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More "Alchemy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glorious morning I have seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face, And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to west ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... devil's name, brings Cosmo Ruggieri hither?" asked the Bernardin. "What doth the wrinkled old dealer in the black art hope to learn from us? We are not given to alchemy, and the occult sciences; we practice no hidden mysteries; we brew no philtres; we compound no slow poisons; we vend no waxen images. What doth he here, I say! 'Tis a scandal in the rector to permit his presence. And what if he came under the safeguard, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... literature and the sciences derived instruction from his discourse, and his talent was conspicuous even in the art of vocal music. His praises were celebrated in kasadas of the greatest beauty. Bakr Ibn An-Nattah said of him: O thou who pursuest the study of alchemy, the great alchemy consists in praising the son of Isa. Was there but one dirhem in the world, thou wouldst obtain it by ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... in it a deeper meaning than the one attributed to it here, it well illustrates the position of the medical man in such cases. Most doctors of the time were mere empirics; dabbled more or less in alchemy; and, in the treatment of mental disease, were little better than children. They had for co-practitioners all who, by their credit with the populace for superior wisdom, found themselves in a position ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... the first starting,—now, 'twould be an outrage, An insult—to the perfumed Night—to Nature— To speak fine words that garnish vain love-letters! Look up but at her stars! The quiet Heaven Will ease our hearts of all things artificial; I fear lest, 'midst the alchemy we're skilled in The truth of sentiment dissolve and vanish,— The soul exhausted by these empty pastimes, The gain of fine things be ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... thirty creatures, hideous and authentic, poised, cohering in a sole chaos of desire; a fluent and numerous cluster of vital inhumanity. As I contemplated this ferocious and uncouth miracle, this beautiful manifestation of the sinister alchemy of hunger, I felt that the last vestige of individualism was about utterly to disappear, wholly abolished in ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... when he had reached this point, which was just as he opened the door of his father's room, which contained a very small library—books being rare and precious in those days—plenty of handsome armour and war-like weapons of offence, and a corner set apart for alchemy and the study of minerals; for, in a desultory way, Sir Morton Darley, bitten by the desire to have a mine of his own to produce him as good an income as that of his enemy neighbour, had been given to searching without success for a good ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... that Lucrezia Borgia was not so black as she has been painted; yet in the early days of June and July, when strawberries and raspberries are ripening, I fancy that most of us can dismiss her and her kin from mind as we observe Nature's alchemy in our gardens. When we think of the luscious, health-imparting fruits which will grace millions of tables, and remember that until recent years they were conspicuous only by their absence, we may not ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... my head, but thou comest and pesterest me with this sorry prattle." "What more wouldst thou have?" replied he. "Allah hath bounteously bestowed on thee a Barber who is an astrologer, one learned in alchemy and white magic;[FN612] syntax, grammar, and lexicology; the arts of logic, rhetoric and elocution; mathematics, arithmetic and algebra; astronomy, astromancy and geometry; theology, the Traditions of the Apostle and the Commentaries on the Koran. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... life, are, indeed, so absolutely interpenetrated and so interdependent that they can almost invariably be contemplated as cause and effect, each reacting upon the other in determining sequences. By the magic of some spiritual alchemy, reading is transmuted into the qualities that build up character, and these qualities, in turn, determine the continued choice of books, so that selection and result perpetuate themselves, forming an unceasing contribution to the nature of life. ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... it represents a higher approximation to realness than does alchemy, for instance, and so drove out alchemy, it is still only somewhere between ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... doth inherit! Oh, the alchemy which doth change Dross of body and dregs of spirit Into sanctities rare and strange! My flesh is feeble, and dry, and old, My darling's beautiful hair is gray; But our elixir and precious gold Laugh at ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... ideals? Let it not be supposed that I believed myself to have lost them. If so, the impression I have given of myself has been wholly inadequate. No, they had been transmuted, that is all, transmuted by the alchemy of Weathersfield, by the personality of Theodore Watling into brighter visions. My eyes rarely left his face; I hung on his talk, which was interspersed with native humour, though he did not always join in the laughter, sometimes gazing at the fire, as though his keen mind were grappling with ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... knowledge of the Absolute? Stahl, Becker, Paracelsus, Agrippa, all the great Searchers into occult causes took the Great Triad for their watchword,—in other words, the Ternary. Ignorant men who despise alchemy, that transcendent chemistry, are not aware that our work is only carrying onward the passionate researches of those great men. Had I found the Absolute, the Unconditioned, I meant to have grappled with Motion. Ah! while I ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... sound and echo, man and maid; The land reflected in the flood; Body with shadow still pursued. For nature beats in perfect tune And rounds with rhyme her every rune; Whether she work in land or sea Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. Not unrelated, unaffied, But to each thought and thing allied, Is perfect nature's every part, Rooted ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... in that way. And still there is room for thousands more. So that if the tyrannous Firmian took to tribulating Salzburg in that manner, Heaven had provided remedies and a Prussian Majesty. Heaven is very opulent; has alchemy to change the ugliest substances into beautifulest. Privately to his Majesty, for months back, this Salzburg Emigration is a most manageable matter. Manage well, it will be a god-send to his Majesty, and fit, as by pre-established harmony, into the ancient Prussian ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... consorted with the old pictures, actions, and words has added to them an element either of charm or expressive potentiality hitherto felt to be lacking. Is that true? Has a rock of offense been removed? Has a mephitic odor been changed to a sweet savor by the subtle alchemy of the musical composer? Has a drama abhorrent, bestial, repellent, and loathsome been changed into a thing of delectability by the potent agency of music? It used to be said that things too silly to be spoken might be sung; is it also true that things too vile, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the infant Maid was given 45 Form'd by the wond'rous Alchemy of Heaven! No fairer Maid does Love's wide empire know, No fairer Maid e'er heav'd the bosom's snow. A thousand Loves around her forehead fly; A thousand Loves sit melting in her eye; 50 Love lights her smile—in Joy's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Do you imagine I sit in chambers all day long, pining for the impossible which no alchemy of fate can apparently ever alter? I'm also a journalist. That's why I've come to see you." He spoke ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... than conformity to things of earth alone. It is more involved than we, as yet, perceive. Answer, first, why the heart thrills; explain wherefore some plaintive note goes wandering about the world, undying; make clear the rose's subtle alchemy evolving its ruddy lamp in light and rain. In the essence of these facts lie ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... flocked about her and she introduced Tess to them one by one. Tess, hardly understanding a word of what was said to her, was never made so much of in her life, sharing honors with Yasmini, almost as much a novelty as she—a Western woman, spirited behind the purdah by the same new alchemy that made a girl of partly foreign birth, and so without caste in the Hindu sense of it, revive a royal custom with its antecedents rooted in the very rocks of time. It was a ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... nitrate of silver. Their knowledge of chemistry was far greater than that of their neighbours, and the science is even now named from the country of its birth. The later Arabs called it Alchemia, the Egyptian art, and hence our words alchemy and chemistry. So also Naphtha, or rock oil, from the coast of the Red Sea; and Anthracite, or rock fuel, from the coast of Syria, both bear Egyptian names. To some Egyptian stones the Romans gave their own names; as the black glassy ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... thy wand celestial, touch The hearts of men, and by thy alchemy Divine, resolve, remelt, aye, e'en recast The thought and very being! Selfish man, So filled with prejudice and hate hath need, O heavenly messenger, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 6, June, 1890 • Various
... childish mind with old Coppelius, who, even though you had not believed in the Sand-man, would have been to you a ghostly bugbear, especially dangerous to children. His mysterious labours along with your father at night-time were, I daresay, nothing more than secret experiments in alchemy, with which your mother could not be over well pleased, owing to the large sums of money that most likely were thrown away upon them; and besides, your father, his mind full of the deceptive striving after higher knowledge, may probably have become rather ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... nineteenth century, is a very different pursuit from the Archaeology of our forefathers, and has as little relation to their antiquarianism as modern Chemistry and modern Astronomy have to their former prototypes—Alchemy and Astrology. In proof of this, I may confidently appeal to the good work which Archaeology has done, and the great advances which it has struck out in different directions within the last fifty years. Within this brief period it has made discoveries, perhaps in themselves ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... dew that perfumes life with sweetness and besprinkles it with splendor; it is the music-tide that sweeps the soul, scattering treasures; it is the victorious and blessed leader of integrity's forlorn hope; it is the potent alchemy that transmutes failure into success; it is the hidden manna that nourishes when all other sustenance fails; it is the voice that speaks to hopes all dead, "Because I live, ye shall live also." For the loftiest friendships have no commercial element in them: they are founded on disinterestedness ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... music that the old man's fingers wooed from the Cremona. You have but to look at the master, she says, and you will comprehend. 'There he stands, a stately figure, gray and rugged, yet with a certain graciousness; simple, kindly, and yet austere; one who had accepted his sorrow, and, by some alchemy of the spirit, transmuted it into universal compassion, to speak, through the Cremona, ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key. What his philosophy seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd byways to knowledge. To him philosophy was to be something giving strange swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath the human countenance, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... he would say to himself, "Ah, Friend Tchernoff is returning," and thereupon he would saunter out to the stairway in order to have a chat with his neighbor. For a long time the stranger discouraged all approach to his quarters, which fact led the Spaniard to infer that he devoted himself to alchemy and kindred mysteries. When he finally was allowed to enter he saw only books, many books, books everywhere—scattered on the floor, heaped upon benches, piled in corners, overflowing on to broken-down chairs, old ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... historically attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- 'alchemy,' 'alcohol,' 'alembic,' 'algebra,' 'alkali,' 'almanack,' 'azimuth,' 'cypher,' 'elixir,' 'magazine,' 'nadir,' 'tariff,' 'zenith,' 'zero '?—for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit cleaving to ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... of such things here," said the Doctor. "In my youth, when I studied in the North, experiments of that nature exercised a powerful sway over my mind. I dabbled in alchemy; I tried and indeed considered that I succeeded in raising spirits and visions; but two things are necessary for such a study: youth, and the mists of the Northern country. Here the generous sun kills such phantasies. There ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... stolid cliff Loosing himself, he followed his high heart To swim on sunshine, masterless as wind; And I believe the brown earth takes delight In the new snowdrop looking back at her, To think that by some vernal alchemy It could transmute her darkness into pearl; What is the buxom peony after that, With its coarse constancy of hoyden blush? 130 What the full summer to that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... their eye and see joy and beauty everywhere. When we meet them they impress us as just having met with some good luck, or that they have some good news to tell you. Like the bees that extract honey from every flower, they have a happy alchemy which transmutes even gloom into sunshine. In the sick room they are better than the physician and more potent than drugs. All doors open to these people. They are ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... and Feng-yang Fu, in Anhui. He devoted himself wholly to study and meditation, declining all offers to enter the service of the State. He preferred to take up his abode in the mountains of Western China, where he persevered in the study of alchemy and in cultivating the virtues of purity and mental abstraction. From the hands of Lao Tzu he received supernaturally a mystic treatise, by following the instructions in which he was successful in his search for the elixir ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... prophecy; if these discoveries, instead of having been, as they really were, preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and founder of philosophic alchemy; if they presented themselves to Sir Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic battery; if this battery, as far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... "Grail" subject distorted, the "Spear" motive thrust in discordant, the "Faith and Love" theme fluttering like a wounded dove in pain, fierce bursts of passion, wild shocks of uncontrolled misery, mingling with the "carnal joy" music of Klingsor's magic garden and the shuddering might of his alchemy. ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... a cabalist—is not so monstrous a prodigy in the nineteenth century! In the year 1801, Lackingtou published a quarto, entitled Magus: a Complete System of Occult Philosophy; treating of Alchemy, the Cabalistic Art, Natural and Celestial Magic, &c.—and a very impudent publication it is too. That Raphael should put forth astrological manuals is not a proof of his belief in the science he professes; but that it should answer ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... changed these vague experiments into exact science; astronomy has replaced astrology, and chemistry has taken the place of alchemy. Nevertheless these changes were brought about only very gradually, and in the 17th century, when Rembrandt lived and painted this picture, a great stir was made by the new ideas of astronomy taught by Galileo in Italy, and the new discoveries in chemistry ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... city. It was gone now from out his life, but everything about it seemed so good and fine; even its exclusive air was not ignoble. Clothed in the calm of history, the golden web of glorious tradition, radiant with the alchemy of memories, it bewitched him like the perfume of a woman's dress. At the entrance of a college they glanced in at the cool grey patch of stone beyond, and the scarlet of a window flowerbox—secluded, mysteriously calm—a narrow vision of the sacred past. Pale and trencher-capped, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... necessary was a thorough knowledge of gases and of the means of producing them. The older chemistry, or alchemy, devoted all its attention, for centuries, to the precious metals, and knew nothing of gas. Medical chemistry, which succeeded it, was concerned chiefly with the curative properties of various chemical preparations. When Robert Boyle, and the investigators who came after him, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... illness, received great attention from Fraeulein von Klettenberg, a friend of his mother's, a pietist of the Moravian school. She initiated him into the mystical writings of those abstracted saints, and she engaged him in the study of alchemy, which served at once to prepare him for the conception of Faust and for the scientific researches of his ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... in order to make the least amount of extravagance produce the utmost admiration and envy, it is desirable to be improvident as publicly as possible; the means for such expenditure being gleaned from retrenchments in the home department. Thus, by a system of domestic alchemy, the education of the children is resolved into a vehicle; a couple of maids are amalgamated into a man in livery; while to a single drudge, superintended and aided by the mistress and elder girls, is confided the economy of the pantry, from whose meagre shelves are supplied ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... acts by the same words: Preparation for a meeting of the ill-starred lovers; the meeting. What is outside of this is mere detail; yet the effect of the tragedy upon a listener is that of a play surcharged with pregnant occurrence. It is the subtle alchemy of music that transmutes the psychological action of ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the vulgar by cabalistic methods, and that though their real origin and the purpose of their association had at times been almost lost, it had revived, and been restored under many aspects. They claimed that alchemy, mediaeval Rosicrucianism, and modern Freemasonry were off-shoots of the original Cabala, and that during the past 150 years new associations had been formed, and the parties who had introduced me into their arcanum were a society in affiliation with many others then in existence in different ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... beautiful souls of the world have an art of saintly alchemy, by which bitterness is converted into kindness, the gall of human experience into gentleness, ingratitude ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... he knew very well that a magical change had taken place in medicine during the last twenty-five years. When he was studying at the university he had fancied that medicine would soon be overtaken by the fate of alchemy and metaphysics; but now when he was reading at night the science of medicine touched him and excited his wonder, and even enthusiasm. What unexpected brilliance, what a revolution! Thanks to the antiseptic system operations were performed such as the great Pirogov ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the ends of these tracts there are upwards of a hundred English tracts, nearly all of the period, and most of them translations. Alchemy looks up since the chemists have found perfectly different substances composed of the same elements and proportions. It is true the chemists cannot yet transmute; but they may in time: they poke about most assiduously. It seems, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... bring forth at her touch. Wherever she walks there are resurrections because life begets life. No science, no mathematics, no history, no language, can be dull or dry when touched by her art, but all become vital because she is vital. By the subtle alchemy of her artistic teaching all the subjects of her school are transmuted into the pure gold of truth ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... He knew also that there had been no miracle in language. He knew it was impossible that the story of the Tower of Babel should be true. That everything in the whole world had been natural. He was the enemy of alchemy, not only in language, but in science. One passage from him is enough to show his philosophy in this regard. He says: "To transmute iron into gold two things are necessary. First, the annihilation of the iron; second, the creation of gold." Voltaire was a man of humor, of ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Flanders, Johann[10] of Bruges, a painter much esteemed in those parts by reason of the great mastery that he had acquired in his profession, set himself to make trial of various sorts of colours, and, as one who took delight in alchemy, to prepare many kinds of oil for making varnishes and other things dear to men of inventive brain, such as he was. Now, on one occasion, having taken very great pains with the painting of a panel, and having brought it to completion with much diligence, he gave it ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... raindrops side by side, drawing irresistibly nearer, ever nearer: for now they had touched and were not two, but one inseparable drop, crystallized beyond change, not to be disintegrated by time, nor shattered by death's blow, nor resolved by any alchemy. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... the water, whilst the men stretched out as if unconscious of the exertion of pulling, every one of them feeling his share of the excitement. From the western sky the last lingering rays of the sun shot athwart the wave, turning it, as it were, by the alchemy of light into a flood of gold. Overhead, the cope of heaven was gradually growing soberer in hue from the withdrawal of those influences which lately had warmed and brightened it; but in the west a brilliant halo encircled the declining ruler of the day. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... compound of greatness, heroism, vanity and wickedness that ever was woman to the destruction of man; ending her terrible life in an absorbing passion for art and literature which attracted to itself all that was most delicate and refined at the end of the seventeenth century; dabbling in alchemy, composing verses forgotten long ago, discoursing upon art with Bernini, dictating the laws of verse to the poet Guidi, collecting together a vast library of rare books and a great gallery of great pictures, and of engravings and medals ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... of state; assumption; naturalization; transportation; development [biol.], developing [photography]. [conversion of currency] conversion of currency, exchange of currency; exchange rate; bureau de change. chemistry, alchemy; progress, growth, lapse, flux. passage; transit, transition; transmigration, shifting &c. v.; phase; conjugation; convertibility. crucible, alembic, caldron, retort. convert, pervert, renegade, apostate. V. be converted into; become, get, wax; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Idearum, which he published in 1582 at Paris, and which contains the germ of all his leading speculations. Bruno's metaphysics attracted less attention than his professed Art of Memory. In an age credulous of occult science, when men believed that power over nature was being won by alchemy and magic, there was no difficulty in persuading people that knowledge might be communicated in its essence, and that the faculties of the mind could be indefinitely extended, without a toilsome course ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... wall at distance meets his eye Which girds a spacious town within its bound; It seems as if its summit touched the sky, And all appears like gold from top to ground. Here some one says it is but alchemy — And haply his opinion is unsound — And haply he more wittily divines: For me, I deem it gold ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... even suitably moved: but as he sat by her bedside, and thoughtfully proffered to her the list of people who had "called to enquire", she looked first at him, and then at the child between them, and wondered at the blundering alchemy of Nature... ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... Cimmerian dark? When, in opposition to every possible criterion, a man claims that there is but 'one ultimate form of matter out of which successively the more complex forms of matter are built up,' is this the advance march of chemistry, or the retrograde to alchemy? When a writer, in a style however lucid and taking, firmly assumes that there is no essential difference in objects alike in material elements, but separated by that mighty and mysterious thing, life, is that the height of wisdom, or the depth of folly? And how ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... in horror. "Donald, how can you? You're tired out, that is all; and as for this—" she lightly touched the sheen of silvery gray at his temples, where the alchemy of Time and stress had made its mark—"it makes you look so ... so distinguished that I am ashamed of my frivolously familiar manner of greeting you. But I just couldn't help it, and I promise not to embarrass you again. Yes, you were embarrassed. ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... Providence has placed him. "And this rule," says he, "ordain I in all the churches." Yet—would any man believe it possible?—the very quintessence of abolitionism itself has been extracted from this passage of his writings! Let us consider for a moment the wonderful alchemy by which this ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... patriotic emotion till it overflowed again. Thus with the thunder of artillery, with the animating sound of drum and trumpet, with the more persuasive music of impassioned words, with shoutings and with revelry, these jocund compeers, from the highest to the lowest, mingled into one by the alchemy of a common joy, chased the hours of that memorable night and gave strange welcome to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... has furnished such a number of the noblest familiar quotations. It is, indeed, true that many of these jewels are fetched from the mines of other poets: great as Milton's obligations, to Nature were, his obligations to books were greater. But he has made all his own by the alchemy of his genius, and borrows little but to improve. The most remarkable coincidence is with a piece certainly unknown to him—Calderon's "Magico Prodigioso," which was first acted in 1637, the year of the publication of "Comus," a great year in the history ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... peerless queen, and it pained him—as it has pained unsuccessful lovers before—to think that she could contentedly accept pinchbeck for gold. It was inconsistent on his part, since he had sacrificed much for the very object of concealing from her the baseness of Mark's metal. He forgot, too, the alchemy ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... the picture in an instant. There was no mistaking the glow of the limbs, the midsummer languor of the smile, the magical atmosphere in which the gold of sunlight, of autumn leaves, of amber grapes, seemed fused by some lost alchemy of the brush. As he gazed, the scene changed, and he saw himself in a darkened room with cabalistic hangings. He saw Heiligenstern's tall figure, towering in supernatural light, the Duke leaning eagerly forward, the Duchess with ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... taught intelligently and truthfully the entire world would have accepted it centuries ago. Its very worst enemies are those who insist upon its inerrancy—who strive by some esoteric alchemy of logic to transmute its every fragment of base metal into bars of yellow gold, the folly of the creature into the wisdom of the Creator. During the Dark Ages hide-bound orthodoxy prevailed and practically every man was a church communicant; ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... short of stature, but it was impossible to imagine more beautiful features or hands. Her education had been very desultory; she had learned more from lovers than from teachers. She had a strong taste for empirical medicine and for alchemy, and was always compounding elixirs, tinctures and balms, some of which she regarded as valuable secrets. So it was that charlatans, trading on her weakness, made her consume, amid drugs and furnaces, a talent and a spirit which might have distinguished her in the highest societies. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... to enter into a full examination of the meaning and value of alchemy in its original legitimate sense (which must not be confused with activities that later on paraded under the same name). Only this we will say - that genuine alchemy owes its origin to an impulse which, at a time when the onlooker-consciousness first arose, led to the foundation of a school ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... subtly blended so that it seemed a perfect thing without beginning, as long descended as the folds of downs which sheltered it. The austere Tudor front, the Restoration wing, the offices built under Queen Anne, the library added in the days of the Georges, had by some alchemy become one. Peace and long memories were in every line of it, and that air of a home which belongs only to places that have been loved for generations. It breathed ease and comfort, but yet had a tonic vigour in it, for while it stood ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... condoned—the particular thing she would not have forgiven. Did she sit in torment while her husband turned his somersaults, or was she now too so perverse that she thought it a fine thing to be striking at the expense of one's honour? It would have taken a wondrous alchemy—working backwards, as it were—to produce this latter result. Besides these two alternatives (that she suffered tortures in silence and that she was so much in love that her husband's humiliating idiosyncrasy seemed to her only an added richness—a proof of life ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... strength. Him I will take, And in stern arts my scholar make. This smoking reed, in which hold The empyrean spark, shall mould Rock and hard steel to use of man: He shall be as a god to plan And forge all things to his desire By alchemy ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... credulous and frantic followers. Although he was not totally exempt from the follies of that age, since he believed in the transmutation of metals, and suggested to his pupils the wonderful power of potable gold, yet he distinguished rational alchemy from the fanatical systems then in repute, and zealously defended the former against the disciples of Galen, as well as those of Paracelsus. He made a number of important discoveries in chemistry, and was unquestionably the first professor in Germany who gave chemical lectures, upon ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... incense they burn at your feet." Wherever she went, as if a celestial magnet passed, all faces drifted towards her with admiring love and pleasure. By her lofty integrity and her matchless sweetness and skill, as by a rare alchemy, she transmuted her fugitive lovers into permanent friends. Her talents were as attractive as her features: little by little her conversation made the listener forget even her loveliness. Saint-Beuve says, "As her beauty slowly retreated, the mind it had eclipsed gradually shone ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... school. Since those days, when likewise he had cast nativities for us maidens, and many a time amused us with his magic arts, we had no knowledge of him but that, after his parents' death, he had ceased to ply the apothecary's trade, and had given himself up to the study of Alchemy. If folks spoke truth he had already discovered the philosopher's stone, or was nigh to doing so: but notwithstanding that many learned men, and among them the Magister had assured me, that such a thing was by no means beyond the skill of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... half in jest that she had said to Smythe, "He shall tell me!" But in the night, by some strange alchemy, that jest had been transmuted into a purpose of which she was still doubtful, if not afraid. And yet to go forward seemed less difficult than to go back. For she had let the days of Seth's recovery and convalescence ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... second offence, and expulsion for a third. At the College de Verdale, at Toulouse, expulsion was the penalty for a list of crimes which includes theft, entering the college by stealth, breaking into the cellar, bringing in a meretrix, witch-craft, alchemy, invoking demons or sacrificing to them, forgery, and ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... related to Chaucer's Pilgrims by the "Prioress" (one of the numerous repetitions of a cruel calumny against the Jews), and by the "Second Nun" (the supra-sensual story of Saint Cecilia). Hence, on the other hand, the greedy hunger for the marvels of astrology and alchemy, notwithstanding the growing scepticism even of members of a class represented by Chaucer's ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... examination satisfied Anstice that Iris had not been mistaken. Cheniston was dead; and as he stood looking down on the quiet face, which, by virtue of Death's magic alchemy, had regained in the last hour something of its former youth, Anstice knew a sincere and unfeigned pity for the young life so ruthlessly cut short by a ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... of a perfectly satisfactory Thought. Let it be observed that each of these rose-correspondences is directly based on Nature, and that, to a mind familiar with the antithetic identity of life and death, all are promptly soluble and mutually convertible, as by mental-magic alchemy. There is a truth and earnestness in them which, while stimulating the joyous sentiment, gives to every allusion to the rose the value of genius, and not of accident or the chic of a ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... neighbourhood of Einsiedeln, not far from Zurich, the son of a physician of repute. He studied in the University of Basle, and later was instructed by Trithemius, Abbot of St. Jacobs at Wurtzburg, an adept in magic, alchemy, and astrology. He passed a long period—probably ten years—of his later youth in travel, studying humanity at close range, gathering all sorts of information, forming his theories of diseases and ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... leaves that had begun to wither, held by tendrils that were strained until they could hold no more, the purple chalices swung lazily in the golden light, slowly filling with the garnered sweetness that every moment brought. Night and day the alchemy went on—dust and sun and dreaming, dust and moon and dreaming, while the Weaver waited, dreaming too, until the web ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... good purpose speak that evangelical word, Et ecce plus quam Salomon hic! You have here in your presence an incomparable treasure, that is, my lord Pantagruel, whose great renown hath brought me hither, out of the very heart of England, to confer with him about the insoluble problems, both in magic, alchemy, the cabal, geomancy, astrology, and philosophy, which I had in my mind. But at present I am angry even with fame itself, which I think was envious to him, for that it did not declare the thousandth part of the worth that indeed is in him. You have seen how ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... shining belt of brain substance called the "corpus callosum." This is the point of union between the subjective and objective, and as the current returns from the solar plexus to this point it is restored to the objective portion of the brain in a fresh form which it has acquired by the silent alchemy of the subjective mind. Thus the conception which was at first only vaguely recognized is restored to the objective mind in a definite and workable form, and then the objective mind, acting through the frontal brain—the area of comparison and analysis—proceeds to work upon a clearly ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... of abruptly postponing the lesson when his eye fell upon her face as she stood in the moonlight which streamed in through the open door. Was it the mystic alchemy of the moon on her face, or was it the glowing passion in her wonderful eyes that transfigured the coarse features? A sudden pity for the girl rose in Cameron's heart and he said gently, "We ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... other people, and you will have a seam of the precious mental metal opened up to you at once; only ore, most likely, that needs much smelting and refining; or it may be, not gold at all, but a metal which your mental alchemy may turn into gold. The one thing I learned was, that they and I were one, that our hearts were the same. How often I exclaimed inwardly, as some new trait came to light, in the words, though without the generalizing scorn, of Shakspere's Timon—"More man!" Sometimes I was seized ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... feud, or an indulgence in criminal or in foolish pursuits, have chilled the fervour of imagination, scattered into fragments many a noble design, and paralysed the finest genius. The distractions of GUIDO'S studies from his passion for gaming, and of PARMEGIANO'S for alchemy, have been traced in their works, which are often hurried over and unequal. It is curious to observe, that CUMBERLAND attributes the excellence of his comedy, The West Indian, to the peculiarly happy situation in which he found himself at the time of ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... degree of improvement her natural good sense was capable of receiving; she knew something of philosophy and physic, but not enough to eradicate the fondness she had imbibed from her father for empiricism and alchemy; she made elixirs, tinctures, balsams, pretended to secrets, and prepared magestry; while quacks and pretenders, profiting by her weakness, destroyed her property among furnaces, drugs and minerals, diminishing ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Niagara; but my feelings have swelled with no transient overflow. I gave my utmost love and devotion to a man I thought worthy. He treated me with neglect, and at last falsified his word in offering his hand to another, I do not hate him. I have none of that alchemy which changes despised love to gall. But I could never forgive him, nor trust him again. And if he, who seemed always so frank, so earnest, so tender, so single in his aims,—if he could not be trusted, I do not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... engaged the attention of medieval investigators. It was, however, much mixed up with alchemy, a false science which the Middle Ages had received from the Greeks, and they, in turn, from the Egyptians. The alchemists believed that minerals possessed a real life of their own and that they were continually developing in the ground toward the state of ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... perhaps it was this fact that enabled him to waste money on all sorts of hobbies instead of going to his office with his little black bag and behaving generally as a "weel tappit" husband and king would do. Rudolph's hobbies were alchemy and astronomy. The chief object of the former extremely inexact science seems to have been to make gold by the synthetic process. Any charlatan who came along with a declared conviction that he could produce gold was welcomed by the King. It was for these his ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... in great trouble, and he had no money with which to pay his painter's pension. The artist had lived so extravagantly that he did not know at last which way to turn, so in desperation he thought to try alchemy and maybe to learn the secret of making gold. He wasted much time at this, as cleverer men have done, but at last he became too ill for that or for his own proper work, and badly off though Charles ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... way chemistry developed out of the medival study of alchemy. The first experimentation with chemicals was carried on with the hope of producing gold by some happy combination of less valuable metals. But finally, after learning more about the nature of chemical compounds, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... is unity with God [Footnote ref 2]. The second stands for vairagya; the third is the worship of God with a view to seek his favour in the attainment of salvation (cf. Yoga sutra, I. 23 and I. 29). The fourth is a new introduction, namely that of rasayana or alchemy. As regards liberation the view is almost the same as in the Yoga sutra, II. 25 and IV. 34, but the liberated state is spoken of in one place as absorption in God or being one with him. The Brahman is conceived as an urddhvamula avaks'akha as'vattha (a ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... of social alchemy, my dear Paul, is to get the most we can out of each age of life through which we pass; to have and to hold the buds of our spring, the flowers of our summer, the fruits of our autumn. We amused ourselves once, a few good ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... and dropped into the distant hills. No wonder the miners go ever westward for the precious gold, to Colorado and Nevada and California, to Sitka and the Copper River, to Anvil City and the Nome beach and across the straits to Siberia. Never a clear night falls but they see the alchemy at work and the precious element going down in dust and nuggets and wide lodes behind the peaks and ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... the laws of Nature on the commixture of common elements, shall we despair that transformations yet more glorious may be wrought in human souls now thwarted and blackened by the malice of the devil, when they are subjected to the far diviner and far more stupendous alchemy of the ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... alike have turned to gold, And tears and laughter mingled to one end, With alchemy of living manifold: If Life so wrought, shall Death be less a friend? Nay, earth to heaven shall give the fairest face, Dimming the haughty beauties of the sky; Would I could see her softly take her place, Sweeping each ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... and they look up and smile. To them sorrow is but a preparation for a diviner joy. All things indeed work together for their good; since, whether fair fortune comes, or ill, they possess the spiritual alchemy that transmutes ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... sometimes questionable, it has rarely happened that the world has not benefited by them in the end. Thus Astrology, which ascribed to the stars an influence over the actions and destinies of man; Magic, which attempted to reverse the laws of nature, and Alchemy, which aimed at securing unlimited powers of self-reward; all tended to the final establishment of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... will, To offer up a sacrifice. Yea, there Between the hosts, the hands of Spain herself Slaughtered the Spanish murderers of the boy Who had borne Drake's flag of truce; offered them up As a blood-offering and an expiation Lest Drake, with that dread alchemy of his soul, Should e'en transmute the dust beneath their feet To one same substance with the place of pain And whelm them suddenly in the eternal fires. Rumour on rumour rushed across the sea, Large mockeries, and one most bitter of all, Wormwood to Philip, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... ruler will be as incomprehensible to the democratic citizen as alchemy, but, in order to draw anything like true inferences or useful deductions, in order to understand the situation and to get a true likeness of the ruler, one must take this utterly unfamiliar and to us incomprehensible claim into ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... virtues. The simple conditions of life are all that are worth striving for. They come to us fresh from Nature and from Nature's God. The complex are but concoctions of man after recipes in the devil's alchemy. So much gold, so much ambition, so much lust. Mix ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... has made history and destroyed it. A sparkling essence of tears and jest, of romance and passion and war and grotesquerie, of treachery and irony and blood and death, whose temper no man may know until he tests it through the alchemy of ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... Leibniz's ideas is anyhow unmistakable. If metaphysical thinking is nonsensical, its empire over the human imagination must still be confessed; if it is as chimerical a science as alchemy, it is no less fertile in by-products of importance. And if we are to consider Leibniz historically, we cannot do better than take up his Theodicy, for two reasons. It was the only one of his main philosophical works to be published in his lifetime, so that it was a principal ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... be worth the loss of all that we hold most sweet? We pay a price for our qualities; the thistle cannot become the vine, or the oak the rose, by admiration or desire. But we need not doubt of the divine alchemy that gives good gifts to others, and denies them to ourselves. And thus I can gratefully own that there are indeed these high mysteries of friendship, and I can be glad to discern them afar off, as the dweller on the high moorland, in the wind-swept farm, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... boy. But the deep deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child's hands were unlinked for ever from his mother's neck, or his lips for ever from his sister's kisses, these remain lurking below all, and these lurk to the last. Alchemy there is none of passion or disease that can scorch away these immortal impresses. And the dream which closed the preceding section, together with the succeeding dreams of this, (which may be viewed as in the nature of choruses ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... disease?' I said, 'Yes, but He does not say that He has told the doctors which it is; and meanwhile I say, hekmet Allah, (God will cure) which can't be called an infidel sentiment.' Then we got into alchemy, astrology, magic and the rest; and Yussuf vexed his friend by telling gravely stories palpably absurd. Abdurrachman intimated that he was laughing at El-Ilm el-Muslimeen (the science of the Muslims), but Yussuf said, 'What is the Ilm el-Muslimeen? God has revealed religion ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... desires; where they shall work for each other; live for each other; and through this blending of spirit, we will be able to forget the sordid present, the squalid here, the rankling now. By love's alchemy we will gild each hour and day, so it will be a time of joyous hope, and life will be a continual feast-day. And so through the desire and effort to express, we will reach the highest ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... of silk, He saw the fruits unfold, And all our expectations in one wild-flower-written dream, Confusion and death sweetness, and a thicket of crab-thorns, Heart of a hundred midnights, heart of the merciful morns. Heaven's boughs bent down with their alchemy, Perfumed airs, and thoughts of wonder. And the dew on the grass and his own cold tears Were one in brooding mystery, Though death's loud thunder came upon him, Though death's loud thunder struck him down— The boughs and the proud thoughts swept through ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... Exeter 'Change; Charing Cross, with a man upon a black horse! These are thy gods, O London! Ain't you mightily moped on the banks of the Cam? Had not you better come and set up here? You can't think what a difference. All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you,—at least, I know an alchemy that turns her mud into that metal: a mind that loves to be at home ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... perjure themselves in false affidavits of cures that were never performed; nor employ a set of led captains to harangue in my praise at all public places. I was bred regularly to the profession of chemistry, and have tried all the processes of alchemy; and I may venture to say, that this here elixir is, in fact, the chruseon pepuromenon ek puros, the visible, glorious, spiritual body, from whence all other beings derive their existence, as proceeding from their father the sun, and their mother the moon; from the sun, as from a living and spiritual ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... that his somewhat spectacular pietism disguised the spirit of one whose mind had little to do with the mysticism of the mediaeval church. Or perhaps it was that the strange friendship between him and Albertinelli, the man of the cloister and the man of the world, effected some alchemy in the mind of each. The story of that lifelong friendship, strong enough to overcome the difficulties of a definite partnership between the strict life of the monastery and the busy life of the bottega, is one of the most fascinating ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... and growing smaller and more numerous. And in the very smallest of the tiny tubes a wonderful process was going on—as wonderful as the way in which the oxygen fed the embryos through the shell. Somehow, by life's marvellous alchemy, the blood was laying hold of the material of the yolk, turning it into more blood, and carrying it away to be used in building up bone and muscle everywhere from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail. You might not have ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... which was a drug and a curse to our manufacturers, when treated under the hands of the chemist, has been the means of supplying us with dyes rivalling in loveliness and variety the hues of the rainbow. If the alchemy of science can extract beautiful colours from coal tar, cannot Divine alchemy enable us to evolve gladness and brightness out of the agonised hearts and dark, dreary, loveless lives of these doomed myriads? Is ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... giving more spirituality to consciousness and causing it to depend 422:18 less on material evidence. These changes which go on in mortal mind serve to reconstruct the body. Thus Christian Science, by the alchemy of Spirit, destroys sin ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Conduct of Ministers on the Reform Bill Religion Union with Ireland Irish Church A State Persons and Things History Beauty Genius Church State Dissenters Gracefulness of Children Dogs Ideal Tory and Whig The Church Ministers and the Reform Bill Disfranchisement Genius feminine Pirates Astrology Alchemy Reform Bill Crisis John, Chap. III. Ver. 4. Dictation and Inspiration Gnosis New Testament Canon Unitarianism—Moral Philosophy Moral Law of Polarity Epidemic Disease Quarantine Harmony Intellectual Revolutions Modern Style Genius of the Spanish ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the interference of criminal justice, and the piece, from the punishment of the guilty, has everything but a merry conclusion. In the Alchemist, both the deceivers and deceived supply a fund of entertainment, only the author enters too deeply into the learning of alchemy. Of an unintelligible jargon very short specimens at most ought to be given in comedy, and it is best that they should also have a secondary signification, of which the person who uses the mysterious language should not himself be aware; when carried to too great a length, the use of them occasions ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... ultimate essence of all things in the Kingdom of Nature—such as minerals, plants, and animals—hence of things pertaining to the realm of material Nature, however invisible that essence may be, and howsoever much it has hitherto eluded the grasp of Science. Alchemy, Astrology, Occult Physiology, Chiromancy exist in Nature, and the exact Sciences—perhaps so called because they are found in this age of paradoxical philosophies the reverse—have already discovered not a few of the secrets of the above arts. But clairvoyance, ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... was one of those whose candour is deadly. It was when he least endeavoured to conceal his character that its hideousness least appeared. He confessed sometimes so much, that you yielded that pity which, ere the shrived culprit could receive, by some fatal alchemy was changed into passion. His smile was a lure, his speech was a spell; but it was when he was silent, and almost gloomy, when you caught his serious eye, charged, as it were, with emotion, gazing on yours, that if you had a guardian sylph you should ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... Zodiac, beautiful in minute perfection. All the rest of the globe was covered with lace-fine work repeating one group of characters over and over. I was not learned enough to tell what the characters were, but the whole plainly belonged to those strange, outcast academies of astrology, alchemy—magic, in short. It contained what appeared to be a pinkish ball; originally a scented paste rolled round and dried, I judged by peering through ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... narrow sense of the word, alchemy is the pretended art of making gold and silver, or transmuting the base metals into the noble ones. The idea of such transmutation probably arose among the Alexandrian Greeks in the early centuries of the Christian ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of Sedgemoor—haunted Sedgemoor—on a fine day it is quite possible to see the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey from here; and Glastonbury Abbey, as you may know, is closely bound up with the history of Alchemy. It was in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey that the adept Kelly, companion of Dr. Dee, discovered, in the reign of Elizabeth, the famous caskets of St. Dunstan, ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... certain knowledge. The boldest and the grandest speculations came first. Man needed the stimulus of some higher reward than that of merely tracing the laws of phenomena. Nothing but a solution of the mystery of the universe could content him. Astronomy was derived from astrology: chemistry from alchemy, and physiology from auguries. The position occupied by philosophy in the history of mankind is that of the great initiative to positive science. It was the forlorn hope of mankind, and though it perished in ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... in alchemy," observed he, "and my sojourn, for above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the medical degree. Here, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled; to conceal the Truth, which it calls Light, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... electrical. The essence of all energies is one and the same, whether in the visible or invisible worlds; but the energies differ according to the grades of matter through which they manifest. A Sacrament serves as a kind of crucible in which spiritual alchemy takes place. An energy placed in this crucible and subjected to certain manipulations comes forth different in expression. Thus an energy of a subtle kind, belonging to one of the higher regions of the universe, may be brought into direct relation with people living ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... he said quietly, "I have no belief in that stone, or in that power of alchemy after which men since the beginning of time have been vainly striving. They may seek and seek, but I trow they will never find it; and I verily believe if found it would but prove a worthless boon. For in the hands of a rapacious master, so quickly would gold ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... gentleman. Sandy (Napier) was also probably his mother's medical adviser: he certainly acted as such to some members of her family. A man of fervent piety—his "knees were horny with frequent praying," says Aubrey—he was, besides, a zealous student of alchemy and astrology, a friend of Dee, of Lilly, and of Booker. Very likely Kenelm had been entrusted to Allen's care at Oxford on the recommendation of Sandy; for Allen, one of his intimates, was a serious occultist, who, according to his servant's ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... parents. It was at that time that an acquaintance sprang up which has ripened in later years into mutual respect and esteem. It was there that what might be termed a casual meeting took place, that has, under the alchemy of resist-less years, turned to golden links, forming a pleasant but powerful bond of union between my parents and myself. For that reason, I hope that I may be spared to my parents for many years ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... she said, at the same time, by some transforming alchemy of woman, presenting to the newcomer eyes that showed no ...
— The Game • Jack London
... of Evil, many times, As pearls and precious ambergris are grown, Fruits of disease in pain and sickness sown, So think not to unravel, in thy thought, This mingled tissue, this mysterious plan, The Alchemy of ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... supposed that tobacco has been without friends, wise, learned, and distinguished; but space forces us to pretermit the mention of many who have ascribed to it as many virtues as were ever ascribed to the grand elixir of Alchemy. We shall content ourselves with two or three miscellaneous testimonies.—Thus Acosta tells us it is a plant, "which hath in it rare virtues, as amongst others it serves for a counterpoison—for the Creator hath imparted his virtues at his pleasure, not willing that any thing ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... each polype mouth is feeding fast, sweeping into itself, by the perpetual currents caused by the delicate fringes upon its rays (so minute these last, that their motion only betrays their presence), each tiniest atom of decaying matter in the surrounding water, to convert it, by some wondrous alchemy, into fresh cells and buds, and either build up a fresh branch in their thousand- tenanted tree, or form an egg-cell, from whence when ripe may issue, not a fixed zoophyte, but ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... reaches into your pocket, and your safety-deposit box, in among the title papers and securities, and shakes off the dust and rust, and sends them out on an errand after the others. That fire—Himself—draws all into the smelting-pot. Its alchemy transmutes possessions into lives, redeemed, sweetened, Jesus-touched, Christ-renewed lives, made like Himself. And the sweet music of their new lives comes up into His gladdened ears, and a few of the strains come to cheer you. One may have at first a strange feeling of bareness, ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... moral anatomists, we are forced to the conclusion that they are frequently indebted to their imaginations for the results they obtain and not seldom for the material upon which they work. A real Chemistry may some day grow out of the failures of this fanciful Alchemy, but the present generation will hardly live to discover the philosopher's stone, though the search for it yield gold, indirectly, by the writing of many novels. If fiction is to be counted among the arts at all, ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it 50,000 pieces of silver" (Acts xix, 19). Doubtless these books of idolatrous divination and alchemy, of enchantments and witchcraft, were righteously destroyed by those to whom they had been and might again be spiritually injurious; and doubtless had they escaped the fire then, not one of them would have survived to the present time, no MS. of that ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... should be adopted by which men and women can be Americanized, as if there were some one particular prescription that could be given; as if you could roll up the sleeve of a man and give him a hypodermic of some solution that would, by some strange alchemy, transform him into a good American citizen; as if you could take him water, and in it make a mixture—one part the ability to read and write and speak the English language; then another part, the Declaration of Independence; one part, the Constitution of the United States; ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... have not found the theorem capable of rendering my work perfect. At the moment you knocked at the door I was picking up the Spirit of the World, and the Flower of Heaven, which are the veritable Fountains of Youth. Have you some understanding of alchemy, Monsieur Coignard?" ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... golden by dragging through dew and lying in the sun, and how the ladies of Venice sat upon the roofs of their palaces with locks outspread upon the encircling brims of crownless hats, in order to capture the true Venetian tint of hair. We do not know by what alchemy the sun silvers a web spread out to whiten, and yet gilds the human tresses of ladies and yellows the "taglocks" of sheep. Chemists may be able to explain, but simple woman, unversed in the mysteries of chemistry, cannot. Whatever may have been the science of it, this golden hue added to medium ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... himself. To what destiny did it correspond, this winged love soaring into the infinite? This rapture of devotion, this utter humbling of self, this ardour of the poet soul singing a fellow-creature to the heaven of heavens—by what alchemy comes it forth from blood and tissue? Nature has no need of such lyric life her purpose is well achieved by humbler instrumentality. Romantic lovers are not the ancestry ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... may have escaped your memory in the din of other things, that in the time when Oliver Cromwell still walked the earth, there lived in England a man by the name of Kenelm Digby, who was renowned in astrology and alchemy, piracy, wit, philosophy and fashion. It appears that wherever learning wagged its bulbous head, Sir Kenelm was of the company. It appears, also, that wherever the mahogany did most groan, wherever the possets were spiced most delicately to the nose, there too did Sir Kenelm ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... History of Transcendental Magic," by Eliphas Levi (Abbe Constant), translated by Arthur Edward Waite, there is a plate used to illustrate the author's theory of Alchemy, which he concludes "had two aspects, one a physical and the other a moral one." The sexual, as well as the spiritual, significance is ignored, but this may be due to a disinclination to reveal the secret meaning of the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Strange alchemy, which Sarka wondered about and, wondering, looked ahead to the time when he should be able, within his laboratory, to analyze the force it embodied, and thus gain new scientific knowledge of untold value to people of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... and mission'd forth Her sealed and unquestion'd messengers. Yet those who follow nature when the track Is finer than a hair—those who can cleave The subtile and combined elements That form a drop of water—those can shrink From the more holy alchemy enjoin'd, Call'd for by that disgust the heart conceives At the usurping empire of pretence; At all those useless and disgraceful chains, Which tie us down, and imp with aptest wings, Falsehood and selfishness, who ought to creep In ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... bridge-makers between the world of sense and the world of spirit. And, in fact, they pass their time in preaching, not the eternal mysteries, but a twopenny morality, in changing the Wine of Angels and the Bread of Heaven into gingerbeer and mixed biscuits: a sorry transubstantiation, a sad alchemy, as it seems ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... game of tennis or the village store! Sixth Avenue, indeed, has come to mean nothing more to them than a rustic bridge or a barbed-wire fence,—something to be gotten over speedily and forgotten. They even, by some alchemy of view point, seem to give it a rural air from Jefferson Market down to Fourth Street—these cool-looking, hatless young people who make their leisurely way down Washington Place or along Fourth Street. People pass them,—people in hats, coats ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... fulness of time, knowledge is obtained and mysteries are revealed. Chemistry and medicine, released from the tedious but not useless apprenticeship they had served to alchemy and empiricism, set up on their own account, and as a consequence, the 'nut of the sea' soon lost its European reputation as a curative, though it was still considered a very great curiosity, and the unsettled problem of its origin formed a famous stock of building materials ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... Sagamores, Puritans, Soldiers, Scholars, Quaker maids, Royalists splendid in their rich brocades! To-day the past has opened wide her door, Scenes long since gone return to us once more, Touched with the alchemy of history's gold. First, ancient Salem, as it was, behold In the grim days when "Witchcraft!" was the cry, When folk declared that they saw witches fly On devil's broomsticks straight across the moon, While ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... Love doth inherit! Ah, the alchemy which doth change Dross of body and dregs of spirit Into sanctities rare and strange! My flesh is feeble and dry and old, My darling's beautiful hair is gray; But our elixir and precious gold Laugh at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... School for Scandal was produced, will appear from the first sketches of its plan and dialogue, which I am here enabled to lay before the reader, and which cannot fail to interest deeply all those who take delight in tracing the alchemy of genius, and in watching the first slow workings of the menstruum, out of which its ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... men by lines in the hand." Thus, to a degree which is very little understood, PARACELSUS took a great step towards modern science. He disclaimed Magic and Sorcery, with ceremonies, and endeavored to base all cure on human will. The name of PARACELSUS is now synonymous with Rosicrucianism, Alchemy, Elementary Spirits and Theurgy, when, in fact, he was in his time a bold reformer, who cast aside an immense amount of old superstition, and advanced into what his age regarded as terribly free thought. He was compared to LUTHER, and the doing ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of this "alchemy of wit," as Camden calls it, will reconcile our modern notions of the [Greek: to trepon] with the puerile ingenuity thought graceful, at that unripe period of our literature, by some of the most accomplished writers and readers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... his rites sacerdotal were o'er, In the depths of his cell with its stone-covered floor, Resigning to thought his chimerical brain, Once formed the contrivance we now shall explain; But whether by magic's or alchemy's powers We know not; indeed, 'tis no ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... music, was left untouched by the treatises of Avicenna, many of which probably varied little, except in being commissioned by a different patron and having a different form or extent. He wrote at least one treatise on alchemy, but several others have been falsely attributed to him. His book on animals was translated by Michael Scot. His Logic, Metaphysics, Physics, De Caelo, are treatises giving a synoptic view of Aristotelian doctrine. The Logic and Metaphysics ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... standing vast against the sunset-light, the high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos—his second-self cries, "I tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the place, the time, the fashion of those lives." Never for him, then, had there been that alchemy of the soul which turns the inchoate drift of the world into golden ore, not then had come to him the electric awakening flash from "work of lofty art, nor woman's beauty, nor ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... made to political study was that they invented it. It is not too much to say that, before fifth-century Greece, politics did not exist. There were powers and principalities, governments and subjects, but politics no more existed than chemistry existed in the age of alchemy. An imitation of an idea, as Plato has taught us, is not the same as an idea; nor is the imitation of a science the same as a science. Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar, Croesus the Lydian and Cyrus the Persian, ruled over great empires; ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... these fifty men and women one true and sublime poet,—the dying "Grammarian," who applies the alchemy of a lofty imagination to the dry ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... and his life directed, by a Jesuit Father, who taught him the crucifix and the rosary. At sixteen the doctrine of divine illumination fascinated him. He struggled to find the path of true devotion; abandoned himself to extremely ritualistic forms of worship; dabbled a little in alchemy and astrology to help develop the divine nature within him and to attain the beatific vision. Soon he was introduced to the "Protestant nunnery," as it was called, where the venerable Mr. Ferran, a friend of George Herbert's, was greatly ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... were to him what the insignia of the secret orders are to the initiated, replete with mystical meaning. To him had come the sudden realization that he was in Nature's laboratory, and in the hieroglyphics traced on the granite walls he read the symbols of the mysterious alchemy silently and secretly wrought beneath their surface. The vastness of the scale of Nature's work, the multiplicity of her symbols, bewildered him, but in his own mind he knew that he still held the key ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... advanced more than two miles when he saw before him the superb city of Alcina. It was surrounded with a wall of gold, which seemed to reach the skies. I know that some think that this wall was not of real gold, but only the work of alchemy; it matters not; I prefer to think it gold, for it ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... matter; I believe he was allowed to keep them for some consideration received. Some of the Peterhouse books are traceable in the Ashmole collection, the Pepys Library, and the British Museum; of those of Queen's College I can say nothing. Dee was specially interested in mathematics, alchemy, and, as everyone knows, converse with spirits, but his library was not confined to books on these subjects; he had some excellent historical, literary, and theological MSS. One of them was the best copy ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... struck from flint. But under inspirational moods the mind begins to glow and kindle. Then the reason of the orator, the poet or reformer ceases to be like a taper, needing a match to light it, and becomes a sun, blazing with its own radiance. Spencer wrote: "By no political alchemy can we get golden conduct out of leaden instincts." Thus there is no necromancy by which the mind can get superior work ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... brought him into contact with Nature thus naked and untamed.—By now, and over as sinister a sea—since westward the dawn would barely yet have broke—the Forest Queen must be steaming along the Andalusian coast, making for Gibraltar and the Straits upon her homeward voyage. And by some psychic alchemy, an influence more potent and tangible than that of ordinary thought, her apprehension fled out, annihilating distance, bridging intervening space. For, just as certainly as Damaris' fair body leaned from the open window, so certainly did her fair ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... learn'd to wing my flight in air. And he admiring much, as he was void Of wisdom, will'd me to declare to him The secret of mine art: and only hence, Because I made him not a Daedalus, Prevail'd on one suppos'd his sire to burn me. But Minos to this chasm last of the ten, For that I practis'd alchemy on earth, Has doom'd me. Him ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... be supposed that tobacco has been without friends, wise, learned, and distinguished; but space forces us to pretermit the mention of many who have ascribed to it as many virtues as were ever ascribed to the grand elixir of Alchemy. We shall content ourselves with two or three miscellaneous testimonies.—Thus Acosta tells us it is a plant, "which hath in it rare virtues, as amongst others it serves for a counterpoison—for the Creator ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... arranged, tended to impede each other, and she did not acquire that degree of improvement her natural good sense was capable of receiving; she knew something of philosophy and physic, but not enough to eradicate the fondness she had imbibed from her father for empiricism and alchemy; she made elixirs, tinctures, balsams, pretended to secrets, and prepared magestry; while quacks and pretenders, profiting by her weakness, destroyed her property among furnaces, drugs and minerals, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy. ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... Sprat did anticipate. Shadwell in his 'Virtuoso' found material for profane merriment in some of the unquestionably absurd inquiries made or suggested by the natural philosophers. "Science was then only just emerging from the Mists of Superstition." Astrology and Alchemy still infected Astronomy, Chemistry, and Medicine. A Fellow of the Royal Society, along with the Puritan, made a ridiculous figure on the stage. But Puritanism and Natural Philosophy both survived the "test of truth," and ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... with a great part in the palace conspiracies of St. Petersburg; he lived at Berlin, and, under the name of Tzarogy, at the Court of the Margrave of Anspach. Thence he went, they say, to Italy, and then north to the Landgrave, Charles of Hesse, who dabbled in alchemy. Here he is said to have died about 1780-85, leaving his papers to the Landgrave; but all is very vague after he disappeared from Paris in 1760. When next I meet Saint-Germain he is again at Paris, again mysteriously rich, again he rather disappears than dies, he calls himself Major ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... process by which the School for Scandal was produced, will appear from the first sketches of its plan and dialogue, which I am here enabled to lay before the reader, and which cannot fail to interest deeply all those who take delight in tracing the alchemy of genius, and in watching the first slow workings of the menstruum, out of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... Where, it may be asked, were my ideals? Let it not be supposed that I believed myself to have lost them. If so, the impression I have given of myself has been wholly inadequate. No, they had been transmuted, that is all, transmuted by the alchemy of Weathersfield, by the personality of Theodore Watling into brighter visions. My eyes rarely left his face; I hung on his talk, which was interspersed with native humour, though he did not always join in the laughter, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Ah! how sinister and covetous you look already!" I laughed too, and told him I was devoured by the desire for gold, and we had better talk of something else; so when Genevieve came in shortly after, we had turned our backs on alchemy. ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... making people joyful, and is helpful medicinally against certain maladies. Moreover real gold can be employed more frequently, and lasts longer in its condition of purity than counterfeit gold. If however real gold were to be produced by alchemy, it would not be unlawful to sell it for the genuine article, for nothing prevents art from employing certain natural causes for the production of natural and true effects, as Augustine says (De Trin. iii, 8) of things produced by the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... picture in an instant. There was no mistaking the glow of the limbs, the midsummer languor of the smile, the magical atmosphere in which the gold of sunlight, of autumn leaves, of amber grapes, seemed fused by some lost alchemy of the brush. As he gazed, the scene changed, and he saw himself in a darkened room with cabalistic hangings. He saw Heiligenstern's tall figure, towering in supernatural light, the Duke leaning eagerly forward, the Duchess with set lips and troubled eyes, the little ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Clausen," she said, at the same time, by some transforming alchemy of woman, presenting to the newcomer eyes that showed no hint ...
— The Game • Jack London
... neither his stories nor his " plot," if we may so call it. He wrote in the middle of the fourteenth century (1344-8) when the West had borrowed many things from the East, rhymes[FN8] and romance, lutes and drums, alchemy and knight-errantry. Many of the "Novelle" are, as Orientalists well know, to this day sung and recited almost textually by the wandering tale-tellers, bards, and rhapsodists ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... of the ruler will be as incomprehensible to the democratic citizen as alchemy, but, in order to draw anything like true inferences or useful deductions, in order to understand the situation and to get a true likeness of the ruler, one must take this utterly unfamiliar and to us incomprehensible ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... ends of these tracts there are upwards of a hundred English tracts, nearly all of the period, and most of them translations. Alchemy looks up since the chemists have found perfectly different substances composed of the same elements and proportions. It is true the chemists cannot yet transmute; but they may in time: they poke about most assiduously. It ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... pleasure to pain, from joy to grief. There is, indeed, no fixed threshold between the states of normal and abnormal consciousness. In this stranger he imagined a sense of companionship that by some magic of alchemy transformed his deep loneliness into joy, and satisfied his passionate yearnings by bringing their subjective fulfillment within range. To have found acceptance in his sight was thus a revolutionary fact in his ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... young man adored. The legend has gone that deluded the boy. But the deep deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child's hands were unlinked for ever from his mother's neck, or his lips for ever from his sister's kisses, these remain lurking below all, and these lurk to the last. Alchemy there is none of passion or disease that can scorch away these immortal impresses. And the dream which closed the preceding section, together with the succeeding dreams of this, (which may be viewed as in the nature of choruses ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... man and maid; The land reflected in the flood; Body with shadow still pursued. For nature beats in perfect tune And rounds with rhyme her every rune; Whether she work in land or sea Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. Not unrelated, unaffied, But to each thought and thing allied, Is perfect ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... beautiful in minute perfection. All the rest of the globe was covered with lace-fine work repeating one group of characters over and over. I was not learned enough to tell what the characters were, but the whole plainly belonged to those strange, outcast academies of astrology, alchemy—magic, in short. It contained what appeared to be a pinkish ball; originally a scented paste rolled round and dried, I judged by peering through ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... down among the millions and millions. His Divine Right, crumbling under the grandeur of partition among the millions, became for himself the most infinitesimal of shares, neither greater nor less than that of any other human being. But glorified now by the holy alchemy of Charity, the tiny grain became divine indeed, and he beheld it as a glowing spark, his own inalienable share in the rights of man. So, for a moment, the poet prince knew again his old-time exultation. Even Truth, he ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... I know that thou art most prodigal of frivolous talk. I sent for thee only to shave my head, but thou comest and pesterest me with this sorry prattle." "What more wouldst thou have?" replied he. "Allah hath bounteously bestowed on thee a Barber who is an astrologer, one learned in alchemy and white magic;[FN612] syntax, grammar, and lexicology; the arts of logic, rhetoric and elocution; mathematics, arithmetic and algebra; astronomy, astromancy and geometry; theology, the Traditions of the Apostle and the Commentaries on the Koran. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious people; while the most important artistic monuments of that legend sufficiently prove that the Romantic spirit was really at work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not without the elements of tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of a matter, at first sight ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... God glorifies God, as showing the most wonderful working of His power in making such a man out of such material, by an alchemy that can convert base metal into fine gold; as showing the most wonderful condescension of His love in taking to His heart man, into whose flesh the rotting ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... government fed you. You did not suffer yet cry "forward" To an army which you led Against a foe with mocking smiles, Sharper than bayonets. You were not smitten down By invisible bombs. You were not rejected By those for whom you were defeated. You did not eat the savorless bread Which a poor alchemy had made from ideals. You went to Manila, Harry Wilmans, While I enlisted in the bedraggled army Of bright-eyed, divine youths, Who surged forward, who were driven back and fell Sick, broken, crying, shorn of faith, Following the flag of the Kingdom of Heaven. You and ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... attributes. I think I prefer the moon, because it is inimitable. You can counterfeit the light and warmth and heat of the sun, and even its color. But silver is used to describe the complexion of the moon only for want of a better word. It is neither silver nor white, but is the result of some mysterious alchemy known only to itself. And its temperature does not affect our bodies at all. You cannot deny that it has exercised a most beneficent effect on the spirits of lovers and poets for all the centuries we know of. Every pair of lovers has some cherished memories of moonlight, and poets would probably ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... sunset-light, the high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos—his second-self cries, "I tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the place, the time, the fashion of those lives." Never for him, then, had there been that alchemy of the soul which turns the inchoate drift of the world into golden ore, not then had come to him the electric awakening flash from "work of lofty art, nor woman's beauty, nor sweet ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... great disappointment when he knew that his work could not be done. He was weak in health and much in debt, for the king could not pay him his pension nor what he owed him for pictures. The artist grew sad and discouraged. He sought relief in the study of alchemy, and indulged the vain hope of discovering some chemical means of making gold from base metals. All this wasted his time and means, and it is to be regretted that he was less wise than his master, for when an alchemist tried to interest Rubens in the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... sky, Mysterious, fair as the moon-led sea, The vast plain flames on the dazzled eye Under the fierce sun's alchemy. The slow hawk stoops To his prey in the deeps; The sunflower droops To the lazy wave; the wind sleeps— Then swirling in dazzling links and loops, A riot of shadow and shine, A glory of olive and amber and wine, To the westering sun ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... twins entered Jesus College, Oxford, in 1638. This was early in the Great Rebellion, and Charles then kept his Court at Oxford. The young Vaughans were hot Royalists; Thomas bore arms, and Henry was imprisoned. Thomas, after many perils, retired to Oxford, and devoted his life to alchemy, under the patronage of Sir Robert Murray, Secretary of State for Scotland, himself addicted to these studies. He published a number of works, with such titles as "Anthroposophia Theomagica, or a Discourse of the Nature of Man, and his State ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... New Comedy of the Greeks and in the Comedy of Rome; it has fallen under the lash of Horace and Juvenal; nowhere is Lucian more amusing than when dealing with this species of roguery. Chaucer with exquisite humour exposed it and its kindred alchemy in the fourteenth century, and Ben Jonson and the author of Albumazar in the seventeenth. Nothing in Hudibras is more rich in wit and humour than the exposure of Sidrophel, and one of the best of Dryden's comedies ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... dwell dominion and the power of prophecy; if these discoveries, instead of having been as they really were, preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and founder of philosophic alchemy; if they presented themselves to Sir Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic battery; if this battery, as far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... expound whore to you? sure I shall; I 'll give their perfect character. They are first, Sweetmeats which rot the eater; in man's nostrils Poison'd perfumes. They are cozening alchemy; Shipwrecks in calmest weather. What are whores! Cold Russian winters, that appear so barren, As if that nature had forgot the spring. They are the true material fire of hell: Worse than those tributes ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... got heavily into debt. King Charles himself was in great trouble, and he had no money with which to pay his painter's pension. The artist had lived so extravagantly that he did not know at last which way to turn, so in desperation he thought to try alchemy and maybe to learn the secret of making gold. He wasted much time at this, as cleverer men have done, but at last he became too ill for that or for his own proper work, and badly off though Charles was himself, ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... chain of circumstances, came the pressing need of service for his father's sake. It was a call upon his deepest strength, and he responded bravely. While the future might be doubtful, he had no doubt of himself; and this very state of mind, this self-confidence, by a generous alchemy, gave him added resolution. Nor did he fail to be vaguely aware of it, and to grasp dimly at the truth ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... and gardens, fountains and baths, and stately halls decorated in the most costly style of Oriental luxury. According to Moorish tradition, the king who built this mighty and magnificent pile was skilled in the occult sciences, and furnished himself with the necessary funds by means of alchemy.* Such was its lavish splendor that even at the present day the stranger, wandering through its silent courts and deserted halls, gazes with astonishment at gilded ceilings and fretted domes, the brilliancy and beauty ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... silent rule, and mission'd forth Her sealed and unquestion'd messengers. Yet those who follow nature when the track Is finer than a hair—those who can cleave The subtile and combined elements That form a drop of water—those can shrink From the more holy alchemy enjoin'd, Call'd for by that disgust the heart conceives At the usurping empire of pretence; At all those useless and disgraceful chains, Which tie us down, and imp with aptest wings, Falsehood and selfishness, who ought to creep In their ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... genial, sympathetic friend. Goethe, during his illness, received great attention from Fraeulein von Klettenberg, a friend of his mother's, a pietist of the Moravian school. She initiated him into the mystical writings of those abstracted saints, and she engaged him in the study of alchemy, which served at once to prepare him for the conception of Faust and for the scientific ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... did not know that his soul was moved to some such consecration as that of a young knight taking his vow of service, though he was aware that all the good in him leaped to instant response in her presence, that by some strange spiritual alchemy he had passed through a ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... Mint then is in this same City of Cambaluc, and the way it is wrought is such that you might say he hath the Secret of Alchemy in perfection, and you would be right! For he makes his money after ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... flight, and he, who had vain desire and little wit, wished that I should show him the art, and only because I did not make him Daedalus, made me be burned by one[3] that held him as a son; but to the last pit of the ten, for the alchemy that I practiced in the world, Minos, to whom it is not allowed to err, condemned me." And I said to the Poet, "Now was ever people so vain as the Sienese? surely not so the French by much." Whereon the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... imagination is almost complete in the pseudo-sciences (alchemy, astrology, magic, occultism, etc.), which it would be more proper to call embryonic sciences, for they were the beginnings of more exact disciplines and their fancies have not been without use. In the history of science, this is the golden age of the creative imagination, corresponding ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... cliff Loosing himself, he followed his high heart To swim on sunshine, masterless as wind; And I believe the brown earth takes delight In the new snowdrop looking back at her, To think that by some vernal alchemy It could transmute her darkness into pearl; What is the buxom peony after that, With its coarse constancy of hoyden blush? 130 What the full summer to that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... linear progression from the old social sciences—forget it," Neel said. "There is the same relationship here that alchemy holds to physics. The old boys with their frog guts and awful offal knew a bit about things like distilling and smelting. But there was no real order to their knowledge, and it was all an unconsidered by-product of their single goal, ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... that she had said to Smythe, "He shall tell me!" But in the night, by some strange alchemy, that jest had been transmuted into a purpose of which she was still doubtful, if not afraid. And yet to go forward seemed less difficult than to go back. For she had let the days of Seth's recovery and convalescence slip by without ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... hopes of enriching himself by the pursuits of alchemy, Tycho devoted most of his attention to those satellites of gold and silver which now constituted his own system, and which disturbed by their powerful action the hitherto uniform movements of their primary. His affections were ever turning to Germany, where ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... the rank and dignity of a science by making it appeal to the reason instead of the fear and superstition of the people. The governments of the past, basing their claims upon divine right, bear about the same relation to democracy that astrology and alchemy do to the modern sciences of astronomy and chemistry. The old political order everywhere represented itself as superimposed on man from above, and, thus clothed with a sort of divine sanction, it was exalted above the reach of criticism. ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... Her Majesty about Roger Bacon. "Before my time, of course," the Queen was saying, "but I'm sure he was a most interesting man. Now when dear old Marlowe wrote his 'Faust,' he and I had several long discussions about such matters. Alchemy—" ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... ALCHEMY, the early analysis of substances which has in modern times developed into chemistry, and which aimed chiefly at the discovery of the philosopher's stone, of a universal solvent, and of the elixir of life; it has been defined to be "an art without art, which has its beginning in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... for the optimist, who does not fly from them, but welcomes them. He has a mental prism which can separate the insipid white light of existence into bright hues. He has a mental alchemy by which he can produce golden instruction out of the dross of failure. He has a spiritual magic which makes the nectar of joy out of the tears of sorrow. He has a clairvoyant eye that can perceive the existence of hope through the iron walls of despair. Prosperity tends ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... most active research projects of the S.M.M.R. was the construction of a more powerful symbology. Psionics had made tremendous strides in the previous four decades, but it was still in the alchemy stage. So far, symbols for various processes could only be worked out by cut-and-try, rule-of-thumb methods, using symbols already established, including languages and mathematics. None were completely satisfactory, but they worked fairly ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of time, knowledge is obtained and mysteries are revealed. Chemistry and medicine, released from the tedious but not useless apprenticeship they had served to alchemy and empiricism, set up on their own account, and as a consequence, the 'nut of the sea' soon lost its European reputation as a curative, though it was still considered a very great curiosity, and the unsettled problem of its origin ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... and invariable sequence of cause and effect, independent of personal will, reappears from the obscurity and discredit into which it had fallen, and by investigating the causal sequences in nature, directly prepares the way for science. Alchemy leads up to chemistry. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... was of uncommon quality and amount, it does not seem to have surpassed his acquisitions in science. "I have attempted," he says in a striking passage, "with great diligence, to attain certainty as to what is needful to be known concerning the processes of alchemy and natural philosophy and medicine.... And what I have written of the roots [of these sciences] is, in my judgment, worth far more than all that the other natural philosophers now alive suppose themselves to know; for in vain, without these roots, do they seek for branches, flowers, and fruit. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... concerning his two letters on Phrenology, and giving his own opinion on that subject in the following characteristic language: "I have never been able to persuade myself to think of the science of Phrenology as a serious speculation. I have classed it with judicial astrology, with alchemy, and with augury; and, as Cicero says he wonders how two Roman augurs could have looked each other in the face without laughing, I have felt something of the same surprise that two learned phrenologists can meet without ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... bread from the baker; she appeared so seldom in the market, that the least credulous of the townspeople ended by attributing to these strange beings the knowledge of some secret for the maintenance of life. Those who dabbled in alchemy declared that Maitre Cornelius had the power of making gold. Men of science averred that he had found the Universal Panacea. According to many of the country-people to whom the townsfolk talked of him, Cornelius was a chimerical being, and many of them came into the town to look at his ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... fantastical: asserting, moreover, that those witches were compelled by the severity of torture to confess acts that they had never done; that innocent blood was shed by a cruel judicature; and that by a new alchemy gold and silver were extracted from human blood. 3. Thereby, and by the like assertions, partly diffused by private oral communications among the vulgar, partly by various letters addressed to both branches of the magistracy, imputing ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... doubtless do many times again. It is merely a matter of altering the valence of the atoms in an old element; whereupon it shifts its position in the periodic scale and becomes a new element. Nature accomplishes this alchemy by means of great heat, which is certainly to be found ...
— Spawn of the Comet • Harold Thompson Rich
... mayest," said Michael—"that is, if thou art the same brisk boy who was partner with me at robbing the Abbot's orchard. 'Tis but a little touch of alchemy to decoct thy house and land into ready money, and that ready money into a tall ship, with sails, anchors, cordage, and all things conforming; then clap thy warehouse of goods under hatches, put fifty good fellows on deck, with ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... When all your alchemy, and your algebra, Your minerals, vegetals, and animals, Your conjuring, cozening, and your dozen of trades, Could not relieve your corps with so much linen Would make you tinder, but to see a fire; I gave you countenance, credit for your coals, Your stills, your glasses, your materials; Built you ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... of artillery, with the animating sound of drum and trumpet, with the more persuasive music of impassioned words, with shoutings and with revelry, these jocund compeers, from the highest to the lowest, mingled into one by the alchemy of a common joy, chased the hours of that memorable night and gave strange welcome to the morn ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... which separated the real from the unreal, he refused to treat the latter supernaturally. That mystery which lesser minds found in the occult, he saw in nature all about him. He denied the existence of spirits, just as he urged the foolishness of the will-o'-the-wisps of former ages,—alchemy and the black art. In one sentence he destroyed the pretensions of palmistry. "You will see," he wrote, "great armies slaughtered in an hour's time, where in each individual the signs of ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... from hatred toward each other. Even then, this ground of union would have ceased with their victory, and on the morrow of the social revolution the old national rivalries might have revived. There is no alchemy by which a universal harmony can be produced out of hatred. Those who have been inspired to action by the doctrine of the class war will have acquired the habit of hatred, and will instinctively seek new enemies when the old ones have ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... absurd tale that had been printed in the Cleveland paper and her fancy took hold of it. Like every other citizen of America she believed in heroes. In books and magazines she had read of heroic men who had come up out of poverty by some strange alchemy to combine in their stout persons all of the virtues. The broad, rich land demanded gigantic figures, and the minds of men had created the figures. Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Sherman, and a half dozen other men were something ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... more commonly use another name for this peculiar liquid—namely, "alcohol," and its origin is not less singular. The Dutch physician, Van Helmont, lived in the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century—in the transition period between alchemy and chemistry—and was rather more alchemist than chemist. Appended to his "Opera Omnia," published in 1707, there is a very needful "Clavis ad obscuriorum sensum referandum," in which ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... He knew that the language of snow and ice was not the language of palm and flower. He knew also that there had been no miracle in language. He knew it was impossible that the story of the Tower of Babel should be true. That everything in the whole world had been natural. He was the enemy of alchemy, not only in language, but in science. One passage from him is enough to show his philosophy in this regard. He says: "To transmute iron into gold two things are necessary. First, the annihilation of the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... at her touch. Wherever she walks there are resurrections because life begets life. No science, no mathematics, no history, no language, can be dull or dry when touched by her art, but all become vital because she is vital. By the subtle alchemy of her artistic teaching all the subjects of her school are transmuted into the pure gold ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... architecture elaborated in the deep seclusion of mountain and forest. The dewy areca-palms throw a dark network of interlacing shadows across the red road, winding for miles through the sylvan scenery, the alchemy of the rising sun transmuting the myriad feathery fronds into fountains of green fire. Only the creaking of a bullock-waggon, or the thud of a falling cocoanut, breaks the hush of the tropical daybreak, when ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... from her hiding-place in one of the outskirts of London, an ancient woman whose surroundings forcibly illustrate the persevering vitality of even the insanest forms of religious belief. Joanna Southcott and her fanaticisms we are apt to associate with Dr. Faustus, alchemy, and persons and things of that kind, as belonging to an age with which we have no personal concern. Yet this is a mistake. The followers of the fatidical Joanna may still be counted by thousands in Great Britain, particularly in its metropolis; and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... one clear flame, to stand erect In natural honour, not to bend the knee In profitless prostrations whose effect Is by itself condemned, what alchemy Can teach me this? what herb Medea brewed Will bring the unexultant peace of essence ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... left the work to the magic and sovereign forces now at play; he did not risk marring the alchemy by a single word. After a moment which seemed an hour he found himself once more confronted by the direct observation of ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... go ever westward for the precious gold, to Colorado and Nevada and California, to Sitka and the Copper River, to Anvil City and the Nome beach and across the straits to Siberia. Never a clear night falls but they see the alchemy at work and the precious element going down in dust and nuggets and wide lodes behind the peaks and into ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... profoundly. On his left knee his left hand rested with two fingers held up. By some rapid mental alchemy these fingers had now become Home Rule and Tariff Reform. His right hand which had hitherto taken no part in the controversy, had raised its index finger by imperceptible degrees. It had been raised almost subconsciously. And by still obscurer processes this finger ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... 'their sixe-penn'orth' of it at the first performance,—something which that witty and splendid company, who made up the Christmas party at Whitehall, on the occasion of its first exhibition there, who sat there 'rustling in silk,' breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; though there might have been one among them, 'a gentleman of blood and breeding,' who could have ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the rise or decline of nations. Some of his conclusions were hasty; many of his analogies fanciful; but he first turned the human mind in that direction. It is by repeatedly deviating into error that it can alone be discovered where truth really lies: there is an alchemy in the moral, not less than in the material world, in which a vast amount of genius must be lost before it is discovered that it has taken the wrong direction. But in Montesquieu, besides such occasional and unavoidable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... their belief in natural, as against the supernatural, causes of disease, and at one time Arnald was obliged to flee from Barcelona for declaring that the "bulls" of popes were human works, and that "acts of charity were dearer to God than hecatombs." He was also accused of alchemy. Fleeing from persecution, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... which, for a single experiment, he consumed several pounds. His processes may be carried on in the drawing-room, and some of them are no less beautiful in appearance than satisfactory in their results. It was said, by an author belonging to the last century, of alchemy, "that its beginning was deceit, its progress labour, and its end beggary." It may be said of modern chemistry, that its beginning is pleasure, its progress knowledge, and its objects truth and utility. I have spoken of ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... honour, and pride beyond her wildest guess of pride. Our eyes are far-visioned for star-gazing, while her eyes see no farther than the solid earth beneath her feet, the lover's breast upon her breast, the infant lusty in the hollow of her arm. And yet, such is our alchemy compounded of the ages, woman works magic in our dreams and in our veins, so that more than dreams and far visions and the blood of life itself is woman to us, who, as lovers truly say, is more than all the world. Yet is this just, else ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... developed out of the medival study of alchemy. The first experimentation with chemicals was carried on with the hope of producing gold by some happy combination of less valuable metals. But finally, after learning more about the nature of chemical ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... place where I first met my parents. It was at that time that an acquaintance sprang up which has ripened in later years into mutual respect and esteem. It was there that what might be termed a casual meeting took place, that has, under the alchemy of resist-less years, turned to golden links, forming a pleasant but powerful bond of union between my parents and myself. For that reason, I hope that I may be spared to my parents for ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... thou well, thou secret lore: Necromancy, Alchemy! Formulas shall bind no more, And our ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... many years the medical adviser of the house; and although Lord Mergwain accorded the medical practice of his day about the same relation to a science of therapeutics that old alchemy had to modern chemistry, yet the moment he felt ill, he was sure to send for young Jermyn. Charles had also attended Lady Joan in several illnesses, for she had not continued in such health as when she ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... magic, but a troublesome error, a pernicious foppery? physic, but intricate rules and prescriptions? philology, but vain criticisms? logic, needless sophisms? metaphysics themselves, but intricate subtleties, and fruitless abstractions? alchemy, but a bundle of errors? to what end are such great tomes? why do we spend so many years in their studies? Much better to know nothing at all, as those barbarous Indians are wholly ignorant, than as some of us, to be so sore vexed about ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... nearer to Burton than to any one else: and I think further that it might have been made into a success of this kind or even of the novel sort itself. But as it stands with the sketch of a completion, I do not think that Flaubert's alchemy had yet ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... yellow heart there is of health and strength for all the nations. The corn triumphant, that with the aid of man hath made victorious procession across the tufted plain and laid foundation for the social excellence that is and is to be. This glorious plant, transmuted by the alchemy of God, sustains the warrior in battle, the poet in song, and strengthens everywhere the thousand arms that work the purposes of life. Oh that I had the voice of song, or skill to translate into tones the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... the ultimate essence of all things in the Kingdom of Nature—such as minerals, plants, and animals—hence of things pertaining to the realm of material Nature, however invisible that essence may be, and howsoever much it has hitherto eluded the grasp of Science. Alchemy, Astrology, Occult Physiology, Chiromancy exist in Nature, and the exact Sciences—perhaps so called because they are found in this age of paradoxical philosophies the reverse—have already discovered ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... that he looked more like a poet than a Doctor even in his uniform; and less like a soldier than either. Such is the alchemy of ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... wearing a high-crowned hat shaped somewhat like a crucible. He was from beyond the sea—a Doctor Cacaphodel, who had wilted and dried himself into a mummy by continually stooping over charcoal-furnaces and inhaling unwholesome fumes during his researches in chemistry and alchemy. It was told of him—whether truly or not—that at the commencement of his studies he had drained his body of all its richest blood and wasted it, with other inestimable ingredients, in an unsuccessful experiment, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to be decaying, as he calls it, we should test carefully his data and his credentials. But, assuming he is right, there will always be found some compensating reaction in another sphere of intellectual activity which is in process of development; and through which, by some divine alchemy, providence, or nature, call it what you will, a new manifestation will be made to the world. The arts which we suppose to have perished, of which, indeed, we write affecting epitaphs, are merely hibernating; the intellect ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... permanent condition, and indeed almost as the humanizing feature, of earthly life. It is noticeable that the clergyman, the physician, and the artist are the only specific types that attracted Hawthorne; he held them all romantically, and science he conceived as alchemy. This same predisposition appears in "Rappaccini's Daughter;" she was the experiment of her father in creating a live poison-woman, a vitalized flower, the Dryad as it were of the poison-tree humanized in mortal shape; the physical object is ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... nodded. He had caught a glimpse of the apparently illimitable vistas of knowledge. What he saw took on tangibility. His abnormal power of vision made abstractions take on concrete form. In the alchemy of his brain, trigonometry and mathematics and the whole field of knowledge which they betokened were transmuted into so much landscape. The vistas he saw were vistas of green foliage and forest glades, all softly luminous or shot ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... so long in peace beneath the Fig Tree of the Cemetery of St. Paul, could be risen now when his grave was weighed upon by No. 32 of the street of the same name. Howsoever, he would have guessed that the alchemy of that immeasurable mind had in some way got rid of the difficulty, and really the Hack must be forgiven for his faith, since one learned enough to know so much about sites, history and literature, is learned enough to doubt the senses and to accept the Impossible; unfortunately the fact was ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... Alchemy was a common pursuit in the Middle Ages. The poor followed it eagerly in the vain desire for gold; the rich spent their wealth in useless experiments, or showered ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... blazing midnight stars of rainless Egypt. Several handsome rosewood cases were filled with rare books—two in Pali—centuries old; and moth- eaten volumes and valuable MSS.—some in parchment, some bound in boards—recalled the days of astrology and alchemy, and the sombre mysteries of Rosicrucianism. Side by side, on an ebony stand, lay an Elzevir Terence, printed in red letters, and a curious Birman book, whose pages consisted of thin leaves of ivory, gilded at the edges; and here too were black rhyta from Chiusi, and a cylix from Vulci, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... the world have an art of saintly alchemy, by which bitterness is converted into kindness, the gall of human experience into gentleness, ingratitude into benefits, insults into pardon. And the transformation ought to become so easy and habitual that the lookers-on may think it spontaneous, and nobody give ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... died; so that Friedrich came home; possessed merely of the Polish language, and of what talents the gods had given him, which were considerable. And now, in the mean while, Johann, who at one time promised well in practical life, had taken to Alchemy; and was busy with crucibles and speculations, to a degree that seemed questionable. Father Friedrich, therefore, had to interfere, and deal with this "Johann the Alchemist" (JOHANNES ALCHEMISTA, so the Books still name him); who loyally renounced the Electorship, at his Father's bidding, in ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... proclivities, Shire Lane had its fits of respectability. In 1603 there was living there Sir Arthur Atie, Knt., in early life secretary to the great Earl of Leicester, and afterwards attendant on his step-son, the luckless Earl of Essex. Elias Ashmole, the great antiquary and student in alchemy and astrology, also honoured this lane, but he gathered in the Temple those great collections of books and coins, some of which perished by fire, and some of which he afterwards gave to the University of Oxford, where they were placed in a building called, in memory of the illustrious ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... repeated, in horror. "Donald, how can you? You're tired out, that is all; and as for this—" she lightly touched the sheen of silvery gray at his temples, where the alchemy of Time and stress had made its mark—"it makes you look so ... so distinguished that I am ashamed of my frivolously familiar manner of greeting you. But I just couldn't help it, and I promise not to embarrass you again. Yes, you were embarrassed. I ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... of extraordinary beauty and charm. He had travelled far and seen many, but there had been none like Evelina. How he had loved her, in those dead yesterdays, and how she had loved him! The poignant sweetness of it came back, changed by some fatal alchemy into bitterness. ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... their holiday, thought it good sport at first to mock at the Stranger's garb. As he stood there, lifted up above them on the rough bench, they could see every detail of the queer leather breeches that he wore underneath his long coat. His girdle with its alchemy buttons showed off grandly too, while the fine linen bands he wore at his neck gleamed out with dazzling whiteness against the dark branches of ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... the Occult School—vere adepti. They discern no beauties but what are concealed from superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind. Their art is the transmutation of styles. By happy alchemy of mind they convert dross into gold—and gold into tinsel. They see farther into a millstone than most others. If an author is utterly unreadable, they can read him for ever: his intricacies are their delight, his ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... feelings have swelled with no transient overflow. I gave my utmost love and devotion to a man I thought worthy. He treated me with neglect, and at last falsified his word in offering his hand to another, I do not hate him. I have none of that alchemy which changes despised love to gall. But I could never forgive him, nor trust him again. And if he, who seemed always so frank, so earnest, so tender, so single in his aims,—if he could not be trusted, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... assumption; naturalization; transportation; development [biol.], developing [photography]. [conversion of currency] conversion of currency, exchange of currency; exchange rate; bureau de change. chemistry, alchemy; progress, growth, lapse, flux. passage; transit, transition; transmigration, shifting &c. v.; phase; conjugation; convertibility. crucible, alembic, caldron, retort. convert, pervert, renegade, apostate. V. be converted into; become, get, wax; come to, turn to, turn into, evolve ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the boldest dogmas of their philosophers and sceptics. In his childhood the Prince had learned strange tales of the ambition, the genius, and the career of his grandsire; and secretly, perhaps influenced by ancestral example, in earlier youth he himself had followed alchemy, not only through her legitimate course, but her antiquated and erratic windings. I have, indeed, been shown in Naples a little volume blazoned with the arms of the Visconti, and ascribed to the nobleman I refer to, which treats ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... material aspect of transmutation would be of small importance in comparison with the control over the inexhaustible stores of internal atomic energy to which its successful accomplishment would inevitably lead. It has become a problem, no longer redolent of the evil associations of the age of alchemy, but one big with the promise of a veritable physical ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... may Be spoken like the language of the father in the play. Divest those things which now I write, and Lucilius wrote of yore, Of certain measured cadences, by setting that before Which was behind, and that before which I had placed behind, Yet by no alchemy will you in the residuum find The members still apparent of the ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... preposterous the object enjoined may be; not even though it be a periodical dinner, cooked after the manner of the ancients, like the nauseous one at which Peregrine Pickle assisted; or instruction in alchemy or in Hindoo astronomy, or in the art of walking on one's head. Not until there remain no persons at once entitled under the will, and also wishing to partake of the banquet or the instruction, can one or the other be equitably discontinued? As long as there are ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... not historically attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- 'alchemy,' 'alcohol,' 'alembic,' 'algebra,' 'alkali,' 'almanack,' 'azimuth,' 'cypher,' 'elixir,' 'magazine,' 'nadir,' 'tariff,' 'zenith,' 'zero '?—for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... My fancy, as it drew the little child Who in these pages lives; her gentle ways Are but the reflex of thy round of days. The trip of syllable I held so dear, And all thy small remarks, are treasured here— Charmed by the alchemy of love to stay The while thy blissful childhood slips away. Kind little heart, that knows no selfish thought, Read here the tale that thou, ...
— The Admiral's Caravan • Charles E. Carryl
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