"Alembic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Evelyn Colcord, sitting like a statue, unable to move nor to speak, passed through a limbo of nameless emotion. Through her mind swept a flashing filament of despair, hope, craven fear, and sturdy resolution. Tortured in the human alembic, she was at length resolved, seeing with a vision that pierced all her horizons. And then, trembling, tense, there came—a thought? A vision? She knew not what it was, nor was she conscious of attempting to ascertain. She knew only that for a fleeting ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... demonstration. We cannot blame science for ruling out that which it cannot touch with its analysis, or repeat with its synthesis. The phenomena of life are as obvious to us as anything in the world; we know their signs and ways, and witness their power, yet in the alembic of our science they turn out to be only physico-chemical processes; hence that is all there is of them. Vitality, says Huxley, has no more reality than the horology of a clock. Yet Huxley sees three equal realities in the universe—matter, energy, and consciousness. But consciousness ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... nobility of the common people and of its song; the national phase is a mere incident of political conditions. The war of races is no alembic for beauty of art. If there were no national lines, there would still be folk-song,—merely without sharp distinction. The future of music lies less in the differentiation of human song, than in ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him justice, he is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt you are selected as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be death; perhaps a fate more awful still. Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest of science before his ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as 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 ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... the unique perfume used by Persian kings; such is this drawing-room, the frail vial of crystal and gold containing the substance of a human vegetation. To fill it, a great aristocracy had to be transplanted to a hot-house and become sterile in fruit and flowers, and then, in the royal alembic, its pure sap is concentrated into a few drops of aroma. The price is excessive, but only at this price can the most delicate perfumes ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... raining plum cakes!" exclaimed the Chevalier La Corne to his lively companion. "Joy's golden drops are only distilled in the alembic of woman's heart! What think you, Hortense? Which of Quebec's fair daughters will be willing ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... about the neck of the giant of civilization. "What will people say?" Well, if you tell them a new truth, they will say that you are a demagogue or a blasphemer, an anarchist or a Populist; but when your new truth has been transformed by Time's great alembic into an old falsehood, they will have absorbed it—it will have become respectable—and you couldn't purge it from their soggy brain with Theodorus' Auticyrian hellebore. They said of Galileo, "Imprison him!" because ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... their failure to transmute the baser metals into gold resulted in the birth of chemistry. They did not succeed in what they attempted, but they brought into vogue the natural processes of sublimation, filtration, distillation, and crystallization; they invented the alembic, the retort, the sand-bath, the water-bath and other valuable instruments. To them is due the discovery of antimony, sulphuric ether and phosphorus, the cupellation of gold and silver, the determining of the properties of saltpetre and its use in gunpowder, and the discovery ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... people, the most prosperous and advanc'd of the world, inhabiting these Prairies, the great Plains, and the valley of the Mississippi, I could not help thinking it would be grander still to see all those inimitable American areas fused in the alembic of a perfect poem, or other esthetic work, entirely western, fresh and limitless—altogether our own, without a trace or taste of Europe's soil, reminiscence, technical letter or spirit. My days and nights, as I travel here—what an exhilaration!—not the air alone, and the sense of vastness, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... I holier dew Than Walden's haunted wave, Distilled from heaven's alembic blue, Steeped in each ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... incapable. Feed well the hungry mind, lest it perish of inanition. It is a sponge in infancy that imbibes ideas without an effort; it is a safety-valve through which fancy and poetry conduct away foul vapors; it is an alembic, retaining only the pure and valuable of all that is poured into it, to be stored for future use. It is a lightning-rod that conducts away from the body all superfluous electricity. It does not harm a sensible child to put it to study early, but it destroys a dull one. Let your poor ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... you in one draught of song, Caught in this rhymster's cup from earth's delight, Where English fields are green the whole year long— The wine of might, That the new-come spring distills, most sweet and strong, In the viewless air's alembic, that's wrought too fine for sight. Good health! we pledge, that care may lightly sleep, And pain of age be gone for this one day, As of this loving cup you take, and, drinking deep, Are glad at heart straightway To feel once more the friendly heat of the sun Creative in you (as ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... establishment which most keenly interested and impressed her. She was in fact under the spell of the great and still potent personality of Saint Francis, which informs with his memory every detail of the buildings and rocks around you. Each legend was full of interest for her. The alembic of her mind seemed to have the secret of distilling from traditions, which in their grossness the ordinary visitor turns from with a smile of contempt, the spiritual value they once possessed for ages of faith, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... cannot hit with my small-arm, marking the goodly masses and unobtrusive meek beauties of it, and longing for them in vain. No amount of dissecting shall reveal the core of Sandro's Venus. For after you have pared off the husk of the restorer, or bled in your alembic the very juices the craftsman conjured withal, you come down to the seamy wood, and Art is gone. Nay, but your Morelli, your Crowe, ciphering as they went for want of thought, what did they do but screw Art ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... make a great national poet, here were all the elements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic, and the lucky moment of projection was clearly come. If a great national poet could ever avail himself of circumstances, this was the occasion,—and, fortunately, Shakespeare was equal to it. Above all, we may esteem it lucky that he found words ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... match thy rich perfume Chemic art did ne'er presume Through her quaint alembic strain, None so sov'reign to the brain. Nature, that did in thee excel, Framed again no second smell. Roses, violets, but toys For the smaller sort of boys, Or for greener damsels meant; Thou art the ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Denmark; a country which possesses, next to Scotland, the richest and most interesting store of ancient ballad poetry in Europe. However, although originally Danish, it has received some touches in passing through the alembic of translation, which may warrant us in giving it a prominent place, and we are sure that no lover of hoar tradition will blame us for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... similar terms that he pressed the forms of his book on the acceptance of the English exiles at Frankfort, and to a great extent with success. Their Book of Common Order is founded on Farel's and Calvin's services, but is so after these services have passed through the alembic of Pollanus and been modified and supplemented by him. This will appear from several of the notes subjoined, and will be more fully shown in ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... not to its own time, are unhoarded the wealth of its thought and the glory of its inspiration. When it is gone,—when its lips are silent, and its heart still,—then is revealed the cherished secret over which it toiled, which was elaborated from the living alembic of the soul, through painful days and weary nights,—the sentiment which could not find expression to contemporaries,—the gift, the greatness, the lyric power, which was disguised and unknown so long. Who, that has communed with the work of such a spirit, has not felt in every line that thrilled ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... groping after a formula which might be their strength, but they had not been able to put it into shape. Jacob Boehm's mysticism, passing through the alembic of such a mind as Leader's, and subjected to that occult atmosphere which Muggleton lived in, came forth in the shape of a new theology, transcendental, unintelligible, but therefore celestial and sublime. The prophets from this moment ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... cautery Shall fierily search my soul, destroy her ill." Natheless, the wounded wasting malady Is her unexorcised sad sovran still. Oh! that alembic fever of interwed Desire and dream and sense, rapture and rue! As soon as my sincerest words are said And heard they seem apostate and untrue. For only speech more richly dubious Than shoaling water, or a ringdove's breast, Than lighted incense more miraculous With fumes of strange ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... took a liking to the tall girl who had come so far to sit under her instruction. There was a fine, free air in her bearing, a lightness in her step, a sparkle in her eye, that spoke of good blood,—whether fused by nature in its own alembic, out of material despised and spurned of men, or whether some obscure ancestral strain, the teacher could not tell. The girl proved intelligent and learned rapidly, indeed seemed almost feverishly anxious to learn. She was quiet, and was, though ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... the false ideas of constancy which are generated and cherished in its name, if not by its agency. Your enemies are intense, but temporary. Time wears off the edge of hostility. It is the alembic in which offences are dissolved into thin air, and a calm indifference reigns in their stead. But your friends are expected to be a permanent arrangement. They are not only a sore evil, but of long continuance. Adhesiveness seems to be the head ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the study of those Arabian sages and alchemists in whom he had delighted when he was a young man. He saw him shun the daylight, and sleep its hours away, and then by night abandon himself like another Cagliostro to strange experiments with alembic and crucible, breathing acrid and poisonous vapours, seeking to extort from Nature her yet undiscovered secrets,—the Philosophers Stone, and the Elixir of Life. He saw him turn for a little from his strange and deadly experiments, and venture forth ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... fact were 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 their transit cleaving to them. In like manner, even though history ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... alembic to which the Animal conveys what each of its organizations, in proportion to the strength of that vessel, can absorb of that Substance, which returns ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... mischief in the false ideas of constancy which are generated and cherished in its name, if not by its agency. Your enemies are intense, but temporary. Time wears off the edge of hostility. It is the alembic in which offenses are dissolved into thin air, and a calm indifference reigns in their stead. But your friends are expected to be a permanent arrangement. They are not only a sore evil, but of long continuance. Adhesiveness seems to be the head ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... reckon," "I calculate," "I guess." The inventiveness which characterizes Americans, the multiplicity of patents, comes from the tendency to go behind the actual, to test possibilities, to bring everything to the standard of thought. Emerson dissolves England in the alembic of his brain, and makes a thought of that. Our politics are yearly becoming more and more questions of principle, questions of right and wrong. There is almost infinite promise and significance in this gradual victory of the moral over the political, of life over mechanism. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... The simple art of converting salt water into fresh, by boiling the former and passing the steam through a cooled pipe into a recipient, would not have escaped the students of the Philosopher's "stone;" and thus we find throughout Europe the Arabic modifications of Greek terms Alchemy, Alembic (Al- ), Chemistry and Elixir; while "Alcohol" (Al-Kohl), originally meaning "extreme tenuity or impalpable state of pulverulent substances," clearly shows the origin of the article. Avicenna, who died in A.H. 428 1036, nearly ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... a most important theory of the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge is to be elicited from within and is to be sought for in ideas and not in particulars of sense. What a chance! A growing youth in seclusion. Such a magnificent seclusion! Where I could try him in my own alembic! Still I hesitated. The imminence of such good fortune made me doubt my ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... dry, it is quickly introduced into a platinum alembic, which has just been dried by heating it to redness. The whole is kept at a gentle temperature for an hour or an hour and a half, so as to allow the decomposition to commence very slowly; the first portions of acid which come over are rejected as they carry with them traces of water remaining ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... decay of the parts comprising the animal economy. The urine is this detritus in a state of solution. The components of urine are chemically similar to those of calculi, and as the components of the one vary according to the disintegration occurring at the time in the vital alembic, so do those of the other. While, therefore, a calculus is only as urine precipitated and solidified, and this fluid only as calculous matter suspended in a menstruum, it must appear that the lithic diathesis is as natural and universal as structural disintegration ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise |
