"Elixir" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by being put down by those members of the Press who had discussed my personal failings for the benefit of their readers, as several years older than I really am (all due, no doubt, to my premature baldness). So I asked for the secret of the American hair-preserving elixir, and my charming companion assured me that she had really and truly discovered an infallible composition for producing hair! This she promised to send to me, and upon my return to England I received the following charming letter, which I publish for the benefit of all those whose hair, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the unknown tongues—the follower of Trismegistus—cursed with bell, book and candle, by every decorous Church in Christendom—the redoubted Cornelius Agrippa; who, if he left not to his pupil Wierus the secret of the philosopher's stone or grand elixir, seems to have communicated a treasure perhaps equally rare and not less precious, the faculty of seeing a truth which should open the eyes of bigotry and dispel the mists of superstition, which should stop the persecution of the ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... commonplace sympathies, himself a lover of the liquid happiness he dispenses, and filled with a fine scorn of all those lesser felicities conferred by love or fame or wealth or any of the roundabout agencies for which his fiery elixir is the ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... go to the White Hare of the Moon, and ask him for a bottle of the elixir of life. If you drink that you will live for ever," ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... before the beginning of another. Ten minutes are not much to a man who has things to say which could hardly be said in ten hours; still, they are something; and to waste even one would be like spilling a drop of precious elixir from a tiny bottle ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... a man shall be conducted by a few doses of Robert Montgomery's Devil's Elixir, called "Satan," or by a portion, or rather a potion, of "Oxford." Apollo, we know, was the god of medicine as well as of poetry. Behold, in this our bard, his two ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... Ida, with her hand on the handle of the door. 'Yes, I know that. I despise and loathe myself as much as I despise and loathe you. I have drained the cup of poverty to the dregs, and I languished for the elixir of wealth. When you asked me to marry you, I thought Fate had thrown prosperity in my way—that it would be to lose the golden chance of a ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... of the scenery. As I went by Victoria West (I had spent the night talking politics with the civillest Dutchmen) I came in early morning to the first Karroo I had seen. The air was tonic, like an exhilarating wine with some wonderful elixir in it other than alcohol, and though the country reminded me in places of vast plains in New South Wales, it lacked, or seemed to lack, the perpetual brooding melancholy that invests the great Austral island. As I stood on the platform of the car, the sun, not ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... little that, in their ignorance, people were not prepared to believe. Stories of marvels and magic that would deceive no one now, were then eagerly accepted as truth. Those were the days when philosophers expected to discover the Elixir of Life; when doctors consulted the stars in treating their patients; when a noble of the royal blood, such as Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, could fall into disgrace because his wife was accused of trying to compass the king's death by melting a wax image of ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... to bed at night, when he rose in the morning, as he went through his day, the thought of death was always with him. He could not get away from it. Ah—if only he could find the "Elixir of ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... fro, during the preceding controversy, "as you seem to agree so ill with each other, I trust you will unite in adopting my course. Let us begin with this cordial; we will then vary the stimulus, if necessary, by means of the elixir, and you will see the salutary effects immediately. A loss of blood would still farther increase the debility of the patient; and I appeal to your candour, Dr. Shuro, whether you ever practised venesection in ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... twelve miles or more, the two vessels turned back and put to sea again, having failed in the chief object of the expedition, which was to obtain a cargo of the medicinal sassafras-tree, from the bark of which, as well known to our ancestors, could be distilled the Elixir of Life. ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... life are hard to neutralize. There is but one subtle elixir that can do it—love; and I had not thought of that magic remedy with ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... of one single glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten to the fruition, when there is changed to here, all is afterwards as it was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate, and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir." It is to this wandering and uneasy spirit of anticipation that roads minister. Every little vista, every little glimpse that we have of what lies before us, gives the impatient imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the body and already plunge into the shadow of the woods, and overlook ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... famous for fluxes," was by direction of the Navy Commissioners supplied for his use in the West Indies. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1464—Capt. Barker, 14 Oct. 1702.] By Admiral Vernon and his commanders he was dosed freely with "Elixir of Vitriol," which they not only "reckoned the best general medicine next to rhubarb," but pinned their faith to as a sovereign specific for scurvy and fevers. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 161—Admiral Vernon, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... the blessing in a great measure to the discovery, years ago, that I am hired not by the job, but by the day. If you, dear friend, will receive this truth into a good and honest heart, and believing, abide in and live by it, you will find it the very elixir of ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... for a drinking-bout. He is simply disgusted with the grossness and vulgarity of it all. He is too old—so the Devil concludes—for the role he is playing and must have his youth renewed. So they repair to an old witch, who gives Faust an elixir that makes him young again. The scene in the witch's kitchen was written in Italy in 1788, by which time Goethe had come to think of his hero as an elderly man. The purpose of the scene was to account for the sudden change of Faust's character from brooding philosopher to rake ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... you. Bihisht in the Persian tongue means Paradise, and a Bihishtee is therefore an inhabitant of Paradise, a cherub, a seraph, an angel of mercy. He has no wings; the painters have misconceived him; but his back is bowed down with the burden of a great goat-skin swollen to bursting with the elixir of life. He walks the land when the heaven above him is brass and the earth iron, when the trees and shrubs are languishing and the last blade of grass has given up the struggle for life, when the very roses smell only of dust, and all day long the roaming dust-devils waltz about the fields, whirling ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... hundred and fifty years' standing was interesting to him, not because it had been caused by the blood of a queen's favourite, slain in her apartment, but because it offered so admirable an opportunity to prove the efficacy of his unequalled Detergent Elixir. Down on his knees went our friend, but ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Lord Tadcaster, and the sweet word "dear," from her lovely lips, entered his heart, and ran through all his veins like some rapturous but dangerous elixir. He did not say to himself, "She is a widow with a child, feels old with grief, and looks on me as a boy who has been kind to her." Such prudence and wariness were hardly to be expected from his age. He had admired her at ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... of whatever kind, with the intensity of a nature at once cold and narrow. Father Nicholas was of a far kindlier disposition, but he was completely engrossed with another subject. Alchemy was reviving. The endless search for the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, and other equally desirable and unattainable objects, had once more begun to engage the energies of scientific men. The real end which they were approaching was the invention of gunpowder, which ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... old, though my heart smote me, as I thought how he was wont to be answered by my master. I even brooked to jest with the night-crow, as my own poor lord called this Nan Boleyn. And lo you now, when his Grace was touched at my lord's sickness, I durst say there was one sure elixir for such as he, to wit a gold Harry; and that a King's touch was a sovereign cure for other disorders than the King's evil. Harry smiled, and in ten minutes more would have taken horse for Esher, had not Madam Nan claimed his word to ride out hawking with her. And next, she sendeth ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... across the sky. Then the wind dropped, and the sea was calm and blue. The Pacific is more desolate than other seas; its spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it has somehow the feeling of an adventure. The air you breathe is an elixir which prepares you for the unexpected. Nor is it vouchsafed to man in the flesh to know aught that more nearly suggests the approach to the golden realms of fancy than the approach to Tahiti. Murea, the sister isle, comes ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... tales that equally exemplify this class, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" and "The Christmas Banquet." In the first the ghastliness of the reversal of the course of life backward, as the guests drink the elixir of youth, while it suggests the paltriness of our pleasures, is a powerful lesson in the beneficence of that daily death whereby we resign the past; this rejuvenation violates nature, and so shocks us, and by the very shock we are reconciled with nature, from which we had parted in thought. ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... an excuse for preferring champagne to waterside porter, heady with grains of paradise and quassia, salt and cocculus indicus. Nevertheless, worse ingredients than oenanthic acid may lurk in the delicate draught, and the Devil's Elixir may be made fragrant, and sweet, and transparent enough, as French moralists well know, for the most fastidious palate. The private sipping of eua-de-cologne, say the London physicians, has increased mightily of late; and so has the reading ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... young man, but she died long ago. She wanted me to kiss her. Oh no, I would not do that.' 'Why not?' I said. 'Oh, she might have got power over me.' 'Has your alchemical research had any success?' I said. 'Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour,' (The alchemist may have been Elephas Levi, who visited England in the sixties, & would have said anything) 'but the first effect ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... longest route to the avenue de l'Opera to buy fine essences of cedar and of that alkermes which makes the person tasting it think he is in an Oriental pharmaceutic laboratory. "The idea is," he said, "not so much to treat Hyacinthe as to astound her by giving her a sip of an unknown elixir." ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... cried Monsieur, "the waters of Lethe and the elixir vitae have equally to be discovered. I imagine that they belong to Paradise—and we have lost Paradise, you know: though I have found my Eve," added Monsieur, with a gallant bow to his cara sposa; "and have been ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... impossible, and would be out of place here, to specify what Dr. Reilly has done for the sanitation of Chicago as Chief Deputy in the Health Office. Administrations may come and go. Would that he could sip the elixir of life, that he might go ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... to bed at night, when he rose in the morning, as he went through his day, the thought of death was always with him. He could not get away from it. Ah—if only he could find the Elixir of ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... comfortable, happy and contented by still further improving their condition, which can only be done by studying their nature, and not by the North and South bandying epithets—not by the quackery which prescribes the same remedy, the liberty elixir, for all constitutions. The two races, the Anglo-Saxon and the negro, have antipodal constitutions. The former abounds with red blood, even penetrating the capillaries and the veins, flushing the face and illuminating the countenance; the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... silvery moonlight. Suddenly a bough fell crashing off a tree in the garden; then all was still again. Sonia's heart beat high with gladness; as if she were drinking in not common air, but some life-giving elixir ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... in chymistry, and attained to good perfection therein; but his servant, or rather companion, Kelly, out-went him, viz. about the Elixir or Philosopher's Stone; which neither Kelly or Dee attained by their own labour and industry. It was in this manner Kelly obtained it, as I had it related from an ancient minister, who knew the certainty thereof from an old English ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... Mourning coaches drawn up, drowning their grief. A pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we'll pull up here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation. Elixir of life. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... flattery, and I soon began to seek him on every occasion. This is an unmaidenly history I am giving, I know, but it is the truth, and must be told. I was satisfied at first if I could only be in the same room with him, and see his face, and hear his voice. The very air he breathed was like an elixir for me. I made every excuse to have him near me; I asked him to my parlor—you know about that—and—and did all I could to be with him. At first he was gentle and kind, but soon, I think, he saw the dawning danger in both our hearts, as I too ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... that Felix objected to the sale of his father's quack medicines, Holt's Elixir and Cancer Cure, and wanted Mr. Lyon to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... of love's garden! How trill her tears, th' elixir of my senses! Ambitious sickness, what doth thee so harden? Oh spare, and plague thou me for her offences! Ah roses, love's fair roses, do not languish; Blush through the milk-white veil that holds you covered. ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... is that I distil A potion, blent of passion, thought, and will, Deeper in reach, in force of fate more rich, Than e'er was juice wrung by Thessalian witch From moon-enchanted herbs,—a potion brewed Of my best life in each diviner mood? 130 Myself the elixir am, myself the bowl Seething and mantling with my soul of soul. Taste and be humanized: what though the cup, With thy lips frenzied, shatter? Drink it up! If but these arms may clasp, o'erquited so, My world, thy heaven, all life means ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Carlyle might have put it, is the Hero as Artist. When we have admitted this, all dregs and sediments of the analytical alembic sink to the bottom, leaving a clear crystalline elixir of the spirit. About the quality of his genius opinions may, will, and ought to differ. It is so pronounced, so peculiar, so repulsive to one man, so attractive to another, that, like his own dread statue of Lorenzo de' Medici, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... came on to rain; he raised a huge umbrella and crouched under it till the storm was over. But the third day he began to show signs of new life, and before they reached the Schroon's mouth, on the fifth day, his young frame was already responding to the elixir of ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... me, my dear Frank? You know I would scorn such meanness." But rising somewhat disconcerted—"really, early as it is, I think I must retire; my head," putting up his hand to it, "feels unpleasantly; this confounded elixir of logwood, little as I drank of it, has played the ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... neighboring village. While Adina keeps both these suitors in suspense, Dr. Dulcamara, a travelling quack, arrives at the village in great state to vend his nostrums. Nemorino applies to him for a bottle of the Elixir of Love,—with the magical properties of which he has become acquainted in a romance Adina has been reading that very morning. The mountebank, of course, has no such liquid, but he passes off on the simple peasant a bottle of wine, and assures him that if he drinks of it he can command ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... for—rest. Nobody bothered him with beefsteaks and pork. No physicians lacerated his tired nerves by feeling his pulse, nor tormented his tired stomach with pellets and powders. He began to feel soothed. The sun was shining warm, and he basked in it. He had the feeling that the sun shine was an elixir of health. Then it seemed to him that his whole wasted wreck of a body was crying for the sun. He stripped off his clothes and bathed in the sunshine. He felt better. It had done him good—the first relief ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... Queen-Mother is Si Wang Mu (comp. with No. 15). The Tang dynasty reigned 618-906 A.D. "The Spreading Halls of Crystal Cold": The goddess of the ice also has her habitation in the moon. The hare in the moon is a favorite figure. He grinds the grains of maturity or the herbs that make the elixir of life. The rain-toad Tschan, who has three legs, is also placed on the moon. According to one version of the story, Tschang O took ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... Obtain a sheep's bladder and pour into it a heavy solution of sugar or some colored simple elixir, found at any drug store. Tie the bladder carefully and place it in a vessel containing water. After a while it will be found that an interchange has occurred, water having passed into the bladder and the water ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... and I hesitated with terror at the snap in his dear old eyes, back under their white brows. Then I let my eyes uncover my heart full of the elixir I had prepared for him, and offered him as much as ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... had fallen from her, material things had ceased to matter. She was free—free as the ether through which she floated. She was mounting upwards, upwards, upwards, through celestial morning to her castle at the top of the world. And the magic—the magic that beat in her veins—was the very elixir of life within her, inspiring her, uplifting her. For a space she hovered thus, still mounting, but imperceptibly, caught as it were between earth and heaven. Then the golden glamour about her turned to a mystic haze. Strange visions, but half comprehended, took shape and dissolved before ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... thee the hidden stone, the Manna lies; Thou art the great Elixir rare and Choice; The Key that opens to all Mysteries, The Word in Characters, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... myself, then it is double mine, Mine, and Leander's mine, Leander's mine. O, see what wealth it yields me, nay, yields him! For I am in it, he for me doth swim. Rich, fruitful love, that, doubling self estates, Elixir-like contracts, though separates! Dear place, I kiss thee, and do welcome thee, As from Leander ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... the right way or path of moral conduct, in which mankind should tread so as to lead correct and virtuous lives. Later on, when Buddhism was introduced, this Taoism, with all its paradoxes and subtleties, to which alchemy and the concoction of an elixir of life had been added, gradually began to lose its hold upon the people; and in order to stem the tide of opposition, temples and monasteries were built, a priesthood was established in imitation ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... it my aim in life to see you drink at that pool." His directness and simplicity stimulated her like some mediaeval elixir. He made her forget her pain. They did not talk much until they were seated on one of the benches near ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... never was a breath of suspicion. He was said to care nothing for women; and even that was made the subject of brutal jests and lies. But it may have been that, worn out with toil and poverty, he found comfort in that laudanum which he believed to be the arcanum—the very elixir of life; that he got more and more into the habit of exciting his imagination with the narcotic, and then, it may be, when the fit of depression followed, he strung his nerves up again by wine. It may have been so. We have had, in the last generation, an exactly similar case in a philosopher, ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Huguenot nobleman's despatches would be considered as a meritorious action. Winter weather, and the practice of his profession likewise, delayed Ercole so much that it was nearly Easter before he brought his certain intelligence to the Chevalier, and to the lady an elixir of love, clear and coloured as crystal, and infallible ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in Mr. Chesley's hands for perusal; and I shall feel stronger, less oppressed, when I have talked freely with you. Kiss me, my pure darling, my own little nameless treasure, my fatherless baby; for indeed I need the elixir of my daughter's love to keep me human when I ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... I was so anxious about H. that I remember nothing except that the cold drinking-water taken from a cistern beneath the building, into which only the winter rains were allowed to fall, was like an elixir. They offered luscious peaches that, with such water, were nectar and ambrosia to our parched lips. At night the housekeeper said she was sorry they had no mosquito-bars ready, and hoped the mosquitos would not be thick, but they came out in legions. I knew that on sleep ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... now early in the fall. Already the nights were frosty, but the days were royal as only early autumnal days among the mountains can be. Every breath was exhilarating, each inhalation seeming laden with some subtle elixir ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... mount, Elixir, here during my freshman and sophomore years. The latter part of my second year I didn't take him out enough to exercise him. So I ordered him sent home. He is a beauty. Jet black with a three-cornered white spot in the middle of his forehead. He's an Arabian, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... it was kept out of sight, and never offended, and everything else so sweet and winning that there was scarcely a being who did not love, as well as honour her, for the cheerfulness and resignation that had borne her through her many trials. Her trustful spirit and warm heart had been an elixir of youth, and had preserved her freshness and elasticity long after her sister and brother-in-law at Ormersfield had grown aged and sunk into the grave, and even her nephew was fast verging ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and from Him flows forth into a thirsty world. That love, 'unmerited and free,' holds in solution power, wisdom and all the other physical or metaphysical perfections belonging to God with all their energies. It is the elixir in which they are all contained, the molten splendour into which have been dissolved gold and jewels and all precious things. When we look at Christ, we see the divinest thing in God, and that is His grace. The Christ who shows us ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... dismal confusion. But here, here at this furnace, I have it already preparing, the only sure safeguard against all such idle fears; and as I have succeeded with the help of wisdom in turning unsightly things into gold, so I shall not fail in producing that elixir for which so many mighty minds have heretofore sought and laboured, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... rheumatic pains. What then? This is no proof that he did not end in voluptuousness. For our part, we are slow to believe that ever any man did or could learn the somewhat awful truth, that in a certain ruby-colored elixir there lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing this power. True it is that generations have used laudanum as an anodyne (for instance, hospital patients) who have not afterward courted ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... and air This year is the hundredth year, 200 I feed my fire with a sleepless care, Watching my potion wane or wax: Elixir of Life is simmering there, And but ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... pour it delicately into the bowl. Apply a lighted match, and let the liquor burn itself out. It will do so, he avouches, with a gentle blue flame of great beauty and serenity. The action of this burning elixir, he maintains, operates to sizzle and purge away all impurity from the antique incrustation in the bowl. After letting the pipe cool, and then filling it with a favourite blend of mingled Virginia, Perique, and Latakia, our friend asserts that he is blessed with a cool, saporous, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... working as fast as I can, Honorable Prince, but the elixir must boil yet one more night. Tomorrow, when the sun shines on the first bar of your celestial window, come, and ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... no elixir like success; and Sir Stephen was drinking deeply of the delicious draught. He had been well known for years: he was famous now. You could not open a newspaper without coming upon his name in the city article, and in the fashionable intelligence. Now it was a report of the meeting ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... changes in Colours by Digestion, exemplify'd by an Amalgam of Gold and Mercury and by Spirit of Harts-horn. And (to such as believe it) by the changes of the Elixir. ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... not yet lost. The Padre's words and attitude acted like a wonderful elixir upon Chiquita. They buoyed her up, lifted her soul from the dust where it had been flung ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... upon his traditions, and who, though without a sou, could tell of a festival given by his family, before the revolution, which had cost a million of francs; and a Neapolitan physician, in whom Lord Monmouth had great confidence, and who himself believed in the elixir vitae, made up the party, with Lucian Gay, Coningsby, and Mr. Rigby. Our hero remarked that Villebecque on this occasion sat at the bottom of the table, but Flora ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... there the night before. And here, too, deep down in a rocky dell, he found a well of clear, bright, sweet, cool water! He flung himself down, plunged his face in the delicious liquid, and sucked in large draughts of the life-inspiring elixir. When he could drink no more he filled his water-bottle, and then, removing his pith helmet, he unbound the bandage which he had tied over his head. It had of course stuck, and the attempt to remove it was painful, ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... the same pent-house of ragged eyebrow over the cold and snaky eye beneath, the same wolfish mouth and permanent hungry smile. But he looked better, stouter, stronger; more cheerful. It seemed as if my lady's society had done him a world of good, and acted as a kind of elixir ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... tale of civil wars, the "honest men," as Don Jose called them, could breathe freely for the first time in half a century. The Five-Year-Mandate law became the basis of that regeneration, the passionate desire and hope for which had been like the elixir of everlasting youth for ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... blood on my hands. We must drink together to our friendship, that all may be forgotten." Brangaena has been tremblingly preparing the potion, and, not knowing what to do—not daring to give the poison, not daring to disobey her mistress—she has poured out the elixir of love. Isolda hands it to Tristan, who fully understands Isolda's meaning and half of her intention—if, indeed, there is another half, for Wagner has given Isolda a true touch of womanly character in leaving it uncertain whether or not she really means ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... change was imperative—so imperative that even the rebellious girls were fain to admit its necessity. His condition required a gentler, kindlier atmosphere than that of New York. The poor diseased lungs craved the elixir of pure air; panted for the invigoration of breezes freshly oxygenized by field and forest, and labored exhaustedly in the languid devitalized breath of a city. The medical fraternity copiously consulted, recognized their impotence, but refrained from stating ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... attempted much, have seldom failed to perform more than those who never deviate from the common roads of action: many valuable preparations of chymistry are supposed to have risen from unsuccessful inquiries after the grand elixir: it is, therefore, just to encourage those who endeavour to enlarge the power of art, since they often succeed beyond expectation; and when they fail, may sometimes benefit the world ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... with clean blotting paper, it makes the old record leap to light, sometimes with astonishing clearness, sometimes slowly, so that the letters cannot be read till next day. It is not always successful; it is of no use to apply it to writing in red, and its smell is overpowering, but it is the elixir of palaeographers. ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... nauseated the bark in substance, it was exchanged for Huxham's tincture, of which he took a table spoonful every two hours in a cup full of cold water: he drank sometimes a little of the tincture of roses, but his common liquors were red wine and water, or rice-water and brandy acidulated with elixir of vitriol: before drinking, he was commonly requested to rinse his mouth with water to which a little honey and vinegar had been added. His looseness rather increased, and the stools were watery, black, and foetid: It was judged necessary to moderate this discharge, which seemed ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... exchanged greetings with Mrs. Todd over the picket fence. The conversation became at once professional after the briefest preliminaries, and he would stand twirling a sweet-scented sprig in his fingers, and make suggestive jokes, perhaps about her faith in a too persistent course of thoroughwort elixir, in which my landlady professed such firm belief as sometimes to endanger the life and ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... his secret and his wish, and put Doctor Coctier on his guard. "Ah," he said to himself, "you have your eye on the King with your elixir of life." And then he added ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... he teases Mab and her devoted slave some degrees more than the victim can bear, and then relieves his feelings in my room by asseverations that the friendship with Leonard will be on the May and Spencer pattern. The sea is the elixir of life to both; Leonard looks quite himself again, "only more so," and Aubrey has a glow never seen since his full moon visage waned, and not all tan, though we are on the high road to be coffee-berries. Aubrey daily entertains me with heroic tales of diving ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all means: and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool who looks for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... remember a certain house in the Rue St. Claude, and coming there on some business respecting M. de Sartines? You remember rendering a service to one of my friends, called Joseph Balsamo, and that this Joseph Balsamo gave you a bottle of elixir, recommending you to take three drops every morning? Do you not remember having done this regularly until the last year, when the bottle became exhausted? If you do not remember all this, countess, it is more than ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... and soon afterwards Nasmyth, whose clothes were now partly dry, lay down, dressed as he was, in his twig-packed bunk, with his pipe in his hand. It was growing a little colder, and a keen air, which had in it the properties of an elixir, blew in, but that was a thing Nasmyth scarcely noticed, and the dominant roar of the river held his attention. He wondered again why he had been drawn into the conflict with it, or, rather, why he had permitted Laura Waynefleet to set him such a task, and ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... Law, intent apparently to suppress them by tribulation. How the Jacobin Mother-Society, as hinted formerly, sheds forth Cordeliers on this hand, and then Feuillans on that; the Cordeliers on this hand, and then Feuillans on that; the Cordeliers 'an elixir or double-distillation of Jacobin Patriotism;' the other a wide-spread weak dilution thereof; how she will re-absorb the former into her Mother-bosom, and stormfully dissipate the latter into Nonentity: how she breeds and brings forth Three Hundred Daughter-Societies; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... and his friends. Clear and cold, the color of silver in the moonlight, it rushed down from the mountains. On one side knelt the men in blue, and on the other the men in gray, and the pure water was like the elixir of heaven to their parched and ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... moist with pity, my brain ceased to whirl. The tender human sympathy which thrilled in the soft pressure of her fingers had brought me the support I needed. Its effect to calm and soothe was like that of some wonder-working elixir. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... of us have been indifferent. If there is excess or lack of any necessary element, that excess or lack means disease, and for such disease we are wholly responsible. Food is not the only and the universal elixir of life; for weak or poor blood is often an inheritance, and comes to one tainted by family diseases, or by defects in air or climate in general. But, even when outward conditions are most disastrous, perfect ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... to lose an eye and to hobble—besides splitting up his voice—which served him right. And again I took the scorpion for the sake of the Phenomenon. I had a babe myself once, sir, though you may not think it. Gormerick (that is this faithful Hag) gave the babe Daffy's Elixir, in teething; but it died—convulsions. I comforted myself when that Phenomenon came out on my stage—in pink satin and pearls. 'Ha,' I said, 'the great York Theatre shall yet be mine!' The haunting idea became a Mania, sir. The learned say that there is a Mania called Money ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Hsu's companions. Chinese history states that Hsu Fuh was a learned man who served the first Emperor of the Chin dynasty (255-206 B.C.), and that he obtained his sovereign's permission to sail to the islands of the east in search of the elixir of life. Setting out from Yentai (the present Chefoo) in his native province of Shantung, Hsu landed at Kumano in the Kii promontory, and failing to find the elixir, preferred to pass his life in Japan rather ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the rattletrap and the racket of filling the tank with the elixir finished her sleep, however. She woke in confusion, finding herself sitting up, dressed, in her little room, with three strange men ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... many other alchemists of that period, had spent years in search of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. His vain experiments to transmute the baser metals into gold reduced him to poverty and want. His quest after these secrets had led him to study deeply the nature and composition of poisons and their antidotes. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... and administered a maximum dose of the oil called castor, and later dosed her with quinine. In the morning she was out and about her work, while the old mother was great in her praises for the passing European who had cured her child. After that came the deluge! They wanted more medicine—fever elixir, toothache cure, and so on, and ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... Italian, completed in December his fifty days' fast, at the Grand Hotel, Paris, in time to enjoy the festivities of the holidays. Unlike his rival, Succi, he partook of no mysterious elixir, but existed on water alone. At the conclusion of his feat, he was so nearly dead that the surgeons were anticipating by way of dissection more light on the effects of privation from food. He was barely able to move about without help. His stomach was unable to hold any solids, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... years past in all patients with the general lowering of nervous force and vitality so common in this disease I have habitually used the testicular elixir of Brown-Sequard. The ridiculous length to which organic therapeutics have been carried, the extravagant advertising claims, and an absurd expectation of impossible results have combined to make the profession shy of ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... little they understood what they meant by them, by disagreeing as much from one another, as from the truth they agreed in opposing: For they deliver their Hypotheses as darkly as their Processes; and 'tis almost as impossible for any sober Man to find their meaning, as 'tis for them to find their Elixir. And indeed nothing has spread their Philosophy, but their great Brags and undertakings; notwithstanding all which, (sayes Themistius smiling) I scarce know any thing they have performed worth wondering at, save that they have been able to draw Philoponus ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... love arisen from the dead. Long before, he had 'supped full' of all the necromantic excitements that poet or romancer could give. Guy Mannering had introduced him to Lilly; Lytton and Hawthorne had sent him searching in many a musty folio for Elixir Vitas and the Stone. Like Scythrop, in 'Nightmare Abbey,' he had for a long period slept with horrid mysteries beneath his pillow. But suddenly his interest had faded: these phantoms fled before a rationalistic ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... makes women beautiful for ever; which renews the strength of man; which is a sweet and excellent food, and which provides medicine for various ills, cannot be said to lack many of the attributes of the elixir of life, and is surely entitled to a special paean in ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Mr. Rook. 'She's got no stomach,' her brother informed me; 'hot things come up again ten minutes after they have gone down her throat; she lives on that beastly mixture, and calls it broth-grog!' Miss Redwood sipped her elixir of life, and occasionally looked at me with an appearance of interest which I was at a loss to understand. Dinner being over, she rang her antique bell. The shabby old man-servant answered her call. 'Where's your wife?' she inquired. ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... remarkable genius,—and genius, in an age where it is not appreciated, is the greatest curse the iron Fates can inflict on man. If not wholly without the fond fancies which led the wisdom of the darker ages to the philosopher's stone and the elixir, he had been deterred from the chase of a chimera by want of means to pursue it! for it required the resources or the patronage of a prince or noble to obtain the costly ingredients consumed in the alchemist's crucible. In early life, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not much interested in makes little impression on your mind if you're a man and in love. For him I was a child, a nice sympathetic child. And such affection as he gave me, I lived upon, as if it had been the washings from a cup of the elixir ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... father, even back to Adam, who walked thus with God! There is a tincture of iron that seeps into a boys blood with the ozone of the earth, that can come to him by no other way. Let him run if he will; Heavens air is a better elixir than any that the alchemist can mix. What if he roams the woods and lives for hours in the water? What if he prefers the barn to the parlor? What if he fights? Does he not take the risk of the scratched face and the bruises? Should he not be in some measure the judge of the situation ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... stood the solemn and awful associations of the last few weeks, the mysteries and terrors of death, drawing her from thought of earthly things to visions of another world. Full of these deep feelings, saturated with the elixir of love, Esther succumbed to the first notes of the church music. Tears of peaceful delight stood in her eyes. She glanced up towards her Cecilia on the distant wall, wondering at its childishness. How deep a meaning ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... you wish, I will do so,' said the father; 'this elixir is not dangerous at my age, as it is ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... "philosopher's stone," the "elixir of youth," and "perpetual motion," the telegraph was long a dream of the imagination. In the sixteenth century, if not before, it was believed that two magnetic needles could be made sympathetic, so that when one was moved the other would likewise move, however far apart they were, and ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... seemed finer than anything I had ever known. Few men at my age were so blessed with the vigour of health, with the elixir of youth. To the world at large I was indebted for its appreciation, its praise sometimes, its interest always. My study in Brooklyn was a room that had become a picturesque starting point for the imagination of kindly newspaper men. They were leading ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... were filled to the brim with the intoxicating elixir demanded by his elemental nature. He fought with a disregard of self that left its mark upon all those who were near by. He spared nothing, and his "automatic" drove terror, as well as death, into the hearts of those with whom he was confronted. It was good to fight ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... superstitions?" said Danville, turning quickly on him. "You, who have built a laboratory; you, who are an amateur professor of the occult arts of chemistry—a seeker after the Elixir of Life. On my word of honor, ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... the heads of ferns and flowers on other hills." Some of the detached portions moved up the valley, others rose slowly above the wooded ridges or trailed their tattered fringes near the tree tops that seemed to have torn their edges. Every bush and leaf was saturated with their life-giving elixir. How the wild sweet carols of the birds ascended from every forest! It seemed as if all Nature was sending up a paean of praise for the beneficent rain, and our thoughts took on that same serenity and calm, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Wilfrid utter a deep groan. But though the fool heard him not, the holy hermits did; and to recognize the gallant Wilfrid, to withdraw the enormous dagger still sticking out of his back, to wash the wound with a portion of the precious elixir, and to pour a little of it down his throat, was with the excellent hermits the work of an instant: which remedies being applied, one of the good men took the knight by the heels and the other by the head, and bore him daintily ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... punctuality was not yet thought upon. "Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a modern man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of life—he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his business habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
