling and shabby and melancholy, but the river was delightful, the rent was a trifle, and everything was picturesque. Roderick ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... any particulars be easily ascertained relative to reprints of the acts of the canonisation of the Seraphic Doctor in their original ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various

... the slightest signal of the jewelled hand. As that is her sacred pleasure, I have been inhabiting the most abstract realms of heroic sentiment, living on the most diluted moonshine, and spinning out elaborately all those charming and seraphic distinctions between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee with which these ecstatic creatures delight themselves in certain stages ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... satisfied with being as good as he was. He was always longing and praying and going about in the effort just to be a better man, more worthy of the message he had to deliver. These were the kind of seraphic pleasures he took in living. And there was no mortal power, no poverty or hardship that could do him out of them. He would come back from feeding some vicious sinner with his gospel substances exhilarated. It seemed to ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris

... of any of the doctrines of Catholic piety was a sin to be expiated hardly even by months of penance: there was nothing sacred to his inquiries, from the authority of the Popes of Avignon to the stigma miracle of the Seraphic St. Francis. He was an enfant terrible; Revolutionist Rousseau had infected him; Victor Hugo the Excommunicate was his literary idol; hidden and forbidden sweets made their way by subterranean passages to his appetite; he was the leader of a group who might some day give trouble to the ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair

... in the island of Patmos (there by him was brought forth what he possessed in the spirit). And he told me further concerning this: that where the universal or general love is born in any one, such would be the true signature and token that this seraphic stone would there be formed and take to itself a bodily shape." (L. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... sometimes there is a little treachery of this kind amongst the profession, it is no more than would be pronounced 'in reason' by all candid men. And certainly, said one of the three, you wouldn't look for perfection in a tinker? Undoubtedly a seraphic tinker would be an unreasonable postulate; though, perhaps, the man in all England that came nearest to the seraphic character in one century was a tinker—namely, John Bunyan. But, as my triad of tinkers urged, men of all professions do cheat ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... however, that, as Hetty had committed murder, and as Tina had just been saved from doing so, the marriage in the first case never actually takes place, and in the second it ends after a few months. And as a smaller instance of repetition, we may compare the bedroom visit of the seraphic Dinah Morris to the earthly Hetty with that of the pattern Lucy Deane to ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... imagine that these would be the last words Dr. Chrystal would address to him personally, or that, as he turned away with a seraphic smile upon his face, he would see him but ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley

... to his Majesty by Fray Pedro de Sant Pablo, preacher and provincial minister of the province of Sant Gregorio of the discalced religious of the Philipinas Islands, of the Order of the seraphic Father St. Francis, for the increase and conservation of the said states of his Majesty, by reason of the building of ships and repartimiento [17] for the service ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair

... if for you to choose, Discretion in the interval, With gay delays he goes To some superior tree Without a single leaf, And shouts for joy to nobody But his seraphic self! ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson

... sentence was never finished. Bonny's gaze, distracted from the colonel to his sister, glued itself to the lady's face, while the perplexity in the blue eyes changed to delight. With a seraphic smile upon her dainty lips, a smile that would have made her recognizable anywhere, under any disguise, the little creature propelled herself from Glory's arms to the outstretched arms of Miss Laura, shrilling her ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond

... sinister imagination, as even vaguely threatening. And for the rest, you have seen a happy young mother teaching first steps to the first-born— that was Amedee. Radiantly tender, aggressively solicitous, diffusing ineffable sweetness on the air, wreathed in seraphic smiles, beaming caressingly, and aglow with a sacred joy that I should be looking so well, he greeted me in a voice of honey and bowed me to my repast with an unconcealed fondness ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington

... Christian land—but by a man whose whole soul and heart had been at one time (nay, was at the very moment of composition) inspired and suffused with that firm belief in God's goodness and His justice—that full assurance of rewards beyond the grave—that exulting and seraphic cheerfulness which associates joy with the Creator—and that animated affection for the Brotherhood of Mankind, which Christianity—and Christianity alone, in its pure, orthodox, gospel form, needing no aid from schoolman or philosopher—taught and teaches. Would, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... was the friend of God on high; Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage With Amalek's ungracious progeny; Or how the royal bard did groaning lie Beneath the stroke of Heaven's avenging ire; Or Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry; Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire: Or other holy seers that tune ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... and beauty, this gay glory and tremorous ecstasy and effort was here for moth-love of one incarnate fever of frail-winged loveliness! Oh! to what unguessed archangelic observation, to what infinite seraphic compassion, may not our own swarming race, who dare not too much pity ourselves, be but just such dainty ephemera! Splendid in purposes, intelligence, and affections as these in colors and grace, glorious when on the wing, and marvellous still, riddles of wonder, even when crawling ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable

... counterpart. Sagard reckons from eighty to a hundred waterfalls and rapids in the course of the journey, and the task of avoiding them by pushing through the woods was the harder for him because he saw fit to go barefoot, "in imitation of our seraphic father, Saint Francis." "We often came upon rocks, mudholes, and fallen trees, which we had to scramble over, and sometimes we must force our way with head and hands through dense woods and thickets, without road or path. When ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... please him, their wrath seemed to him too tempestuous, their passion too overpowering, the lion-marrow which fills every member of his phases was matter too substantial for his tastes, and the Raphaelic and Seraphic profiles which are wrought into the midst of the nervous and powerful creations of this great genius, were to him almost painful from the force of the cutting contrast in which they are ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt

... full high advanced, Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind, With gems and golden lustre rich emblazed, Seraphic arms and trophies; all the while ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... whatever to a place in the Literature of Power, a literature which many of us think the only thing in the world of books worth consideration. Great philosophy is here, and high thought. Who would for a moment wish to disparage St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, or Aquinas the Angelic? Plato and Pascal, Malebranche and Fenelon, Bossuet and Machiavelli are all among the world's immortals. Yet now and again we are bewildered by finding the least important book of a well-known author—as ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... said Emmeline, who was seated on Paddy's shoulder, holding on tight to him, and gazing upon the island, the green of whose trees was now visible, an oasis of verdure in the sparkling and seraphic blue. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... is love, All wisdom she, all thoughts that move About her everlasting breast Till she gathers them to rest: All tenderness of all the ages, Seraphic secrets of the sages, Vision and hope of all the seers, All prayer, all anguish, and all tears Are but the dust, that from her dream Awakes, and knows herself supreme — Are but earth when she reveals All that her secret heart conceals Down in the dark and silent loam, Which ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... has she bound and spell-bound thee. 'Love is not altogether a Delirium,' says he elsewhere; 'yet has it many points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the Infinite in the Finite, of the Idea made Real; which discerning again may be either true or false, either seraphic or demoniac, Inspiration or Insanity. But in the former case too, as in common Madness, it is Fantasy that superadds itself to sight; on the so petty domain of the Actual plants its Archimedes-lever, whereby to move at will the infinite ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... door, the air is the vehicle of the sacred word which shall spring from my lips. Hear, then, with the ears of the soul and the heart, that the words of the Lord may not fall on a stony ground, but that they may grow and shoot upward in the field of our seraphic father, St. Francis. You, sinners, captives of those Moors of the soul who infest the seas of the eternal life, in the doughty ships of the flesh and the world; you who row in the galleys of Satan, behold with reverent compunction him who redeems souls from the captivity of ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... in his course, with fire and tenderness breaking out in his face and manner, that gave him a kind of seraphic look, the speaker burst forth into a description of the love of Christ, that before long bowed the heads and hearts of his audience as one man. Sobs and whispers and smothered cries, murmured from all parts of the ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner

... smile with the seraphic calm of one who sees beyond the pomps and vanities of existence, and would begin the relation of ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... with a seraphic grin. "I suppose it's the gettin' so near home, and all that. I do feel rather festive this mornin. 'Rolls a bit, ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling

... the perfumed chalices of flowers, houris of an erotic paradise, elemental spirits of nature wantoning in Eden in her prime. To accuse the painter of conscious immorality or of what is stigmatised as sensuality, would be as ridiculous as to class his seraphic beings among the products of the Christian imagination. They belong to the generation of the fauns; like fauns, they combine a certain savage wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of inspiration, a delight in rapid movement as they revel amid clouds or flowers, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... those piquant flippancies of speech which harass the enemy like a straggling fire; and could contrive, when it suited her purpose, to make herself as disagreeable as if her face had not been that of a cherub, or her voice seraphic. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various

... am always sensitive to female influences. Besides, what would Jorrocks' ghost be to this? Could anything be in better taste? Would I not be exposing myself to the chance of injuring my nervous system by interviews with such creatures as my last visitor, unless I decided at once? She gave me a seraphic smile, as if she knew what was passing in my mind. That smile settled the matter. "She will do!" I cried; "I choose this one;" and as, in my enthusiasm, I took a step toward her, I passed over the magic circle ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various

... her shape by inductions both rapid and sagacious, he beheld one of those masterpieces of Nature whose creation appears to demand as its right all the happiness of love. Here was a fair young face, on which the sun of Spain had cast faint tones of bistre which added to its expression of seraphic calmness a passionate pride, like a flash of light infused beneath that diaphanous complexion,—due, perhaps, to the Moorish blood which vivified and colored it. Her hair, raised to the top of her head, fell thence with black reflections ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac

... he was called. Some fragments of his conversation have been preserved, the unquestioned judgements which his hearers loyally received. Of the Schoolmen he was contemptuous, with their honorific titles: 'doctor angelic, doctor seraphic, doctor subtle, doctor irrefragable.' 'Was Thomas (Aquinas) a doctor? So am I. Thomas scarcely knew Latin, and that was his only tongue: I have a fair knowledge of the three languages. Thomas saw Aristotle only as ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... the Doctor, in a voice that was only too seraphic to be called hysterical, "is it——? It is!" he cried. "Oh, my son, my son!" And he sat down upon the hamper and sobbed like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... ruby, and whose gates were gates of burnished gold. As he gazed, they were flung open on silent hinges, and a host, clothed in spotless white, entered their portals, welcomed with swelling anthems and seraphic songs. Then the toppling precipice began to reel and stagger beneath his feet—a fierce bright flame burst from amidst the night below, more brilliant than the sun's intensest ray. It drank up the darkness, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various

... diverse music. It is necessary to keep in mind this plan of the poet lest thinking the lovely lights, and lovely sounds and lovely movements are only terms descriptive of physical, though impalpable phenomena, we lose the deep and beautiful symbolism that is the magic secret of the seraphic poesy of the Paradiso. Of the brilliancy and movement of the spirits of the Sphere of Venus—spirits who in this life failed in Christian ideals because of their amours, Dante says, and his description is that of an expert musician distinguishing ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery

... token of her pardon, "can you give to me again a hand so ill deserved? can you look with such compassion on the author of your woes? on the wretch, who for an instant could doubt the purity of a mind so seraphic!" ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... were an unfailing token of mediaeval sainthood. We read of Francis of Assisi's sheepskin that "often a companion of the saint would take it to the fire to clean and dispediculate it, doing so, as he said, because the seraphic father himself was no enemy of pedocchi, but on the contrary kept them on him (le portava adosso) and held it for an honor and a glory to wear these celestial pearls in his habit. Quoted by P. Sabatier: Speculum Perfectionis, etc., Paris, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... what is love? 'Tis not the crown of kings, Nay, nor the fire of white seraphic wings! Is it a child's heart leaping while he sings? Even so say I; Even ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... to her giving both our thanks and explaining the state of affairs. "All is over," I said, "between that lady and myself. Do not name her to me, lest the hideous word 'Woman' should blind me to the seraphic word 'Aunt.' My life is a howling waste—but what matter? Ha! Ha! Ha!" I cannot remember my exact words, of course. . ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... would never prove that what it terminated in was a fact, as in my metaphysical faith I had deputed and asserted it to be. The angels would remain notional, while my intent was to have them exist; so that the more earnestly I held to my fable the more grievously should I be deceived. For even if seraphic choirs existed in plenty on their own emotional or musical plane of being, it would not have been their hands—if they had hands—that would have lighted the stars I saw; and this, after all, was the gist and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... bald head, which looked so very large because it shone so much; and the long grey hair at its sides and back, like floss silk or spun glass, which looked so very benevolent because it was never cut; were not, of course, to be seen in the boy as in the old man. Nevertheless, in the Seraphic creature with the haymaking rake, were clearly to be discerned the rudiments of the Patriarch with ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... converses with Christ's human nature only. However, he was not believed this time on his bare word; the adventure of the crusade having a little sunk the credit of his oracles. Afterwards a thousand schoolmen arose, such as the Irrefragable Doctor, the Subtile Doctor, the Angelic Doctor, the Seraphic Doctor, and the Cherubic Doctor, who were all sure that they had a very clear and distinct idea of the soul, and yet wrote in such a manner, that one would conclude they were resolved no one should understand a word in their writings. ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire

... in any way like the innkeeper's daughter of Comic Opera. She was a schoolgirl of sixteen, with a long, fair plait, a short serge skirt, and a seraphic oval face. She ought to have been called Fanny or Clara. ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... who had never been hard upon her, accompanied by Nicole Midi, by the young seraphic doctor, Courcelles, and L'Oyseleur, along with various other ecclesiastical persons, visited her prison. The Inquisitor congratulated and almost blessed her, sermonising as usual, but briefly and not ungently, though ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... the promise of all he could desire to see in woman. His love was not of the blind-little-boy sort, but of a deeper, more exacting, keen-eyed kind, that sees faults where even a true mother will not, so jealous is it of the perfection of the beloved. But one thing was plain, even to this seraphic dragon that dwelt sleepless in him—and there was eternal content in the thought—that such a woman, once started on the right way, would soon leave fault and weakness behind her, and become as one of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... him the fierce light of everlasting flames; the burning of fever was the fire that is never quenched; the pain that racked his limbs was the worm that dieth not. And now in his torment there came the vision of a seraphic face bending over him in gentle solicitude; a face that brought comfort with it, even in the midst of his agony. After that one wild question he sank slowly back upon the pillows, and lay faint and weak, his breathing scarce audible. Angela laid her fingers ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... his couch an angel fair, with radiant, glitt'ring wings Of hues as bright as the living gems the fount to Heaven flings; With loving smile he bent above the fair child cradled there, While sounds of sweet seraphic power stole o'er ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon

... milky whiteness of the neck. This was neither Norman beauty, where flesh abounds, nor French beauty, as fugitive as its own expressions, nor the beauty of the North, cold and melancholy as the North itself—it was the deep seraphic beauty of the Catholic Church, supple and ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac

... three months had expired, there came another pastor, as different from him as possible. Mr. Lurton was as gentle as his predecessor had been boisterous. There was a strong substratum of manly courage and will, but the whole was overlaid with a sweetness wholly feminine and seraphic. His religion was the Twenty-third Psalm. His face showed no trace of conflict. He had accepted the creed which he had inherited without a question, and, finding in it abundant sources of happiness, of moral development, and spiritual consolation, he thence concluded it ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... to describe her ineffable loveliness, for, like the beauty of a flower, it was incapable of analysis. Nothing that I could write would give you any adequate idea of this girl's seraphic face, for she was like unto no one you have ever seen in this cold Western world. I watched in a wild, nervous transport, I know not how long—time and space had no part in this new ecstasy of mine! I could think ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... a criticism as this, a shining reflection, so to speak, of the work which it exalts; yet MacSilly, the seraphic aesthete of Edinburgh, has expressed in a still more moving and penetrating fashion the impression produced upon his mind by the sight of this primitive painting. "The Madonna of Margaritone," says ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... all we love; All praise (to speak her worth) is faint; Her manners show'd the yielding dove, Her morals, the seraphic saint: She never breath'd nor look'd complaint; No equal upon earth had she - Now, what is this fair thing I paint? Alas! as all that live ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe

... said, with a broad and seraphic smile, "that in this hotel there has to-day a murder ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the forms of light, Seraphic and divine, The painter's wand had summoned from The dim Ideal's shrine; And felt within my fevered soul Ambition's wasting fire, And seized the pencil with a vague And ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various

... by my side, sat with me, walked with me, was my inexpressibly sweet and inseparable companion,—never left me but to go and sit with her mother. We knew all her intelligence, all her pure and delicate sensibility, the quickness and power of her perceptions, her seraphic love. She was all love, and loved all God's creation, even the animals, trees, and plants. She loved her God and Saviour with an angel's love, and died like ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams

... that wild, sweet face, Which thus and ever gleams, And smiles, with a seraphic grace, Upon ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley

... Agassiz, Lowell, Whipple, Motley, Charles Eliot Norton, Edmund Quincy, Francis H. Underwood, Judge Hoar, J. Elliot Cabot, and others. Lowell and Holmes were the wits par excellence, though Judge Hoar did not fall far behind. Emerson sat always with a seraphic smile upon his face, and Longfellow thoroughly enjoyed every good sally, though not adding to the mirth-making himself. Dr. Appleton, who met Dr. Holmes ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... Northampton. There he was ordained February 15, 1727, and thither a few months later he brought his "espoused saint," Sarah Pierpont, consummate flower of Puritan womanhood, thenceforth the companion not only of his pastoral cares and sorrows, but of his seraphic ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... fashion'd every sphere, Spaced out their suns, and round each radiant goal, Orb over orb, compell'd their train to roll, Bade heaven's own harmony their force combine. Taught all their host symphonious strains to join, Gave to seraphic harps their sounding lays, Their joys to angels, and to ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... recedes: it disappears: Heaven opens on my eyes; my ears With sounds seraphic ring. Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly! O grave where is thy victory? O death, ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth

... spectacles drop a bow or curtsey as I pass, wisely mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black, which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle I can be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic doctor. ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold

... quickly diverted your thoughts into the proper channel. As she pinched you, the Kitten dropped her eyes so that you noticed how long and black were her eyelashes. Then, having punished you, she raised her eyes to yours with so seraphic an expression that you thought of "large-eyed cherubim" and entirely forgot that she had pinched you at all, unless next day as you looked in the glass you happened to notice a little blue mark on your cheek. ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker

... writer observed a funeral procession on its way towards Malabar Hill, and followed it to the Towers. For a moment after arriving there the face of the corpse was exposed, showing the marble features of a young girl of some fifteen years, wearing upon her pale face an expression of seraphic loveliness. The body was covered with a snow-white sheet, exhibiting the outline of a beautiful, budding form suddenly snatched from life. Over and around the body were white buds and half-blown pale flowers, indicative of youth, recalling ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... a word Suggestive of seraphic screeches; The Poliphant comes next, and third The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various

... crucified by them. Here is Slavery's abhorred riot of vices and crimes, from whose soul-sickening details the human imagination shrinks aghast,—and over all, to complete the picture, these theologians bring in the seraphic countenance of the Saviour of mankind, smiling celestial approval of the multitudinous miseries and infamies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... seraphic, composed of light and emotion. She came so near and so large that her very thoughts seemed to be photographed. She drifted away; she smiled, danced, wept, and made her human appeal ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... What Man can range From such Seraphic Pleasure? 'Tis want of Charms that make us change, To grasp the Fury, Treasure. What Man of Sense wou'd quit a certain Bliss, For ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn

... not your child, if then on bended knees I dropped, and thought of Abelard, and also Eloise; Or when, beside the altar high, he bowed before the pyx, I envied that seraphic kiss he ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte

... seeing this gesture followed by gloomy looks, and what French reporters call "sensation," in these young men, whom naturally I viewed with awe as my leaders—boys that were called young men, men that were reading Sophocles, (a name that carried with it the sound of something seraphic to my ears,) and who had never vouchsafed to waste a word on such a child as myself. The day was come, however, when all that would be changed. One of these leaders strode up to me in the public playground, and, delivering a blow on my shoulder, which was not intended to hurt me, but ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... interesting topics with him or not talk at all. Letty understood him thoroughly. She would chuck him under the chin mornings, or shake his solid head between her hands, telling him he was a brute, but a nice kind of a brute. "Yes, yes," he would growl. "I know. I'm an animal, I suppose. You're a seraphic suggestion of ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... harbourage installed, Lulled by the murmurous hum of London's traffic To that full calm which may be justly called Seraphic, ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)

... fair hair, which brought out the purity of her features. Whoever has seen the sublime Virgin of Titian in his great picture of the "Presentation" at Venice, will know that Veronique was in her girlhood,—the same ingenuous candor, the same seraphic astonishment in her eyes, the same simple yet noble attitude, the same majesty of childhood in ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... whirlwind of the passions! How did my frame tremble, and madden, and shiver, and burn! How were my lips at once bursting with frenzy and locked in silence! It was my guardian angel that protected me, that pleaded for me, that awed me to patience, and that repaid by her seraphic praise the virtue she ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... ladies fearfully snubbed by their coachmen; and as for chauffeurs, who may kill you or somebody else at any moment, the mental attitude of the average automobilaire toward them must be one of abject deference. But there have been some really heroic, some almost seraphic, efforts to readjust the terms of a relation that seems to have something essentially odious in it. In the old times, the times of the simple life now passed forever, when the daughter of one family 'lived out' in another, she ate with the family and shared alike ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... required of them; both lost very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them in tender and mellifluous threnodies. It would be easy to trace many parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer of the Nativity and of Paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of audacity. It is hard to conceive of Emerson as "an expert swordsman" like Milton. It is impossible to think of him as an abusive controversialist as Milton was in his controversy with Salmasius. But though ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... should have guessed by your writing that you were in some unusual frame of mind, either tired, or—or—" he looked again, and closely, at the writing,—"or in a temper less delightfully calm and seraphic than usual. Yes, it looks actually a bad-tempered hand. Valentine's!" Then he laughed, and tossed the note carelessly into the fire that was crackling upon the hearth. Rip lay by it, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... gather slowly. Madame Lepelletier is more enchanting still in some soft black fabric, with dull gold in relief. Floyd has washed and brushed and freshened, but still wears his travelling suit for a very good reason. Cecil is in white, with pale blue ribbons, which give her a sort of seraphic look. Yet she is tired with all the jaunting about, and after a while Laura ceases to torment her with questions, as the conversation becomes ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... round, full throat; the white frock, say, with arabesques of blue all over it, that Felix Kennaston said reminded him of Ruskin's tombstone; or that other white-and-blue one—decollete, that was—which I swear seraphic mantua-makers had woven out of mists and the skies of June: when I remember these things, I repeat, almost am I tempted to become a boot-maker and a lapidary and a milliner and, in fine, an adept in all the other arts and trades ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell

... cathedral, with its "jeweled and golden facade" and its aerial Gothic construction. Mr. Browning, with his little son, drove over to the wild, curious town of Bagnorgio, which, though near Orvieto, is very little known. But this was the birthplace of Giovanni da Fidenza, the "Seraphic Doctor," who was canonized as St. Buonaventura, from the exclamation of San Francesco, who, on awakening from a dream communion with Giovanni da Fidenza, exclaimed, "O buona ventura!" Dante introduces this saint into the Divina Commedia, as chanting the praises ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... keen eyes, as if uncertain what to do, but his hesitation did not last long. A piece of pine wood lay near him, and picking it up he drew from under his belt a great keen-bladed bowie-knife, with which he began to whittle long slender shavings that curled beautifully; then a seraphic smile of content spread over ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... first, in the solemn consecration of the first-fruits of the year to God; and secondly, in honoring the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God, particularly his birth and circumcision. The church invites us on this day to unite our homage with the seraphic ardors and transports of devotion with which the glorious Mother of God assisted at these wonderful mysteries which we commemorate, but in which she acted herself so great a part. With what sentiments did Mary bear in her womb, bring forth, and serve her adorable son, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... Cherubim of Raffaelle, it seems to shine out in still more truthful vividness from the brow of a young person rapt in religious ecstasy. The hands clasped in prayer,—the upturned eyes,—the expression of humble confidence and seraphic hope, (displayed, let me suggest, on a beautiful face,) constitute a picture of which, having witnessed it, I can never forget the force. Yet I knew it was only a trance. So one knows that village churches are built ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... night was perfect. Crayford fell into a seraphic mood. Beneath his hard enterprise, his fierce energies, his armor of business equipment, there was a strain of romance of which he was half-ashamed, and which he scarcely understood or was at ease with. That night it came rather near to the ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... an exceptional expression, but highly characteristic; it is one of Fisher's best works. Now he is about our Wiedeman, and if he succeeds as well in painting angels as men, will do something beautiful with that seraphic face. You are to understand that these works are done by the artist for the artist. Oh, we couldn't afford to have such a luxury as a portrait done for us. But I am pleased to have a good likeness of each of my treasures ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... without a warning. After writing deliberately to her friend Emma, she laid down her pen and thought of nothing; and into this dreamfulness a wine passed, filling her veins, suffusing her mind, quickening her soul: and coming whence? out of air, out of the yonder of air. She could have imagined a seraphic presence in the room, that bade her arise and live; take the cup of the wells of youth arrested at her lips by her marriage; quit her wintry bondage for warmth, light, space, the quick of simple being. And the strange pure ecstasy was not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... reciprocated. Hours flew like minutes, and I was surprised by the clock striking ONE before it occurred to me that it was time to depart. Again I traversed the streets at that solemn hour, insensible to every feeling, and regardless of every object but the flaming torch lit up in my heart and the seraphic image of Laura. At length I was warned by the scrutinizing gaze of a watchman to repair to my lodgings. But my pillow afforded no rest. All night long I pondered on the exhilarating events of the day. Many were the endearing accents that escaped my lips as I addressed in ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones

... Mr. Francis Chenoweth in an anonymous "Sonnet" (of twenty-three lines) which appeared in the issue following Miss Carewe's debut. Mr. Chenoweth wrote that while dancing the mazourka with a Lovely Being, the sweetest feelings of his soul, in a celestial stream, bore him away beyond control, in a seraphic dream; and he untruthfully stated that at the same time he saw her wipe the silent tear, omitting, however, to venture any explanation of the cause of her emotion. Old General Trumble boldly signed his poem ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington

... dearest friend, and also you, "Joint sons of sacred harmony, adieu! "Apollo whispering, prompts me to retire, "And bids me join the bright seraphic choir: ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... much interest in their own danger is very rarely felt. In writings of fiction, whether novels or biographies, these death-beds are generally depicted as almost seraphic in lucidity of intelligence. Sadly large has been my experience in death-beds, and I can only say that I have seldom or never seen such. Indifference, excepting with regard to bodily suffering, or to ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale

... the darkness, through the streaming deluge of that tropic clime. For the seraphic frenzy had now come upon the mage in good earnest, and all the Thought-reader burned in his ...
— HE • Andrew Lang

... a poem to watch her listening to a theme of Weber, or Beethoven, or Herold,—her eyes raised, her lips silent, regretting no doubt the life escaping her. The cure Peroux and Monsieur Habert, her two religious comforters, admired her saintly resignation. Surely the seraphic perfection of young girls and young men marked with the hectic of death, is a wonderful fact worthy of the attention alike of philosophers and of heedless minds. He who has ever seen one of these sublime departures from this life can never remain, or become, an unbeliever. Such ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... was probably proposing to himself the model of this excellent person, who for his piety was named the Seraphic Doctor. BOSWELL. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... ears of your souls and hearts that the words of the Lord may not fall on the stony soil where the birds of Hell may consume them, but that ye may grow and flourish as holy seed in the field of our venerable and seraphic father, St. Francis! O ye great sinners, captives of the Moros of the soul that infest the sea of eternal life in the powerful craft of the flesh and the world, ye who are laden with the fetters of lust ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... robed in white, was bareheaded and barefooted. The dress, the action, the seraphic face were not infrequent on the water, and especially in the churches; recognition was instantaneous, and through the eager ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... now upon some fairer tide— Their scattered ashes on Hope's pinions rise And people realms beyond the azure skies! Then may our faltering footsteps lead To where fond hearts may never bleed— Where vanished faces, cherished forms, Are anchored safe from life's rude storms; Where strains seraphic, soft and low, The rapt ear greet, and we shall know The loved and lost we only see In ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy

... breathless, motionless, sleep's self, Wax-white, seraphic, saturate with the sun That filled the window with ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... university career, became acquainted with Friedrich Schlegel, and remained his most intimate friend. He also came to know Fichte, and eagerly absorbed his Doctrine of Science. A little later he came into close relations with Wilhelm Schlegel and Tieck in Jena. He experienced a seraphic love for a delicate girl of thirteen, whose passing away at the age of fifteen served to transport the youth's interests almost exclusively to the invisible world: "Life is a sickness of the spirit, a passionate Doing." His chief conversation lay in solitude, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... the best years of his life.[D] He was the guest and the beloved friend as well as the patient of Mr. Gillman; and the devoted attachment of that excellent man and his estimable wife supplied the calm contentment and seraphic peace, such as might have been the dream of the poet and the hope of the man. Honored be the name and reverenced the memory of this true friend! He died on the 1st of June, 1837, having arranged ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... for both your groups, if you will only make your limit of age include me. I am only five feet ten, and I 'll sit very low if you 'll admit me to the charmed circle. Shall you have a stage name? I would suggest 'The Seraphic Sapphira.'" ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... while Hans enjoyed the sensation of being carried by somebody else, and lay upon the cushions smoking with a seraphic smile and addressing sarcastic remarks to the bearers, who fortunately did not understand them. Soon, however, he wearied of these novel delights and as he was still determined not to walk until he was obliged, climbed on to ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard



Words linked to "Seraphic" :   loveable, lovable, cherubic, seraphical, angelical, sweet, seraph



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