"Alchemy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... district he had marked out as his field of survey for the present. In the course of a year his mind was accustomed to pass in a grand solar sweep through all the zodiacal signs of the intellectual heaven. Sometimes it was in the Ram, sometimes in the Bull; one month he would be immersed in alchemy, another in poesy; one month in the Twins of astrology and astronomy; then in the Crab of German literature and metaphysics. In justice to him it must be stated that he took such studies as were immediately related to his own profession ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... myself through the air in 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 other leprous one, who heard me, replied to ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... 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 ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... twenty Edwards, would have done Florence no harm, had she remained true to herself, and to her neighbouring states. Her merchants only fall by their own increasing avarice; and above all by the mercantile form of pillage, usury. The idea that money could beget money, though more absurd than alchemy, had yet an apparently practical and irresistibly tempting confirmation in the wealth of villains, and the success of fools. Alchemy, in its day, led to pure chemistry; and calmly yielded to the science it had fostered. But all wholesome indignation against usurers was prevented, in ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... 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, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 for the purpose of insuring ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the fleckless, soaring 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 the colors ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... She was not to be won by fighting Leddys or tearing up pine-trees by their roots. That armor was without a joint; a lance would bend like so much tin against its plates, and yet there must be some alchemy that would make it melt as a mist before the sun. It was tenanted by a being all sentiency, which saw him through her visor as a passer-by in a gallery. But one in armor does not fly from passers-by as she ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry, London and New York, 1899. A popular account of the development of the phlogiston theory from alchemy, giving explanations of the curious beliefs and methods of working of the alchemists. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... been born 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
... Alec!" he laughed, starting up. "You and I have all we need in this world. 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
... no less warmly: "We can hardly give too much appreciation to that subtile alchemy of the brain which has enabled him to produce out of dull, crabbed, and often illegible state papers, the vivid, graphic, and sparkling narrative which he has given to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... have been a man of considerable social talent, lively in conversation, and dealing in playful wit and amusing sarcasm. Dominici relates that two Spanish officers, visiting at his house one day, entered upon a serious discussion on the subject of alchemy. The host, finding their talk some what tedious, gravely informed them that he him self happened to be in possession of the philosopher's stone, and that they might, if they pleased, see his way of using ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... glorified by 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 leprosy of sin ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... a 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 ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... 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 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, ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... after them to see things more clearly than ever before. There are definite historical grounds for placing Basil Valentine as the first of the series of careful observers who differentiated chemistry from the old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of information to the uses of medicine. It is said to have been because of the study of Basil Valentine's work that Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic traditions, so supreme in medicine up to his time, and began our modern pharmaceutics. ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... them! In "The Princess of the Sun" we are offered a new and fantastic version of the Coppelia story. "The Dear Departed" finds Saltus in a murderous amorous mood again. In "The Princess of the Golden Isles" a new poison is introduced, muscarine. Alchemy furnishes the theme for one tale; the protagonist seeks an alcahest, a human victim for his crucible. We are left in doubt as to whether he chooses his wife, who wears a diamond set in one of her teeth, or a gorilla. There are dramas ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Yes—and was it not, too, a finely organized bit of business for profiting by these strangers, a using of their proper authority over the temple territory to transfer their brothers' foreign coins safely over to their own purses? Aye, it was a transmuting of their holy offices into gold by the alchemy ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... the place 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
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... impossible sweet and rapturous memory, clutching with a poignant passion at his heart. What was the secret of the fragrant days that had departed and could never return? Was it well to recall them? And what too was the secret of that strange and beautiful alchemy of the mind, that forgot all the troubles and cares of the old life, and even touched the few harsh incidents that it did retain with a wistful beauty, as though they had had some desirable element in them? Would it not be better, more tranquillising for the spirit, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from her letters will show how profusely Margaret poured out her treasures upon her friends; but they reveal, too, the painful processes of alchemy whereby she ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... alchemists cannot produce. Thus the true metal has the property of 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 ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... plain to Mr. Peter's understanding? Perhaps it will surprise him less that parliamentary eloquence excites more wonder than admiration in me; that the fate of countries governed by that sublime alchemy does not appear the hopefulest just now. Not by that method, I should apprehend, will the Heavens be scaled and the Earth vanquished; not by that, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... without ascertainable purpose or result, cannot be fixed into human memories. Fix them there by never so many Documentary Histories, elaborate long-eared Pedantries, and cunning threads, the poor human memory has an alchemy against such ill usage;—it forgets them again; grows to know them as a mere torpor, a stupidity and horror, and instinctively flies from Dryasdust ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... ill-clothed and sallow people. Prisoners we'll have at least, if not the culprit; And for the Baron's gold—if 'tis not found, At least he shall have the full satisfaction Of melting twice its substance in the raising The ghost of this rouleau. Here's alchemy For your Lord's losses! ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... are together, O mysterious tome, whose Arab name breathes a strange mustiness of occult lore and claims kindred with the sciences of almagest and alchemy. What will you show me? Let us turn the leaves at random. Before fixing one's eyes on a definite point in the landscape, it is well to take a summary view of the whole. Page follows swiftly upon page, telling me nothing. A chapter catches ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... is the world revolution. Death at the bedstead of every Kaiser knocks. The Hohenzollern army shall be felled like the ox. The fatal hour is striking in all the doomsday clocks. The while, by freedom's alchemy Beauty is born. Ring every sleigh-bell, ring every church bell, Blow the clear trumpet, and listen for the answer:— The blast from the sky of the ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... For, under the alchemy of the Great War, many things are changing and in the wonderful days of reconstruction that lie ahead the Farmer is destined to play an upstanding part in the new greatness of our country. Because of this it behooves the humblest ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... them to continue poisoning themselves and their descendants by over-indulgence in alcoholic drink?[1216] Surely "the defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... 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
... still hours he would meditate, and he became more than ever convinced that man could, if he pleased, become lord of his own sensations. This, surely, was the true meaning concealed under the beautiful symbolism of alchemy. Some years before he had read many of the wonderful alchemical books of the later Middle Ages, and had suspected that something other than the turning of lead into gold was intended. This impression was deepened when he looked into Lumen de Lumine by Vaughan, the ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... of vulgarity in his language, save when the right delineation of character orders it so: words, that are nothing but vulgar as used by vulgar minds, are somehow in his use washed clean of their vulgarity; for there was a cunning alchemy in his touch that could instantly transmute the basest materials into "something rich and strange." In this respect, Mr. White justly applies to him what Laertes ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... making of the world; the dreams and the deeds of the masters of Nuremberg; above all, sacrifice and enlightenment and redemption of the soul; how, except by music, could these be made manifest? It was the first and only and final alchemy that could by its magic transformation give an answer to the tremendous riddles of consciousness; that could lift you, though tearing and making mincemeat of you, to the serenity of the Pisgah-top, whence was seen the promised land. It, in itself, was reality; and the door-keeper who ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... 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 ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... prosecuted his studies, also, under a traveling sage who united the mysteries of medicine with magic and legerdemain. His mind, therefore, had become stored with all kinds of mystic lore; he had dabbled a little in astrology, alchemy, divination;[2] knew how to detect stolen money, and to tell where springs of water lay hidden; in a word, by the dark nature of his knowledge he had acquired the name of the "High German Doctor," which is pretty nearly equivalent ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... face was curiously intent—as of some midnight worker in research who sees a bright near glimpse of the gold his alchemy has so long sought to materialize in the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... Salamanca were great schools of magic. The teachers taught that all knowledge might be obtained by the assistance of fallen angels. These teachers were skilled in the abstract sciences, in alchemy, in the various languages of mankind, and of the lower animals, divinity, magic, and prophecy. They professed to possess the power of controlling the winds and waters, and of influencing the stars. They also pretended to be able to cause earthquakes, spread diseases or cure them, release ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... descendant as a Puritan impregnated with the secret doctrine of Robert Fludd. In 1639 Vaughan returned to England, but was immediately attracted to Denmark by the discovery of a golden horn adorned with mysterious figures, which he and his colleagues in alchemy supposed to typify the search for the philosophical stone. At the age of twenty-eight, Vaughan made further progress in the Rosicrucian Fraternity, being advanced to the grade of Adeptus Minor by Amos Komenski, ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... knew that the Jefferson menace which had been built up week after week by rumor and also by fact, as represented in scores, was real,—that the purple team was invincible, that Ridgley had met the irresistible force and could not by any alchemy of spirit turn defeat ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... alleys, silvered by the moon, and redolent of flowers that had been made magical by the alchemy of night, surrounded them. They came to a spot where a circular wall of foliage, rising behind stone benches, hemmed in a fountain, above which a marble antique warrior was lifting in his arms a marble girl, who struggled against ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... upper classes for the beverage of life, observes, "Even in this city, there are few of the magistrates or eunuchs or others in office free from this insanity; and as there are plenty who wish to learn the secret, there is no want of professors." This seems to be the only species of alchemy to which the Jesuits have said the Chinese are addicted. The preparation of the liquor of life is their philosopher's stone; and, in all probability, is composed of opium and other drugs which, by encreasing the stimulus, gives a momentary ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... seditions to which Egypt was constantly exposed. The emperor besieged Alexandria for eight months, cut off the aqueducts which conveyed water to the city, and, having taken it, put many thousands of its citizens to death. One remarkable edict which he now published forbade the study of alchemy in Egypt, and ordered all books upon that subject to be burned. He also made a treaty with the Nubians, in order to protect the frontiers ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... 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 the thunder, Till he saw our wide ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... 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, ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... blossom and 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
... contrivance. But the great Florentine invented 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 of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... alcalis and acids, and converted the poisonous minerals into soft and salutary medicines. But the most eager search of Arabian chemistry was the transmutation of metals, and the elixir of immortal health: the reason and the fortunes of thousands were evaporated in the crucibles of alchemy, and the consummation of the great work was promoted by the worthy aid of mystery, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... fatal tenacity, and by a perverted ingenuity, in some way or other connected with himself, and made applicable to his own circumstances. Naught could pass through his imagination or memory, but, by some diabolical alchemy, was stripped of its sanative and healthful properties, and converted ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... one of the great secrets—the origin of life, or the nature of matter, or the attainment of immortality. They seem to us to have taken a very roundabout route in their investigations, but their object was often very much the same as that of every chemist and biologist of the present day. Take alchemy, again, which is supposed by people generally to have been nothing but an attempt to turn the baser metals into gold. According to the Rosicrucians, who may be supposed to have known something about it, alchemy ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... an error to think of the medicine of the period, either European or Virginian, only in terms of rational or scientific theories. Treatment was too often based on magic, folklore, and superstition. There were physicians relying upon alchemy and astrology; the Royal Touch was held efficacious; and in the materia medica of the period were such substances as foxes' lungs, oils of wolves, and Irish whiskey. Nor should it be forgotten that many of the sick never saw a medical man but ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... Parable. Section I. The Parable. Section II. Dream And Myth Interpretation. Part II. Analytic Part. Section I. Psychoanalytic Interpretation Of The Parable. Section II. Alchemy. Section III. The Hermetic Art. Section IV. Rosicrucianism And Freemasonry. Section V. The Problem Of Multiple Interpretation. Part III. Synthetic Part. Section I. Introversion And Regeneration. A. Introversion And Intro-Determination. B. Effects ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... 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 ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Beginnings of Chemistry, London and New York, 1899. A popular account of the development of the phlogiston theory from alchemy, giving explanations of the curious beliefs and methods of working of the alchemists. Rodwell, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... that of 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 so greatly ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 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
... "Nowadays alchemy and necromancy awaken nothing but curiosity. How then can one who thinks and reasons admit that an art can be cultivated and sustained by theories extravagant, fantastic, enigmatic, explained and condensed in abstruse phrases and sentences, which not only have ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... sometimes a fatal, companion. He 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 have ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of the poet in this case have merited resemblance to that of the refiner of gold, what name less than alchemy can characterize his achievement in the rest of this scene? From the first words ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... elections, predictions? all 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 ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... of painting, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, 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 ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... times, Primal chimes of sun and shade, Of 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... working and the washing of it to free it from the milk and the final packing into tub or firkin, its fresh odour in the air—what a picture it was! How much of the virtue of the farm went each year into those firkins! Literally the cream of the land. Ah, the alchemy of Life, that in the bee can transform one product of those wild rough fields into honey, and in the cow can transform another ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... 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
... 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, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... means peculiar in the fondness which he has shown in this poem and elsewhere for figures drawn from the language of alchemy. ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... helped him to enjoy life so humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a 'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical, 'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and sober ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... this other Shepherd leads into His pastures, 'They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.' Aye! that is it. That is why He can lead them where He does lead them. Strange alchemy which out of two crimsons, the crimson of our sins and the crimson of His blood, makes one white! But it is so, and the only way by which we can ever be cleansed, either with the initial cleansing of forgiveness, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... falcon ever felt delight of wings As when, an eyas, from the 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
... poniards." The physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales, weighing his food. Lord Coke valued Chaucer highly, because the Canon Yeman's Tale illustrates the Statute Hen. V. Chap. 4, against Alchemy. I saw a man who believed the principal mischiefs in the English state were derived from the devotion to musical concerts. A freemason, not long since, set out to explain to this country, that the principal cause of the success of General ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... and the cry of triumph which meant the arrival into the safe refuge of his mother's arms. There was no detail of the occurrence that faithful heart could not recall. Time had no power to dull the recollection which love's alchemy kept clear and bright. Was he not still her boy—her lamb—for all her fourscore years and all the sorrow they had both known between that day and this? And the old walls which had rung to the sound of Francis' baby merriment echoed ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... best preventive of abuse. Liquors, like everything else, must be good. "Cooking sherry" is as much an abomination as "cooking butter," or "cooking apples." You will never get out of pot or pan anything fundamentally better than what went into it. Cooking is not alchemy; there is no magic in the pot. The whole art and mystery of it is to apply heat and seasoning in such fashion as to make the best, and the most, of such food supplies as your purse permits. Tough meat cannot be cooked tender; tainted meat cannot be cooked sound. ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... of a husband required. He was attentive, and 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 ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... the past was once the present, and that if it seemed to be transformed and to rise into cloud-land behind us, it was only the enchantment of distance—an enchantment which men have been under in all ages. The everyday, the near-at-hand, become prosaic; there is no room for the alchemy of time and space to work in. It has been said that all martyrdoms looked mean in the suffering. Holy ground is not holy when we walk upon it. The now and the here seem cheap and commonplace. Emerson knew that "a score of airy miles will smooth rough Monadnoc ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... 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
... 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 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 ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... is so prominent a fact with ourselves. The ages that intervened were, as a whole, times of the densest superstition. The human mind was active, but it was entirely occupied with miracle and semi-miracle; in astrology, magic and alchemy; in trying to find the key to the supernatural. Every thinker, every educated man, every man who knew more than the rest, was bent upon finding this key for himself, so that he might use it for his own advantage. During all those ages there was no idea of the natural sciences. The key they lacked, ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... ages and occasions have forborne to use it, and falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first who took it up, and to no other purpose but to obstruct and hinder the first approach of Reformation; I am of those who believe it will be a harder alchemy than Lullius ever knew, to sublimate any good use out of such an invention. Yet this only is what I request to gain from this reason, that it may be held a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves, ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... assimilation; evolution, sea change; change 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 ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... a love where the man and woman shall live together as one in their hopes, thoughts, deeds and 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... is combustion. It is marvelous how science proceeds like witchcraft and alchemy, by means of an abracadabra which has no earthly sense. Pray, what is combustion? You can try and answer scientifically, till you are black in the face. All you can say is that it is that which happens when matter is raised to a certain temperature—and ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... have been free 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 ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... develops in three successive periods, which may be called—comparing them with the grand periods of civilization—the religious period, the sophistical period, the scientific period.[3] Thus, alchemy represents the religious period of the science afterwards called chemistry, whose definitive plan is not yet discovered; likewise astrology was the religious period of another ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... dwelt one of whom Masters hailed as "The Master of Masters." This man, if "man" indeed he was, dwelt in Egypt in the earliest days. He was known as Hermes Trismegistus. He was the father of the Occult Wisdom; the founder of Astrology; the discoverer of Alchemy. The details of his life story are lost to history, owing to the lapse of the years, though several of the ancient countries disputed with each other in their claims to the honor of having furnished his birthplace—and ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... divination have exercised an influence not only (as at present) over the uneducated, but over the greatest minds, over kings and queens and wealthy people. Animal magnetism, one of the great sciences of antiquity, had its origin in occult philosophy; chemistry is the outcome of alchemy; phrenology and neurology are no less the fruit of similar studies. The first illustrious workers in these, to all appearance, untouched fields, made one mistake, the mistake of all inventors; that is to say, they erected an absolute system on a basis ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... all the Religions, 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, from them, and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... step, at perfection. That such was the tardy 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 which its ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... childish courage; but it was the courage of one who had never been exposed to danger. There is another courage in my heart now, and it is the courage of the veteran who has bared his bosom to the foe! I know not by what strange alchemy these diverse elements of evil can have become absorbed and incorporated into this newer and better life, but this I do know, and nothing can make me doubt it—that while I am not so good, yet I am better; while I am not so pure, yet I am purer. Yes, Pepeeta, I think we can go back on our ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... boat's bows over the glassy smooth surface of 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 ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... of standing challenge to everybody else. If one man can grow absorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over something else. Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener is to be very meanly organised. A man should be ashamed to take his food if he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it into intense ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the car, Dr. Gamble was talking spiritedly with 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)
... "Pardoner," and of legends like those 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 • Adolphus William Ward
... three great subjects of Newton's labours—the fluxional calculus, physical astronomy, and optics—a very large portion of his time, while resident in his college, was devoted to researches of which scarcely a trace remains. Alchemy, which had fascinated so many eager and ambitious minds, seems to have tempted Newton with an overwhelming force. What theories he formed, what experiments he tried, in that laboratory where, it is said, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... at 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, then, that the conviction ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... philosopher, quack, fanatic, organizer, and martyr. He hailed from Mallorca—or Majorca, as you English persist in calling it—and he wrote books on Apologetic Theology, Dogmatic Divinity, and Practical Alchemy. Also he penned this diary, which has evidently been kept pretty snug so far, and thanks to its general dreary tone, no one has read the memorandum on page the ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... doctrines means simply 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 of the Buddhists, and ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... door 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 tables, and a bed that was only made up now and then when the owner, alarmed by ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... laughed at those simple 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 well. Product: so ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... 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, it was discovered that gold was an element, or simple ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... said, at the same time, by some transforming alchemy of woman, presenting to the newcomer eyes that showed no ...
— The Game • Jack London
... theory is plausible enough. Nor is it inconceivable that God, without using error and evil directly as a means to truth and good, should passively permit error for the sake of the truth that He foresees will come out of it. Astrology was not incipient astronomy; nor was alchemy primitive chemistry; the end and aim in each case was wholly different. Yet the pseudo-science gave birth to the true; as false premisses often lead by bad logic to sound conclusions. Totemism, "a perfectly crazy and ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... (called Agrippa of Nettesheim), a German philosopher, and student of alchemy and magic, who was born in 1486, and died in 1535, "if you would handle adders and snakes without harm, wash your hands in the juice of radishes, and you may ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... the method would improve later. Was it not already a miracle to make the ataxic walk, to bring consumptives back to life, as it were; even to give hours of lucidity to the insane? And at the thought of this discovery of the alchemy of the twentieth century, an immense hope opened up before him; he believed he had discovered the universal panacea, the elixir of life, which was to combat human debility, the one real cause of every ill; a veritable scientific Fountain of Youth, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... was short. We stepped out into what for want of better words I can describe only as a central hall. It was circular, and strewn with thick piled small rugs whose hues had been softened by the alchemy of time into ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Yao-pien, whose tints are transmuted by the alchemy of fire; for they enter blood-crimson into the heat, and change there to lizard-green, and at last come forth azure as the cheek of ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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 is the Mock Astrologer. ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... determined optimist than Napoleon might well have hoped for success over the forces of the new coalition. True, they seemed overwhelmingly great. But many a coalition had crumbled away under the alchemy of his statecraft; and the jealousies that had raged at the Congress of Vienna inspired the hope that Austria, and perhaps England, might speedily be detached from their present allies. Strange as it seems to us, the French people opined that Napoleon's escape from Elba ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... his aid the kabouters, and, from these ugly little fellows, got some useful hints; for they, dwelling in the dark caverns, know many secrets which men used to name alchemy, and which ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... 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 ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Airpump aeropumpilo. [Error in book: aeropompilo] Aisle flankajxo. Ajar duonfermita. Akin parenca. Alabaster alabastro. Alacrity rapideco. Alarm maltrankviligi. Alarum (clock) vekhorlogxo. Alas! ho ve! Albeit kvankam. Album albumo. Albumen albumeno. Alchemy alhxemio. Alcohol alkoholo. Alcoholic alkohola. Alcoholism alkoholismo. Alcove alkovo. Alder (tree) alno. Ale biero. Alert vigla. Algebra algebro. Alias alie. Alien alilandulo. Alike simila. Aliment mangxajxo. Alimony nutramono. Alive viva. Alkali ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... me that which I know already? Yet perhaps in the future it may be different, since often by the alchemy of the mind the fables of our youth are changed into the facts of our age, and we come to believe in anything, as your little yellow man believes in some savage named Zikali, and those Amahagger believe ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... to Jacques Coictier bore reference principally to the temporal advantages which the worthy physician had found means to extract, in the course of his much envied career, from each malady of the king, an operation of alchemy much better and more certain than the pursuit of ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... mankind. "Poetry and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and mammon of the world." While the emotions penetrated by poetry last, "Self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe." Poetry's "secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life." It makes the familiar strange, and creates the universe anew. "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... 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 ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... next to the question of the analysis of the products, of that which is produced during the process of fermentation. So far back as the beginning of the 16th century, in the times of transition between the old alchemy and the modern chemistry, there was a remarkable man, Von Helmont, a Dutchman, who saw the difference between the air which comes out of a vat where something is fermenting and common air. He was the man who invented the term ...
— Yeast • Thomas H. Huxley
... method of making a cement for earthen vessels, no doubt crucibles. His account of him is amusing, and reminds one of Ben Jonson's Subtle. This was one of the many quacks who gulled men during that twilight through which alchemy was passing into chemistry. "This Dr, for a Dr he is, brags that if he have but the hint or notice of any useful thing not yet invented, he will undertake to find it out, except some few which he hath vowed not ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... 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 will try it ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... and joy 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 splendour ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... a marvellous alchemy in true piety. Mind and sense subject to its process become refined. Where refinement is not the result, we may believe that there is a false note in the devotion, that there is self-seeking in the effort toward God. Toyner's wealth grew with the spread of the ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... believes in nothing and is in a state of despair and not hope, his energies are paralyzed. But hope lends wings,—hope and faith are creative, and can both control and change the trend of events. Circumstances are but the crude material, which is subject to any degree of transformation by the alchemy of faith. "When a god wishes to ride, every chip and stone will bud and shoot out winged feet to carry him," and it is hope and faith that give the power of ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... 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
... blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. But it is not the husbandman who makes them grow. It is, first, the miraculous plasmic power in the grain of seed, which brings forth after its kind; then the alchemy of sunlight which, in presence of the green colouring matter of the leaves, gathers hydrogen from the water and carbon from the gases in the air, and mingles them in the hydro-carbons of plant growth; and, finally, the wholly occult vital ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... relations, however, were not broken off, and they continued to meet. Penautier was considered such a lucky fellow that it was generally expected he would somehow or other get some day the post he coveted so highly. People who had no faith in the mysteries of alchemy declared that Sainte-Croix and Penautier did ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... countrymen, and in order that they might avoid the many mistakes which he himself had made. He also wrote on agriculture, on fortification, and natural history, on which latter subject he even delivered lectures to a limited number of persons. He waged war against astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and like impostures. This stirred up against him many enemies, who pointed the finger at him as a heretic, and he was again arrested for his religion and imprisoned in the Bastille. He was now an old man of seventy-eight, trembling on the verge ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... and alchemy. A memorial addressed to the king by the heirs of Gilles de Rais informs us that this immense fortune was squandered ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... peoples of the world over the vast solitudes of sea ... doing his work well and willingly ... and asking no reward but that the bird of dusk, the mouth of honey, be his to love and be loved by ... to melt with and be one in occult alchemy of soul and mind and body ... to get strength and knowledge, and the understanding which is ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... of Jason and many others of the same class are said by Fortuitus Comes to have a reference to alchemy. ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... 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 ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 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 I, Harry ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... theories. Then in addition to the charms 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, containing the ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... bred in the popular superstition a mysterious awe and attached to almost all scientific investigation the epithet 'black,' or diabolic, as opposed to the 'white art' of holding communion with good spirits. Alchemy and astrology (words meaning merely what we call chemistry and astronomy) became words of hellish import, and he who practised these arts was in league with Satan. Thus were regarded such men as Lully, Roger Bacon, the Abbot Tritheim, and (perhaps best known of all, at least to all readers ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill |
