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Dross   Listen
noun
Dross  n.  
1.
The scum or refuse matter which is thrown off, or falls from, metals in smelting the ore, or in the process of melting; recrement.
2.
Rust of metals. (R.)
3.
Waste matter; any worthless matter separated from the better part; leavings; dregs; refuse. "All world's glory is but dross unclean." "At the devil's booth are all things sold, Each ounce of dross coats its ounce of gold."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Dross" Quotes from Famous Books



... worse within that space of time, long enough if we measure its limit by the standard of history, trivial if we reckon it by the progress made in human ethics and human understanding. Surely there are lessons to be learned in the silent city; Pompeii, we realize, is not merely a heap of antique dross whence we can pick up precious grains of knowledge, but it is an oracle in itself, which, if properly consulted, will give us plain answers to our modern speculations, and will possibly reprove us for ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... fame-drunken, shall be named first. Herr Goldstein follows, sonorous, curly-haired, heavy, a trifle anxious, as some bear that had caught, somehow, a butterfly in his claws. Next, a man condemned to a newspaper, sad, courted, armed, analyzing for press agent's dross every sentence that was poured over him, eating his a la Newburg in the silence of greatness. To conclude, a youth with parted hair, a name that is ochre to red journals and gold on the back of a supper check. These sat at a table while ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... draped with awnings; gorgeously- clad flunkeys stood upon the doorsteps, ushering in long streams of visitors. In the City men worked for money; in the West End they threw it away, carelessly, heedlessly, as if it had been dross. The great hotels sheltered hives of strangers, who admired and criticised, envied and scoffed, and flitted industriously about on the edge of the feast; on the edge, but never actually ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... fireworks, and so create such terrifying effects that none would venture near the spot again. With bated breath, she even suggested that I should make a "death-bone" to be employed for the secret ill of Duckbill; she thus exposed the dross of hereditary superstition which rose to the surface ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... wanderers of a seaport. Kind, generous, forsooth! as harlots are, or thieves. And the gold, flowing in torrents through that tainted and luxurious world, splashing the very walls, seemed to him now to be loaded with all the dross, all the filth of its impure and muddy source. There remained, then, for him, de Gery, but one thing to do, to go away, to quit with all possible speed this situation in which he risked the compromising of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... parts of the earth, and is treasured wherever it has fallen. The learning which he borrowed from continental Europe he repaid with magnificent interest. In Westminster Hall his name is associated with Nottingham, Hale, Mansfield, and Stowell. Counting as dross the wealth of professional eminence, he became from the love of it an expounder of law to its tyros. He has spread for thousands of adopted children a banquet of the treasures of legal lore, and next to reverencing his paternal ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... road a steam roller stood, with its tarpaulin drawn over it for the night. In the field, along the wooden fence, some loads of dross had been shot between the haycocks; lengths of sod had been stripped off the soil and thrown in a heap, and planks had been laid down for the wheelbarrows. A rake, which some haymaker had left, stood planted in the ground, teeth uppermost; beside it a labourer's barrow lay overturned. A ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton

... stakes. Nature did not pick and choose the subjects of her wilful ministrations. She seemed to scatter at random, out of sheer gaiete de coeur, as Jouffroy had said, and if some golden grain chanced to be gleaming in this soul or that, what cause for astonishment? The rest might be the worst of dross. As well might the chance occur to one of Nature's children as to another. She did not bestow even one golden grain for nothing, bien sur; she meant to be paid back with interest. Just one bright bead of the whole vast circlet of the truth: perhaps it was hers, but more likely ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... I thought. Yet it was dross. On a night in springtime, in the bazaar at Mangalore, we two first met. I have not forgotten. That night I fell in love with the white orchid from the Punjab. She was more beautiful to me than life or ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... has awakened out of her sleep—she is purging away the dross that has accumulated round her life, and at last as a nation we ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss

... weeks, at Nat's, we heard of nothing but lethodyne. Patients recovered and patients died; but their deaths or recoveries were as dross to lethodyne, an anaesthetic that might revolutionise surgery, and even medicine! A royal road through disease, with no trouble to the doctor and no pain to the patient! Lethodyne held the field. We were all of us, for the moment, intoxicated ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... manuscripts on the table. "I find no traces of the golden pen with which I wrote in characters of fire. My treasure of fairy coin is changed to worthless dross. My picture, painted in what seemed the loveliest hues, presents nothing but a faded and indistinguishable surface. I have been eloquent and poetical and humorous in a dream,—and behold! it is all nonsense, now that ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... heart," she replied, "the long trial of our love has purified it from earthly dross, and proved it the type of love immortal in ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow

... intimacy, the two happy lovers ceased to be so shy of common themes, and their speech did not reject all as dross that was not pure ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... but a dim memory—such a land could ill afford to defy an empire ten times as populous and more than ten times as powerful. True, the Russians were pouring in under the guise of friendship; but the bitter memories of Tilsit forbade any implicit trust in Alexander. And, if the dross had been burnt out of his nature by a year of fiery trial, could his army, exhausted by that frightful winter campaign and decimated by the diseases which Napoleon's ghastly array scattered broadcast in its flight, ever hope, even with the help of Prussia's young levies, to cope with the united ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... back together to the camp. From that period until the end of the war, Myrtle passed her time between the life of the tent and that of the hospital. In the offices of mercy which she performed for the sick and the wounded and the dying, the dross of her nature seemed to be burned away. The conflict of mingled lives in her blood had ceased. No lawless impulses usurped the place of that serene resolve which had grown strong by every exercise of its high prerogative. If she had been called now to die for any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... Valour, from Corruption free, Made up of Courage and Humility. That when Encamp'd the good Man lowly bent, Cook'd his own Cabbage in his homely Tent: And when the Samaites sent a Golden Sum, To tempt him to betray his Country Rome, The Dross he scoffingly return'd untold, } And answer'd with a Look serenely bold, } That Roman Sprouts would boil without their Grecian Gold: } Then eat his Cale-worts for his Meal design'd, And beat the Grecian Army ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous

... thought, "I, too, can do my bit to save England.... It needs but the spark to burn away the dross of this terrible horse-sense ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... who did this hand refuse. Duty—her father—Fate—these willed, she but obeyed; Not hers the woe, the strife that envious Ate made! Untimely, Fortune's shower must drown me, not revive; Too lavish and too late her fatal gifts arrive. The golden apple falls, the gold is turned to dross: When Fate at Fortune mocks, all gain ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille

... goods and wealth, which once I loved, I do now count but dross: and my beloved, The children of my womb, I now regard As if they were another's. God is witness My pride is to despise myself; my joy All insults, sneers, and slanders of mankind; No creature now I love, but God alone. Oh, ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley

... the ship cautiously past Capri and into the bay. The air was now black with volcanic dross and a gloom as of midnight surrounded them on every side. The shore, the mountain and the water of the bay itself were ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne

... Look up, Old age approaches ominously near. Oh shake thou off the world, even as the bird Shakes off the midnight dew that clogged his wings. Soar upward, seek redemption from thy guilt And from the earthly dross that round thee clings. Draw near to God, His holy angels know, For whom His ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... rivers that are called Elivagar had flowed far from their sources," replied Har, "the venom which they rolled along hardened, as does dross that runs from a furnace, and became ice. When the rivers flowed no longer, and the ice stood still, the vapour arising from the venom gathered over it, and froze to rime, and in this manner were formed, in Ginnungagap, many layers of congealed ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson

... camp for the defence of the city. Soldiering is their business, not money-making. They must live in common, supported efficiently by the state, having no private property. The gold and silver in their souls is of God. For them, though not for the other citizens, the earthly dross called gold is the accursed thing. Once let them possess it, and they will cease to be guardians, and become oppressors ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... so touching that they could have come only from the very soul of Beethoven. Especially noteworthy is the aspiring melody of the middle, contrasting portion (Maggiore) where the spirit, freed from earthly dross, seems to mount to the skies in a chariot of fire. The third part, where the minor mode is resumed, abounds in dramatic touches; especially that fugal passage, where the ecclesiastical tone, combined ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... you done," she continues, "beyond devoting the gold of your genius to work, which dross, in the person of a dozen predecessors or contemporaries, has produced as well. Pun and parody, satire and invective, quaintness of fancy, and elegance, have each had its representative as successful as you. Your life-work, until this moment, has been the record of a genius increasingly untrue ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... But I love your honour, and I swore to myself that I should save it in your teeth. I beg of you to let me save it"—with a sudden lovely change of tone. "Otto, I beseech you let me save it. Take this dross from your poor friend who ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the heart of every being, no matter how degraded, how sinful, how wicked, how merciless, is a spark of goodness which, when fanned by the angel's breath, glows or spreads until it burns out all the dross that years of wrong-doing have implanted there. Why it was and how it came about, Simon Kenton to his dying day never fully understood, but he always insisted that at that moment he heard the voice of Missionary Finley, with ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis

... he ceases to feel them if he be always with them; but the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not "too bright, nor good, for human nature's daily food;" it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us, is as distinct, as its ministry ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... no reason to complain of the way in which Warton has acquitted himself, as far as he has gone. His History of English Poetry is a rich mine, in which, if we have some trouble in separating the ore from the dross, there is much precious metal to reward our pains. The first volume of this laborious work was published in 1774; two others followed, in 1778, and in 1781; and some progress had been made at his decease in printing ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... will live to bless the gold of Hendrik Brant, and that is why I work so hard to save it from the Spaniards. Also that is why I ask you to risk your lives to-night; not for the wealth's sake, for wealth is dross, but for what the wealth will ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard

... of one possessed of a capacity for enjoyment; possessed, too, of every means for the gratification of desire. As yet, the man of him was unrevealed in its integrity. No test had been put upon him. The fires of suffering had not tried the dross of him. What real worth might lie under this sunny surface the future must determine. There showed now only this one significant fact: that, in the first moment of his return from journeyings abroad, he sought his father with all eagerness, ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... the Golden Age. Then we felt in our veins the pulse of immortal youth. Then all the chivalry of the ancient days, all the heroism, all the self-sacrifice that shaped itself into noble living, came back to us, poured over us, swept away the dross of selfishness and deception and petty scheming, and Patriotism rose from the swelling wave stately as a goddess. Patriotism, that had been to us but a dingy and meaningless antiquity, took on a new form, a new mien, a countenance divinely fair and forever young, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... whining youth, Forsooth! Go, weep and wail, Sigh and grow pale, Weave melancholy rhymes On the old times, Whose joys like shadowy ghosts appear,— But leave me to my beer! Gold is dross, Love is loss; So, if I gulp my sorrows down, Or see them drown In foamy draughts of old nut-brown, Then do I wear the crown ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various

... shall outlive us? Some more substantial boon Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon? The little that we sec: From doubt is never free; The little that we do Is but half-nobly true; With our laborious hiving What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, Only secure in every one's conniving, A long account of nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... musical programme. The reply staggered me: "No man, woman, or child in this island would for a moment even dream of singing a worldly song. We are all converted here, except a few benighted Catholics. The vain, fleeting joys of this world are as dross to us. The missionary has a modulator, and he trains the young men and women in the sol-fa so that they may sing Sankey's hymns in all the parts." I was dreadfully floored by this answer, and could only mutter mechanically, "Dross," ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... was a man of earthly mould, after all; a good deal of dirt and dross about him, undoubtedly, but some kindly and just feelings he had, especially where the Baron or his young mistress were concerned. He set up a lamentable howl. 'If that doleful day should come, while Duncan Macwheeble had a boddle it should be Miss ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... market-cloak and drawing on with difficulty her elastic-sided boots. She fastened her skirt high with an old silk cord and took her umbrella. Remembering that she had not covered the fire, and that it would have burnt away before she returned, she took a bucket out to the coal-house. The wet dross hissed and smoked as she covered the fire. She drew out the damper to heat the water, turned back the rag hearthrug lest a cinder should fall on it in her absence, and once more taking her umbrella, and lifting the key from its nail on the cupboard door, went out into the rain. She locked the ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone

... unto the wisest; wealth at its purest source, exponent of labour and of mind. But, to the frequent fool, heaped with foulest dross—for the cygnet of Pactolus and those golden sands, read—the hippopotamus wallowing in the Niger, and smothered ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... if they had more: and they rested also too much upon their watery dispensation, instead of passing on more fully to that of the fire and Holy Ghost, which was his baptism, who came with a fan in his hand, that he might thoroughly, and not in part only, purge his floor, and take away the dross and the tin of his people, and make a man finer than gold. Withal, they grew high, rough, and self-righteous; opposing further attainment; too much forgetting the day of their infancy and littleness, which gave them something ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn

... gold; Curly and his companions might gamble to their hearts' content; such things were nothing to him. He had struck a vein of wealth, the true gold of love, by the side of which all the treasures of earth were as dross. ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody

... fetch the grain. The ash-spit wickets on the green betray New games begun and old ones put away. Let us fare on, dead friend, O deathless friend, Where under his old hat as green as moss The hedger chops and finds new gaps to mend, And on his bonfires burns the thorns and dross, And hums a hymn, the best, thinks he, that ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various

... poetry. Poetry is thought so inly warmed by creative sensibility as to overflow in musical cadence. And when we consider that thought is the gathering of loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creative sensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of its tumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence is heard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch some sound of the tread in divine movement, we may ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert

... to say that every nerve would be strained to its utmost tension to bring the coveted prize within his grasp; yet here the reward is of infinitely greater value, a prize compared with which riches are as dross in comparison with gold. It is Health, without which the acquisition of Wealth, is well-nigh impossible, and its possession as profitless to the ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... thy votaries in anthems sing With the immortal Haydn, and do praise Creative Wisdom, Who, of one blood made All Nations for to dwell on earth in love, Then let celestial fires descend and burn Complete, the offering of the lips, and purge The dross of caste and hate from ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 6, June, 1890 • Various

... certainly seem to be an ill-destined one," admitted Tian, "for, as the Verses say: 'Gold sinks deeper than dross.' Is there anything that an ordinary person can ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... evidences: Thus invited, He, delighted, Gives the usual references: This is business. Each is fluttered When the offer's fairly uttered. "Which of them has his affection?" He declines to make selection. Do they quarrel for his dross? Not a bit of it—they toss! Please observe this cogent moral— English ladies never quarrel. When a doubt they come across, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... death at Kenninghall. We know now how all things had been changed had she died. But God could not spare her who was to be (however unwittingly or unwillingly) the purifier of His Church, to show which was the dross, and which ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt

... if asleep and unable to speak. They make every thing plain to her concerning the past, and they confirm her in the vow that was made beneath the old elm, long ago. It is such a treasure, that precious legacy; so filled with beautiful thoughts, and so free from earthly dross. Besides, it is all her own, sacred from the world. No other eye has ever seen it, and nobody else can ever know the secret workings of the great mind that is no longer clogged by the ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... They, discreetly, Ask for further evidences: Thus invited, He, delighted, Gives the usual references. This is business. Each is fluttered When the offer's fairly uttered. "Which of them has his affection?" He declines to make selection. Do they quarrel for his dross? Not a bit of it - they toss! Please observe this cogent moral - English ladies never quarrel. When a doubt they come across, English ladies ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... The Prelude are, as wholes, not good poems at all. They contain, indeed, passages of magnificent poetry. But how one longs, how, as one sees from this essay, Mr Arnold longed, for some mercury-process which would simply amalgamate the gold out of them and allow us to throw the dross down any nearest cataract, or let it be blown away by any ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... fair-weather men. The casual courier may be alert, loyal, and trustworthy; he may be relied on to try his honest best, but it is not to be expected of him that he will greatly dare and count his life but as dross when his incentive to enterprise is merely filthy lucre. But I could trust Andreas to dare and to endure—to overcome obstacles, and, if man could, to "get there," where, in the base-quarters in Bucharest, the amanuenses were waiting to copy out in round hand for the foreign telegraphist the rapid ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various

... of some accused person, the object of men's hopes and fears, the single point on which the eyes of a whole people are bent. These are the occasions which try a man's inward heart, and separate the dross of human nature from the gold of human nature. On these occasions, never mind being mixed up for a moment with the criminal, and the crime; fling yourself back upon great principles, fling yourself back upon God; yield not one atom to violence; suffer not the slightest encroachments ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... MS-DOS hackers) loathe MS-DOS for its single-tasking nature, its limits on application size, its nasty primitive interface, and its ties to IBMness (see {fear and loathing}). Also 'mess-loss', 'messy-dos', 'mess-dog', 'mess-dross', 'mush-dos', and various combinations thereof. In Ireland and the U.K. it is even sometimes called 'Domestos' after a brand of ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... joy of life trembles in all the fibres of the poet's heart.... Then, the old age of Ecclesiastes is contrasted strikingly with the youth of Solomon—the king disillusioned, skeptical, convinced of the vanity of love, beauty, and knowledge. All is dross, vanity of vanities! And the young romantic poet ends his work with the conclusion that wisdom cannot exist without faith—that faith alone is capable of giving ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... they are once kindled, the materials run together into an hard cake or lump, which is sustained by the furnace, and through this the mettal as it runs trickles down the receivers, which are placed at the bottom, where there is a passage open, by which they take away the scum and dross, and let out their mettal as they ...
— Iron Making in the Olden Times - as instanced in the Ancient Mines, Forges, and Furnaces of The Forest of Dean • H. G. Nicholls

... breath, because you had seen what great poets write of, and great painters try to render, and only great musicians by their impalpable, mysterious tone-art can come nearest to conveying—the earthly beauty that has been purged of all grosser particles of dross in the white fires of the Divine Love. She was not altogether perfect, or one could not have loved her so. Her scorn of any baseness was bitterly scathing; the point of her sarcasm was keen as any thrusting ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... of a loftier ethical purpose. The myth is to religion what alchemy is to chemistry or astrology is to astronomy. Like these sciences, religion retains much of the material of the cruder phase of thought that is displayed in myth, alchemy, and astrology, but it has been refined and elaborated. The dross has been to a large extent eliminated, and the pure metal has been moulded into a more beautiful and attractive form. In searching for the elixir of life, the makers of religion have discovered the philosopher's stone, and with its aid have transmuted ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... that I wish to do. I should be above the influence of dross. And for myself I am. Would that I might suffer alone! And this is not all. The man who has effected my ruin owes every thing to me. I found him penniless, and raised him to a condition that should have inspired him with regard and gratitude. I would have trusted that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... she scarcely breathed. The spell of Jim's magnanimity held her, made her realize, at last, the grandeur, the immensity of love. Her soul was awed. Thought followed thought through her brain; love in its sublimity was bared to her gaze; self fell away—burned as dross in the fire of suffering; to guide herself was not enough; she must aid and comfort others. If hands were outstretched in anguish, she must clasp them; if a heart cried to her in desolation, she had no right to turn aside. Was she ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... feel pity, even if we do not understand and cannot enter into the cowardly weakness by which they were driven to betray their comrades. But in the case of the National Scouts there were no extenuating circumstances except perhaps that the greater responsibility rested on the men who paid in dross for the ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... you sigh after titles and long for high rank, Let this be your aim night and day, To increase the small balance you have at your bank, And to honors' 't will soon point the way. For you'll find that men bow to the glittering dross, Whate'er its possessor may be; And if obstacles rise they will help you across, If you only ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley

... informant. Sometimes the applicant is persuaded that I have indirect influence with the American Congress, and presses me to communicate his grievance to the authorities in Washington. I dare not close my ear against such applicants, for in the mass of valueless dross which I receive, I sometimes discover a rough diamond which, after due cutting and polishing, I dispose of to ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... was no saint, and that hitherto very little opportunity had been given to her of learning to discriminate true metal from dross. Then—she thought of Mr Samuel Rubb, junior. Mr Samuel Rubb, junior, was a handsome man, about her own age; and she felt almost sure that Mr Samuel Rubb, junior, admired her. He was not worn out with life; he was not broken with care; ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope

... eloquent adoration of his heart's chosen one—his highest ideal of the glorious perfection of womanhood. The effect on Fillmore Flagg of this fervent, all-absorbing love, was most excellent; it broadened and purified his life, eliminating from it all the dross of selfishness. He took a new interest in the lives of every married couple and every pair of lovers on the farm. By persevering effort, tact and skill, he completely won their confidence. He shared their hopes, plans, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... now. But there has never an hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I could count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of these romances seems but dross." ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... city become an harlot! she that was full of judgement! righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water. Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various

... grand thing for every one to get the dross all burned away from their nature and only have ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter

... Somewhere beyond those savage mountains, amid these pathless forests, was a noble city built and paved with gold. Somewhere flowed a stately river whose waters swept between golden margins, over sands of gold. In some remote region dwelt a barbarian monarch to whom gold and precious stones were as the dross of the wayside. These stories were the offspring of the legends of the alchemists of the Dark Ages, who had professed to make gold in their crucibles; it was as good to pick up gold in armfuls on the earth as to manufacture it in the laboratory. The ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... unspoilt nature; and that, if we can dare to look upon life as an educative process, the tragic sorrows that overwhelmed him were not the mere reversal of the wheel of fortune, but gifts from the very hand of the Father—to purify a noble soul from the dross that was mingled with it; to give a great man the opportunity of living in a way that should furnish an eternal and ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... before his eyes was like a powerful medicine. It stirred things that had lain dormant within him. It consumed the heavy dross of four years of stupefying torture and brought back to him vividly the happenings of a yesterday that had dragged itself on like a century. All at once he seemed unburdened of shackles that had weighted ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood

... the optimist, who does not fly from them, but welcomes them. He has a mental prism which can separate the insipid white light of existence into bright hues. He has a mental alchemy by which he can produce golden instruction out of the dross of failure. He has a spiritual magic which makes the nectar of joy out of the tears of sorrow. He has a clairvoyant eye that can perceive the existence of hope through the iron walls of despair. Prosperity tends to make one forget the grace of Buddha, but ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... of man's knowledge, but rather of divine wisdom. But he esteeming all kind of handicraft and invention to make engines, and generally all manner of sciences bringing common commodity by the use of them, to be but vile, beggarly, and mercenary dross: employed his wit and study only to write things, the beauty and subtlety whereof were not mingled anything at all with necessity. For all that he hath written, are geometrical propositions, which are without comparison ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... grovellest low before the great * Nor over fording lesser men dost blench Who gildest dross by dirham gathering, * No otter ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... holiness—the intellect purified and ennobled, consecrating all its powers to His service—memory, a holy repository of pure and hallowed recollections—the affections, without one competing rival, purged from all the dross of earthliness—the love of God, the one supreme animating passion—the glory of God, the motive principle interfused through every thought, and feeling, and action of the life immortal; in one word, the heart a pellucid fountain; ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff

... have no further services from thee. If thou art not yet satisfied, fetch the weight and scales, and I will cast my gold into it, and my dross besides—so shall I be ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... received by our progenitors were it possible for them to be now looking over my shoulder? These men, I say, theorize; and their theories are simply corrected, reduced, systematized—cleared, little by little, of their dross of inconsistency—until, finally, a perfect consistency stands apparent which even the most stolid admit, because it is a consistency, to be an absolute and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... biography (that most inspiring of all literature) demonstrates that your reward will be as rich as the college man's reward. Yes, richer, for the gold which your refinery purges from the dross of your disadvantages will be doubly refined by the fires ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... passed, and the weeks passed, and the months, and the years! And little Lionel was growing up amidst the dross. His long hair was filthy, and matted together, and his skin was always stained with the clay. His parents could scarcely know whether he was a lovely boy or not. It was so dark down there, that ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... has been proposed to destroy our German forests, they alone have guarded for us in their shade the earliest speaking witnesses of national industry. In the mountain-forests of the middle Rhine one often finds large dross-heaps on sequestered hill tops, far from brooks and water courses. These are the places where stood the primeval "forest smithies," whose forges were perhaps worked with the hand or the foot, and of which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... take thy cross," Is the Redeemer's great command; Nature must count her gold but dross, If she would gain ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz

... all the dross of the emotions, came out as something purely intellectual, so that the Stoics agreed with the Socratic conception that virtue is knowledge. They also took on from Plato the four cardinal virtues of Wisdom, Temperance, Courage, and Justice, and defined them ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock

... dross that love will not refine away, nor any vice that love can not expel from the heart. Wordsworth was so impressed with the evil of avarice that he could compare it only to a poisoned vine that wrapped itself so tightly ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... what you can with. Now is the time the messenger is come into your villages to summon you; the man is come with the measuring rod; the fire is lighted in which you shall be tried, whether you are gold or dross. Now is the time for the true champions of Samoa to stand forth. And who is the true champion of Samoa? It is not the man who blackens his face, and cuts down trees, and kills pigs and wounded men. It is the man ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... me across the thousands of miles of land and sea, carried by sooty train and boat, buried in a dross of mail in prosy canvas sacks: I open them with the delight one feels when he brushes aside the mat of damp and frosty withered leaves to find ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... thus, a baser alchemist In some perverted plan persist To turn my gold to dross. If I turned my gold their soul were sold Tho' I wore a crown and cloth of gold, Their soul ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson

... pictures, which will not bear to be viewed near. Even pleasing scenes improve by time, and seem more exquisite in recollection, than when they were present; if they have not faded to dimness in the memory. Perhaps, there is so much evil in every human enjoyment, when present,—so much dross mixed with it, that it requires to be refined by time; and yet I do not see why time should not melt away the good and the evil in equal proportions;—why the shade should decay, and the light remain ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... not make the first advances) with a youth, some years younger than himself and of lower social class, whose development he was able to assist. "But for my part," he remarks, "I owe him as much as I gave him, for his love lighted up the gold of affection that was in me and consumed the dross. It was from him that I first learned that there was no such thing as a hard-and-fast line between the physical and the spiritual in friendship." This relationship lasted for some years, when the young man married; its effects ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... be a tear, From passion's dross refined and clear; A tear so limpid and so meek, It would not stain an angel's cheek; 'Tis that which pious fathers shed Upon a duteous ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey

... and glory—glory, the reward That sole excites to high attempts the flame Of most erected spirits, most tempered pure AEthereal, who all pleasures else despise, All treasures and all gain esteem as dross, And dignities and powers, all but the highest? 30 Thy years are ripe, and over-ripe. The son Of Macedonian Philip had ere these Won Asia, and the throne of Cyrus held At his dispose; young Scipio had ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton

... association with so many of its enthusiastic advocates, had indeed done much for Sarah Grimke. Her mind was rapidly becoming purified from the dross that had clogged it so long; religious doubts and difficulties were fading away one by one, and the wide, warm sympathies of her nature now freed, expanded gladly to a new world of light and love and labor. As she expressed it, she was like one coming into a clear brisk atmosphere, after ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney

... good qualities; and I now live and do well by having discarded them. We must fight the world with its own weapons; but still, as I said before, there is some good in it, some pure ore amongst the dross; and it is possible to find high rank and large fortune, and at the same time an innocent mind. If you do marry, I will try hard but you shall possess both; not that fortune can be of ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat

... us hope my ambition is not sordid; is unstained with the dross of avarice. It is a stern god, and I shall not deny that 'Ephraim is joined to his ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... of physical torture. I learnt secrets about the fineness of his spirit which, I believe, he never allowed you to suspect. Probably he never suspected them himself until the ordeal of terror had sifted the gold from the dross. It was the dross that Maisie remembered. But we, who were his comrades in khaki, saw nothing but the gold—his untiring ability to share. You weren't there; nevertheless, that's what I've got to help you ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... now in England, where they are accounted by many, the Dross and Refuse of the nation. Men think it a stain to their blood to place their sons in that function; and women are ashamed to ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe

... mitre, holding in his hand the staff of his high office. This pastor of the Church was at peace; the man of the world was sober with access of wisdom; the man of modes smiled pleasantly at his secret thoughts. Very handsome, very remote, very pure he looked; for so death purges off the dross which we work into the ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett

... in the squadron he possessed, And these he felt the Lord of Hosts had blessed, For he was ever faithful to the cross, With which compared, all else was earthly dross. Southwestward toward the equinoctial line He steered his barks, for vast was his design. There, like a mirror, the Atlantic lay, White dolphins on its breast were seen to play, And lazily the vessels rose and fell, With flapping sails, upon the gentle swell; While panting ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... delightfully abridged the task which to their impatient eyes appeared to be much too slow in executing, could have spared their dear friend so much unnecessary time and labour in disencumbering himself of the superfluity of worldly dross which had fallen to his share. A little cogging, sleeving, and palming; nay, a mere spindle judiciously planted, or a few long ones introduced on the weaving system, could have effected in one evening what fifty milling matches, considering ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... manifested and thy righteous name be exalted. Be thou lifted up before the people. Lord, we rededicate ourselves at this hour to be used of thee in the salvation of men. Come into these temples of clay afresh at this hour, O Lord, and let the fire of thy holy presence consume all the dross that may be in us. Anoint our feeble lips to speak the unsearchable riches of Christ ... Hear us, Lord, we ask ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison

... reproach upon his name? If so be death is a sleep, how much better to feel at the end, 'I die, but I die self-approved, and justified by self!' And if death is not all a sleep; if, as Socrates tells us, there are hopes that we but pass from a base life to another with less of dross, then how do pleasures and glories, griefs and dishonours, of this present life touch upon a man whose happiness or woe will ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... will in thee die, And all earth's glory, on which men do gaze, Seem dust and dross in thy pure-sighted eye, Compared to that celestial beauty's blaze, Whose glorious beams all fleshly sense do daze With admiration of their passing light, Blinding the ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... I'll resume. While I could buy them, friends indeed were plenty. Alas! prudence is seldom co-mate with youth and inexperience. The golden dream was soon to end—end even with the yellow dross that gave it birth. Fallacious hopes of coming "posts," averted for a time my coming wretchedness—three weeks, and not a line! The landlord suffered from an intermitting affection, characteristic of the "stiff-necked generation;"—he bowed to others—galvanism could not have procured the tithe ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... But his highest ambition was to be taken on at the colliery where his father worked; and he shortly joined his elder brother James there as a "corf-bitter," or "picker," to clear the coal of stones, bats, and dross. His wages were then advanced to sixpence a day, and afterwards to eightpence when he was set to drive ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... through a stormy cloud; An angel hovering o'er the paths of life, But sought in vain amidst its cares and strife; Claimed by the many—known but to the few Who keep thy great Original in view; Who, void of passion's dross, behold in thee A glorious ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie

... has been completely freed from dross, no fire, however great, has any further action on it, for nothing but its imperfections can be consumed. So it is with the divine fire in the soul. God retains her in these flames until every stain is burned away, and she is brought to the ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... may rank among the most forlorn. I fling a palm into the sea; 'twill sink: Others throw lead, and it is lightly borne. What have I done, dear Lord, the world to cross? Gold in my hand forthwith is turned to dross. How have I made, dear Lord, dame Fortune wroth? Gold in my hand forthwith is turned to froth. What have I done, dear Lord, to fret the folk? Gold in my hand forthwith ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... concerned, I have told everything truthfully. I value my word, sir." The few who talk about his vindictive spirit, while they really admire his heroism, have no test by which to detect a noble man, no amalgam to combine with his pure gold. They mix their own dross ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau

... Master Richard, it is surely no small matter to lose the respect of those who looked up to us for countenance; and the favour of a right learned king; and, O Master Hooker, such a power of money! But money is mere dross. I should always hold it so, if it possessed not two qualities: that of making men treat us reverently, and that of enabling us to ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... of the wine and the wealth and the mirth, The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;— Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... He is working in the minds of the souls abiding there, urging them to cast off the dross of earth-desires and to fix the aim upon higher things, to the end that their re-incarnations may be under improved conditions. On the Physical Plane He is working in the hearts and minds of the ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... of shifting and indulged in much cowardly evasion. Vulgarians all, they are yet too complex to be pinned down by a formula. Old wine in these three new bottles makes for disaster. Undine Spragg is the worst failure of the three. She got what she wanted for she wanted only dross. Ibsen's Button-Moulder will meet her at the Cross-Roads when her time comes. Hedda, like Strindberg's Julia, may escape him because, coward as she was when facing harsh reality, she had the courage to rid her family of a worthless encumbrance. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... looks for strength and honesty that he can yoke up with, a Yussuf Dakmar spies out human failings; and whereas most of us in our day have mistaken pyrites for fine gold, which did not hurt more than was good for us, he ends by mistaking gold for dross. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy

... years, just as the first week's wages of youth, money earned by service rendered, proclaiming coming manhood, brings with it a thrill and glow of proud satisfaction, compared with which all the millions of later years are as dross. ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie

... pease, sadness, onions, anger, evil tidings, and loss of friends,"—a very arbitrary and unjust classification. Melancholy was evidently regarded as a disease, and a much-to-be-lamented one. External applications were made to "drive the worms out of the Brain as well as Dross out of the Stomack." Here is "A pretious water to ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... where, with the knowledge acquired, self sits in judgment upon the works of the hands and mind, whether or no they have been well done; the sacrifice of the lower nature properly made, control of the triune being established, the transmutations correct and accurate, assimilation perfect and free from dross, harmony gained by loving obedience to the higher law of being, and thus becomes ruler of his kingdom; the long journey almost accomplished, so far as Earth is concerned, perceiving and understanding that ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... vast masses of burnt stone and sulphur on its surface, like dross on melted lead, and nothing was visible toward Bosco Trecase but endless acres of dark scoriae, broken here and there by the greenish, curling smoke of sulphur. At one point a great cone pine tree, torn up by its roots and turned to black charcoal, stuck out of the ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... and constancy Put off their dross and mortal guise, And with the look that is to be They ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion.... by the spirit of judgment and the spirit of burning." This cleansing is done by the blast of the Spirit's burning. Here is the searching, illuminating, refining, dross-consuming character of the Spirit. He burns up the dross in our lives when He enters and ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans

... He separates the dross from the gold, purifies the human character, through the furnace of affliction. Those who bear fruit He purgeth, that they may bear more fruit. Through the sacred law, He speaketh to the unfruitful in tones of Sinai: and, in [10] the gospel, ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... Thackeray, who knew the true from the false, the dross from pure gold: "Which was the most splendid spectacle ever witnessed, the opening feast of Prince George in London or the resignation of Washington? Which is the noble character for ages to admire—yon fribble dancing in lace and spangles, or yonder hero who sheathes his sword after ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth

... not died away, and events occurred, from day to day, inflaming the spirit of religious difference. Yet this was not an unmixed evil—"The greatest blessings have been achieved by discussions, errors suffer in the ordeal; truth never does; the dross is consumed in the fire; the gold comes out more brilliant, more precious, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... All the gold has gone out of the world, and there is nothing left but lead and dross. See how sharp the green is under the gray, and note the clearness of the air. Everything is keen and hard upon the eye to-day; the sky is full of rain and the sea is a wild harmony in ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... was as simple and considerate and kindly as a man could be. Coppertop adored him, and, as Gillian reflected, the love of children is rarely misplaced. Some instinct leads them to divine unfailingly which is gold and which dross. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... course I say it!" he protested. "It's true! He's the finest chap in the world, all true gold and not a grain of dross. That's how it is we all knock under to him. Even Nap does that, though he doesn't care a tinker's curse for anyone else ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell

... born of their elation at approach to the rich mysteries of the new land they sought. Much cheap wine had been consumed among them, and in some of them this had, already, wrought its vicious alchemy and changed the gold of sunny tempers into the dross of ugliness. Among those most affected by the liquor was the man Moresco, who so continually boasted of the great things he had done in New York politics and who, since his rebuff by the old German, when ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey

... again speaks to the world and the world listens to Italy. It is a great task and a great deed and it demands great efforts. To carry it through, we must, each one of us, free ourselves of the dross of ideas and mental habits which two centuries of foreign intellectualistic tradition have heaped upon us; we must not only take on a new culture but create for ourselves a new soul. We must methodically ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various

... Bellamy's Looking Backward, Ch. IX.] or free demand of commodities from a central store [Footnote: More's Utopia and Cabet's Icaria.] or the like has ever been suggested that does not give ten thousand times more scope for that inherent moral dross in man that must be reckoned with in any sane Utopia we may design and plan.... Heaven knows where progress may not end, but at any rate this developing State, into which we two men have fallen, this Twentieth ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... an abstract of love's noble flame, 'Tis love refined, and purged from all its dross, 'Tis next to angel's love, if not the same, As strong as passion ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... one God, whom they behooved to worship and serve—that they had been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ, in order that they might place their confidence of salvation in Him and in His grace—and that, all the inventions of men being mere dross and rubbish, they ought to condemn all idolatries and superstitions. In one word, their theology was in substance this—There is one God who created all the world, and declared His will to us by Moses and the prophets, and finally by Jesus Christ and His apostles; and we have one sole Redeemer, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various

... becomes gentleness, hysteria becomes equanimity, and sound becomes silence. From its presence vaunting and vainglory and arrogance hasten away to be with their own kind. By its power, as of a miracle, it changes the dross into fine gold, the grotesque into the seemly, the vulgar into the pure, the water into wine. Into the midst of commotion and confusion it quietly moves, saying, "Peace, be still!" and there is quiet and ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... writers" come up in this century, to be forgotten in the next. But the silver cord of the Bible is not loosed, nor its golden bowl broken, as Time chronicles its tens of centuries passed by. Has the human race gone mad? Time sits as a refiner of metal; the dross is piled in forgotten heaps, but the pure gold is reserved for use, passes into the ages, and is current a thousand years hence as well as to-day. It is only real merit that can long pass for such. Tinsel will rust in the storms of life. False weights are ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... Gigolette, she looked at me with eyes like stones of gall: "If we were honest folks," said she, "I wouldn't mind at all. But then . . . you know the life we lead; well, anyway I mean (That is, providing it's a girl) to call her Angeline." "Cheer up," said I; "it's all in life. There's gold within the dross. Come on, we'll drink another ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service

... no! Hear me, Clementina. I will be generous. I now absolve you from all your vows. You are free. Should the time ever come that prosperity shine upon me, and I find that I have sufficient for both of us of that dross which I despise, then will I return, and, should my Clementina not have entered into any other engagement, throw my fortune and my person at her feet. Till then, dearest ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat

... vile an excrement, But with his beams he will thenceforth exhale. The fens and quagmires tithe to him their filth: Forth purest mines he sucks a gainful dross. Green ivy-bushes at the vintner's doors He withers, and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... the fierce throbbing of the artery in her round snowy throat, and see the shadow of her long lashes; and again some electric current flashed from her feverishly bright eyes, burning its way to the secret chambers of his selfish heart, melting the dross that ambition and greed had slowly cemented, and dropping one deathless spark into a deep adytum, of the existence of which he had never even dreamed. Unconsciously he leaned toward her, but she pressed back against the iron bars, and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... "snapped erect"); and lots and lots of love. As for the ending, to relieve any apprehensions on your part, let me quote it. "Taking her swiftly in his arms, he questioned: 'Has the gold come free from the fire at last, my darling?' 'Gold or dross,' she whispered as she yielded, 'it is your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various

... a coarse speech sounds; and how unworthy of one who calls himself a man, to be always bent on material things, instead of rising towards those which are intellectual. Is that dross, the body, of importance enough to deserve even a passing thought? and ought we not to ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)

... against almost all men; the exceptions are so few and doubtful that I doubt whether I can ever gain from another that intense receptive attitude which I am willing to bestow. Fortunately for me, this illusion that there are such intense perceivers re-creates itself out of the veriest dust and dross of humanity. Like Shelley's 'Cloud,' my illusion may change, but it cannot die. Now I am in a state of mind when I am willing to let everything go by default—everything except my last illusion, that I can never let myself out to anyone. To Marie—and to you—and one or two others—I ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... started at first sight of him. Born of an Italian mother, his skin was dark, and his eyes coal-black; yet his ample but symmetrical forehead was singularly white and delicate. Very tall and spare, and both face and figure were of that exalted kind which make ordinary beauty seem dross. In short, he was one of those ethereal priests the Roman Catholic Church produces every now and then by way of incredible contrast to the thickset peasants in black that form her staple. This Brother Leonard looked and moved like a being who had come ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... the world. If we ask how he differentiated his experiences, which had most value for him, we shall find something deficient. That is to say, things which were unique and precious to him do not always appear so to his readers. He counted as gold much that we regard as dross. But though we may differ from his judgments, the test which he applied to his recollected impressions is clear. He attached most value to those which brought with them the sense of an indwelling ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... The floor had a slope that tended to fling the debater forward, and its boards, lying loose on an uneven foundation, rose and looked at you as you crossed the room. In winter, when the meetings were held regularly every fortnight, a fire of peat, sod, and dross lit up the curious company who sat round the table shaking their heads over Shelley's mysticism, or requiring to be called to order because they would not wait their turn to deny an essayist's assertion, that Berkeley's style was superior to David Hume's. Davit ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie

... oh, Blazes," said Willie sadly, "has money told on you so fearfully already? Do you think that she would give you up for the sake of Auberly's dross?" ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne

... earthen cupps made of stuff like tobacco pipes, and put them into a burning hot furnace, where, after a while, the whole body is melted, and at last the lead in both is sunk into the body of the cupp, which carries away all the copper or dross with it, and left the pure gold and silver embodyed together, of that which hath both been put into the cupp together, and the silver alone in these where it was put alone in the leaden case. And to part the silver and the gold in the first experiment, they put the mixed body into ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... thy scorched hide and flesh wert thou once stretched on these bars. Tell down thy ransom, I say, and rejoice that at such rate thou canst redeem thee from a dungeon, the secrets of which few have returned to tell. I waste no more words with thee—choose between thy dross and thy flesh and blood, and as thou choosest, so ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... corner, like a wounded animal in some obscure den among the rocks. For the moment her own troubles were pretty nearly forgotten, for there was something for her to do. She had been but a useless by-product of humanity in the great melting pot of the world and had proved incapable of rising above the dross and making even a poor place for herself. But this man was young and strong and able, bearing all the marks of one destined to be of use. He had looked splendid in his efficient and sturdy manhood and therefore there was something ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick

... apron then, Well sewn, upon his body's lower part He placed, and over it a mighty stone As large as any mill-stone was secured. His firm, deep, iron apron then he braced Over the mighty stone—an apron made Of iron purified from every dross— Such dread had he that day of the Gaebulg. His crested helm of battle on his head He last put on—a helmet all ablaze From forty gems in each compartment set, Cruan, and crystal, carbuncles of fire, And brilliant rubies of the Eastern ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy

... and miner of any land or time, throwing his searchlight of reason into the crude mass of Indian, Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Frank, German, Russian and Briton lore, and forthwith appropriated the golden beauties of each nation, leaving behind the dross of vice and vulgarity. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... he have any of the eagle nature in him, it comes to the surface then. There is a sense of altitude about these dazzling November and December days, of mountain-tops and pure ether. The earth in passing through the fire of summer seems to have lost all its dross, and life ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... plenty of wrong turns taken at cross roads, time misused or wasted, gold taken for dross and dross for gold, manful effort mis-directed, facts misread, men misjudged. And yet those who have felt life no stage play, but a hard campaign with some lost battles, may still resist all spirit of general insurgence in ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... We, too, the absent ranks must join; And friends will censure and forget: There's metal base in every coin; Men vanish, leaving traces yet Of evil and of good behind, Since false notes taint the skylark's hymn, And dross still lurks in gold refined— The lights ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon



Words linked to "Dross" :   impurity, waste product, scum, scoria, slag, basic slag, waste material



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