All 4 Uses of
ethereal
in
The Scarlet Letter
- It kept him down on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to and answered!†
p. 132.2 *
- Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him away with them; now a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they rose.†
p. 134.8
- Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change, in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated.†
p. 153.4
- The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise; moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end.†
p. 245.7
Definitions:
-
(1)
(ethereal) characterized by an air-like insubstantiality
or:
so delicate and insubstantial that it barely seems of this world -- often beautiful -
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, but seen in older writings, ethereal can mean "heavenly or celestial" -- as when Milton writes of an "ethereal messenger" in Paradise Lost. Similarly, it can mean "unworldly" or "spiritual".
In chemistry, there is a specialized meaning: "of or related to the chemical, ether"