"Mercury" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we were off for Fort Fetterman. To our surprise, the morning was delicious, though the mercury at noon the day before had ranged at over 100 deg. in the shade. Laramie Peak was still in sight, and was so, in fact, for weeks, till upon nearer acquaintance the fine old mountain became a friend for life. The country was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the world, at Frankfort-on-the-Main. My horoscope was propitious: the sun stood in the sign of the Virgin, and had culminated for the day; Jupiter and Venus looked on him with a friendly eye, and Mercury not adversely; while Saturn and Mars kept themselves indifferent; the moon alone, just full, exerted the power of her reflection all the more, as she had then reached her planetary hour. She opposed herself, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... lever flies off, it releases a strong spring, which forces the firing pin into a percussion cap. This ignites the fuse, which burns down and sets off the detonator, charged with fulminate of mercury, which explodes the main ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... dishes unwashed, he carefully shoveled this dirt into his sluices, and watched the water carry mud and sand away. Once in a while he would shut off the water to examine the rich amalgam at each cleat across the trough, removing that which was saturated with gold and replacing it with fresh mercury. This clean-up was going to be especially good, and he was glad to ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... bromine is employed are usually ether, chloroform, acetic acid, hydrochloric acid, carbon bisulphide and water, and, less commonly, alcohol, potassium bromide and hydrobromic acid; the excess of bromine being removed by heating, by sulphurous acid or by shaking with mercury. The choice of solvent is important, for the velocity of the reaction and the nature of the product may vary according to the solvent used, thus A. Baeyer and F. Blom found that on brominating orthoacetamido-acetophenone in presence of water or acetic acid, the bromine goes into the benzene ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... to recall the honors which have been bestowed on the testudinates from all antiquity. It was the sun-dried and sinew-strung shell of a tortoise that suggested the lyre to Mercury, as he walked by the shore of Nilus. It was on the back of a tortoise that the Indian sage placed his elephant which upheld the world. Under the testudo the Roman legions swarmed into the walled cities of the orbis terrarum. And in that wise old fable which childhood learns, and age too ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... excellent of blessing and peace!) and the seven thousand three hundred and twentieth year of the Alexandrian era, and the planet now in the ascendant, according to the rules of mathematics, is Mars, which being in conjunction with Mercury, denotes a favourable time for cutting hair; and this also indicates to me that thou purposest to foregather with some one and that your interview will be propitious; but after this there occurs a sign, respecting a thing which I will not name to thee.' 'By Allah,' exclaimed ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the Constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinary; it is taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... made no pretense of shirking it while he stood on the steps of his father's mansion in Cavendish Square and watched his chauffeur stowing a luncheon basket beneath the front seat of the Mercury 38. ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... that the mercury, after rising gradually in the instrument, as long as our descent was taking place, had stopped precisely at ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... signs, twelve in number and occupying each one twelfth part of the firmament, steadily revolve from east to west, the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, as well as Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, differing from one another in the magnitude of their orbits as though their courses were at different points in a flight of steps, pass through those signs in just the opposite direction, from west ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... the white cotton dress rising and falling, the white-stockinged legs much in evidence, the arms outstretched as if in flight, straw hat falling off yellow hair, and a little wisp of swansdown scarf floating out behind like the drapery of a baby Mercury. ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the author of "The Planet of Dread" made a mistake when he chose a mythical planet for his terrific adventures. Why not Venus or Mercury? If they have water the conditions on them would be similar to what he described for Inra. There ain't no such planet. But why ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... conclusions. We believe it may safely be said, that there is not one among all the fabled deities of antiquity, whom (if the writers of antiquity may be trusted) it is not possible to identify with every other—Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Pan, Hercules, Priapus, Bacchus, Bel, Moloch, Chemosh, Taut, Thoth, Osiris, Buddha, Vishnou, Siva, all and each of these may be shown to be one and the same person. And whether we suppose this person to ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... well-known figure of Hodge, ere the hind was descried through a cloud of hot dust, urging on his steed to the extremity of a short but laborious trot. Needless were it to dwell upon the anxiety and foreboding with which he awaited the nearer approach of this leaden-heeled Mercury. To lovers the detail would be unnecessary, and to others description would fail ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... description and her love's; The fane of Venus, where he moves His worthy love-suit, and attains; Whose bliss the wrath of Fates restrains For Cupid's grace to Mercury: Which tale ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... claims Japanese-administered Senkaku-shoto, as does Taiwan, (Senkaku Islands/Diaoyu Tai) Climate: extremely diverse; tropical in south to subarctic in north Terrain: mostly mountains, high plateaus, deserts in west; plains, deltas, and hills in east Natural resources: coal, iron ore, petroleum, mercury, tin, tungsten, antimony, manganese, molybdenum, vanadium, magnetite, aluminum, lead, zinc, uranium, world's largest hydropower potential Land use: arable land: 10% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 31% forest and ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the surface that did not sink now stood high above it and were larger. The dust that drifted along blessed it and it grew. Day by day a change; always a note to make. The moss drying on the tree trunks, dog's-mercury stirring under the ash-poles, bird's-claw buds of beech lengthening; books upon books to be filled with these things. I cannot think ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... about. Outside the body, bacteria may be killed by starvation, by want of moisture, by being subjected to high temperature, or by the action of certain chemical agents of which carbolic acid, the perchloride and biniodide of mercury, and various chlorine preparations are the ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... Wadsworth, a four company post, in January '68. The winters, always severe, had been doubly so in '67 and '68. I went by team, leaving Sauk Center with the mercury at forty below zero. It never got above forty five below in the morning, while we were on the trip. The snow was three feet on a level and we broke the roads. It took us twelve days to make this three ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... one-quarter ounce Oxalic Acid, one-half ounce Cream Tartar. Stir all together, then add slowly three ounces Mercury stirring briskly all the time so it will mix. This is good, 25 ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... unwilling sense that there was nothing in the world he had rather they rested on. Her appearance pleased his fastidious, rather old-fashioned taste. Mrs. Archdale was wearing a long grey cloak. On her head was poised a dark hat trimmed with Mercury wings; it rested lightly on the pale golden hair which formed so agreeable a contrast to her ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... lounged on the sofa, in corduroys and high laced boots, smoking cigarettes. Broderson leaned on his folded arms at one corner of the dining table, and Genslinger, editor and proprietor of the principal newspaper of the county, the "Bonneville Mercury," stood with his hat and driving gloves under his arm, opposite Derrick, a half-emptied glass of whiskey ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... well enough. There were plenty of shady places to lie and smoke in when the mercury went sizzling up its tiny tube. Sometimes, when there was a dance, they would choose the best of Phoebe's roses to decorate their horses' bridles; and perhaps their hatbands, also. Peaceful would then suck harder than ever at his pipe, and his faded blue eyes would wander pathetically about the ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... instead of allowing us to mount the hill and look out for accommodation at once, desired us to halt, and sent on a messenger to inform Chongi, the governor-general, that we were visitors from Kamrasi, who desired he would take care of us and forward us to our brothers. This Mercury brought forth a hearty welcome; for Chongi had been appointed governor by Kamrasi of this district, which appears to have been the extreme northern limit of the originally vast kingdom of Kittara. All the elite of the place, covered with war-paints, ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... is a pretty story that Mercury fell in love with Rhea (or the Earth), and wishing to do her a favor, gambled with the Moon, and won from her every seventieth part of the time she illumined the horizon, all of which parts he united together, making up five days, and added them to the Earth's year, which had ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... needless to speak of mines of silver and mercury after gold and diamonds; but the result is that the European race is straightway provided with an enormous wealth commensurate with the immense commercial and manufacturing enterprises required for the establishment of its supremacy ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... fellow who was called Argus in mythology, who had a hundred eyes, of which only two were ever asleep at the same time. This bird gets his name from him; though the story is that Mercury killed him, and Venus transferred his eyes to ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... have no reason to doubt, although unable to proceed thither to confirm his statement by my own testimony. It is certain, however, that the mountains of Bosnia are unusually rich in mineral products. Gold, silver, mercury, lead, copper, iron, coal, black amber, and gypsum, are to be found in large quantities; silver being the most plentiful, whence the province has received the name of Bosnia Argentina. The manifold resources of the country in this respect have unfortunately ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... return to Mrs. Seal, and the little gods and goddesses of justice,—Pan or Mercury, which is it? And as for you, Grab, look out for sharks as you pull in. If they hear of your being afloat, the souls of persecuted sailors will set them on you, as the devil chases male coquettes. Well, gentlemen, you are balked this time; ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the dresser of the vine in Homer's 'Hymn to Mercury' translated so exquisitely by Shelley, and of a very beautiful single figure in Theocritus besides. Neither probably would suit your purpose. In the 'Pax' of Aristophanes there is an idle 'Chorus' who talks of looking at the vines and watching the grapes ripen, and eating them ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... put in this way the fact of his having given up a desperate cause, for this very reason, that he had done his duty on the field of Philippi, and that it was known he had done it. Commentators will be so cruelly prosaic! The poet was quite as serious in saying that Mercury carried him out of the melee in a cloud, like one of Homer's heroes, as that he had left his shield discreditably (non bene) on the battle-field. But it requires a poetic sympathy, which in classical editors ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... said Sir Norman, in the same meditative way, "that truth lies at the bottom of a well, and I am glad some one has turned up at last who is able to fish it out. Ah! Here comes our ancient Mercury to show us to ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... known that the red precipitate of mercury regains its flowing condition without the addition of an inflammable substance. Since mercury, however, really loses its phlogiston as well by means of vitriolic acid as of the acid of nitre, it must necessarily assume this again as soon as it ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... accumulated moisture. Possibly the most notable thing that occurred through the weary weeks was the gliding of the temperature up to the unprecedented height of fifteen below. To atone for this, outer space smote the earth with its cold till the mercury froze and the spirit thermometer remained more than seventy below for a fortnight, when it burst. There was no telling how much colder it was after that. Another occurrence, monotonous in its regularity, was the lengthening of the nights, till day became ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... Also thou Mercury the god of eloquence The gentyll sterre of grace and vertue Thy beames of ryght peace and conscyence On our kynges counsayll downe send and renue The trouthe of Iustyce / that they may extue For to do wronge by the synne of couetyce That here before ...
— A Ioyfull medytacyon to all Englonde of the coronacyon of our moost naturall souerayne lorde kynge Henry the eyght • Stephen Hawes
... should be dipped in warm water previous to its being used. Various articles were collected from individuals in the meeting, and successively presented to them, all of which they described. India-rubber, cork, sponge, pocket combs, &c. A small pocket thermometer, with its tube and its mercury, its principles and use, and even the Turkey-leather on the cover, were all fully described. After explaining the nature and properties of coal-gas, one of the boys stated to the meeting, that since the commencement of this experiment, he ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... done me good. For some thoughts, which sure would be the most beautiful, vanish before we can rightly scan their features; as though a god, travelling by our green highways, should but ope the door, give one smiling look into the house, and go again for ever. Was it Apollo, or Mercury, or Love with folded wings? Who shall say? But we go the lighter about our business, and feel peace and pleasure in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cautioning Max not to enter the circle nor utter a word, no matter what he sees or who comes to join them. Into the melting-pot Caspar now puts the ingredients of the charm: some lead, bits of broken glass from a church window, a bit of mercury, three bullets that have already hit their mark, the right eye of a lapwing, the left of a lynx; ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... pure quicksand (if such there be) and other aqueous materials of Class C, such as water, oil, mercury, etc., it has already been shown that they are to be considered as liquids of their normal specific gravity; that is, in calculating the air pressure necessary to displace them, one should consider their specific gravity only, as a factor, and not ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... university, depending of course on the soul-size of the Superior or Abbe. These constant journeyings and pilgrimages served in lieu of the daily paper, the Western Union Telegraph, and the telephone. Things have slipped back, I fear me, for now Mercury merely calls up his party on the long-distance, instead of making a personal visit—the Angel Gabriel as well. We save time, but ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... I glances across the brass rail and sees this pair advancin' sort of uncertain, I'm all prepared to cause a drop in the mercury. They wa'n't exactly the type I had in mind, though. What I'd expected was a brace of high school cutups. But these two are ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... like everything else, and he never failed to have plum-duff on Sunday. His well was near his house, and every morning he dropped into it a lead and line, and noted down the depth of water. Three times a day he entered in a little note-book the state of the weather, the height of the mercury in barometer and thermometer, the direction of the wind, and ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... Not Mercury, nor Jupiter we beg For a devouring despot, lank of leg, Of prying eye, and frog-transfixing beak; Though singly we seem weak, United we are strong to smite or scoff. Off, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... neighborhood also, except a detachment at New Market, and another small one at the signal-station on Three Top Mountain. The winter was a most severe one, snow falling frequently to the depth of several inches, and the mercury often sinking below zero. The rigor of the season was very much against the success of any mounted operations, but General Grant being very desirous to have the railroads broken up about Gordonsville and Charlottesville, on the 19th of ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... Venus, Mercury and Mars. These three planets were in conjunction at the time of your birth. You were born when the sign was wrong and you have had more or less trouble ever since. Had you been born when the sign was in the head or the heart, instead of the feet, you would ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... over them. The latter, to be more strongly affected by the magnet, are provided with faces of soft iron. To the lower face of the lower arm of the fork a small sharp stylus is fastened, which, with each beat of the fork, comes into contact with the mercury in the little cup, n, or a spring used instead of it. This closes an electric circuit, which passes around the magnet, thence going through the tuning fork by the binding screw, k, and thence by connections not shown in the cut back to the battery. In consequence of the magnetism ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... the editors and owners of The Times, Fortnightly, Mercury, and other periodicals in which a few of the poems have appeared for kindly assenting to their being reclaimed for collected ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... in this class of "igneous after-effects," in that they are late developments in igneous intrusions and often grade into veins clearly formed by aqueous or gaseous solutions. Among the valuable minerals of the igneous after-effect class are ores of gold, silver, copper, iron, antimony, mercury, zinc, lead, and others. While mineral products of much value have this origin, most of them have needed enrichment by weathering to give them the value ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... remarks will apply to the Romans. Their gods were as detestable as they were numerous. Hesiod tells us they had thirty thousand. Temples were erected to all the passions, fears, and diseases to which humanity is subject. Their supreme god, Jupiter, was an adulterer, Mars a murderer, Mercury a thief, Bacchus a drunkard, Venus a harlot; and they attributed other crimes to their gods too horrible to be mentioned. Such gods were worshiped, with appropriate ceremonies, of lust, drunkenness, and ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... six till ten they silted in imperceptibly from twenty streets. As fast as the crowd grew, regiments appeared, and taking up positions, lay at ease. There was something terrible about the quiet way in which both crowd and troops increased. The mercury was not high, but it promised to be a hot morning in New York. All the car lines took off their cars. Trucks disappeared from the streets. The exchanges and the banks closed their doors, and many hundred shops followed their example. New York almost came to a standstill ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... son of Brahma. He is the eloquent messenger of the Gods, a musician of exquisite skill, and the inventor of the vina or Indian lute. He bears a strong resemblance to Hermes or Mercury. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... message is a spectacular thing. Current of great power is used, and the spark is a blinding flash accompanied by deafening noises that suggest a volley from rifles. But Marconi is experimenting to reduce the noise, and the use of the mercury vapour invented by Peter Cooper Hewitt will do much to increase the rapidity ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... Mercury and Warwickshire and Staffordshire Advertiser was the title of newspaper of which the first copy was dated November 24, 1820. The title of Mercury was revived in 1848. on the 10th December of which year Mr. Wm. B. Smith brought out his paper of that ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... like a Mercury, on a rock in mid-stream, the angler had just thrown eighteen yards of line lightly as a silken thread to an inch, when his foot slipped, and a loud splash, bringing the painter, like Icarus, out of the clouds with a run, startled his attention to the place where his companion ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... sets her several impossible tasks, but Psyche, with supernatural aid, accomplishes all of them safely. At last Cupid manages to escape through a window. He finds Psyche lying on the road like a corpse, wakes her and Mercury brings her to heaven, where at last she is properly married to Cupid—sic rite Psyche convenit in manum Cupidinis et nascitur illis maturo partu ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... now, a letter from my Master to his cousin, and then, of course, an answer to that. I had need go get myself fitted like Mercury, with wings at his heels. To be the lacquey of a man that hath quarrelled with his mistress! And to know the final issue all the time, that it is sure to be made up between them. And to hear him mutter "the last," between his teeth, while sealing it. He was to have journeyed this evening, too, ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... got up and dressed. She put on a pale blue linen gown which Jack admired, and a blue straw hat trimmed with grey wings which Jack said made her look like Mercury. ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... at an elevation of 5,000 feet, I found the most delightful climate I ever knew. It was like eternal spring, the air pure and the temperature remarkably even. There is a story of a Mexican woman, who, settling in this part of the country, broke her thermometer because the mercury never moved and she therefore concluded that it was out of order. The pleasantness of the climate struck me particularly on one occasion, after a prolonged stay in the invigorating though windy climate of the sierra. I had caught a cold the ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... more justly attributed to the German temperament? Are not the Germans constitutionally incapable of accomplishing a revolution? They lack the red corpuscles in their veins. They have no phosphorus or mercury in their composition. They have no elan, no resilience or vitality. They are strong, but only when they act gregariously, not when they act as free and irresponsible individuals. They can fight, but only when they are driven, and ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... one eye kept upon the master; and a kind of buzzing stillness reigned throughout the schoolroom. It was suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a negro in tow-cloth jacket and trousers, a round-crowned fragment of a hat, like the cap of Mercury, and mounted on the back of a ragged, wild, half-broken colt, which he managed with a rope by way of halter. He came clattering up to the school door with an invitation to Ichabod to attend a merry-making or "quilting-frolic," to be held that evening ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... gelatine is solid when cold. Pfeffer ("Physiology", Eng. Tr. III. page 52. Pfeffer has pointed out the resemblance between the contact irritability of plants and the human sense of touch. Our skin is not sensitive to uniform pressure such as is produced when the finger is dipped into mercury (Tubingen "Untersuchungen", I. page 504.) generalises the result in the statement that the tendril has a special form of irritability and only reacts to "differences of pressure or variations of pressure in contiguous... regions." ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... 1875-76, continue through many later years, including all kinds of carbon instruments —the water telephone, electrostatic telephone, condenser telephone, chemical telephone, various magneto telephones, inertia telephone, mercury telephone, voltaic pile telephone, musical transmitter, and the electromotograph. All were actually made ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of fiction and the June of fact. The June of fiction is divided into two equal parts—the dry half and the wet half. The former is made up of hot days, dull with dust haze, when the shade temperature may reach 118 degrees, and of oppressive nights when the air is still and stagnant and the mercury in the thermometer rarely falls below 84 degrees. Each succeeding period of four-and-twenty hours seems more disagreeable and unbearable than its predecessor, until the climax is reached about the 15th June, when large black clouds appear on the horizon ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... not as yet been collected in the center of the globe. The terrestrial crust, thin and incompletely hardened, allowed it to spread through its pores. This caused a peculiar form of vegetation, such as is probably produced on the surface of the inferior planets, Venus or Mercury, which revolve nearer than our earth around the radiant ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... dropped his axe into a deep pool, besought Mercury to recover it for him. That thoughtless deity immediately plunged into the pool, which became so salivated that the trees about its margin all came ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... of Mercury, who therefore sowed this dissension between the two brothers in revenge for his death by Pelops. See ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... implicitly copied, was a man of indifferent character, who accompanied Mr. Forster, in the insurrection in Northumberland, as his chaplain. He afterwards turned king's evidence, and appeared against those whom he had served. For this act of treachery his pension was raised (as I find by the Caledonian Mercury for 1722) from 50l. to 80l. a-year. He dedicates his History of the Rebellion ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... tell your lord that you brought no answer, and it will not be the first lie with which you have befooled his imperial ears," replied Maria Theresa coutemptuously, while she waved her hand as a signal of dismissal. The unhappy Mercury retired, and as he disappeared, the pent-up anguish of the ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... of making the gods and demigods serve the purposes of sacred history, he put them, as the Fathers of the Church did, in active opposition to it. When the angel Gabriel salutes the Virgin at Nazareth, Mercury flies after him from Carmel, and listens at the door. He then announces the result of his eavesdropping to the assembled gods, and stimulates them thereby to desperate resolutions. Elsewhere, it is true, in his writings, Thetis, Ceres, Aeolus, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... closed, to-day, in honor of Washington's birth-day. But it is a fast day; meal selling for $40 per bushel. Money will not be so abundant a month hence! All my turnip-greens were killed by the frost. The mercury was, on Friday, 5 deg. above zero; to-day it is 40 deg.. Sowed a small bed of curled Savoy cabbage; and saved the early York in my half barrel hot-bed by bringing it into the parlor, where there ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... lessons of this miserable globe of folly, when we have mastered all the virtues and shed all the vices, when we long to be free from the trammels of sense and appetite and sickness and ambition, we are transferred to Mercury. Mercury is a highly evolved planet, a spiritualized existence, free from the obsessions of sex and greed, an ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Mirth and sorrow, want and plenty, night and day, make up our time. But in troth I am pleased at my stocking; very well pleased at my stocking. Oh, here's my niece! Sirrah, go tell Sir Sampson Legend I'll wait on him if he's at leisure: —'tis now three o'clock, a very good hour for business: Mercury ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... influence of all the Homoeopathic remedies tried by him in modifying, so far as he could observe, the progress or termination of diseases. It deserves notice that he experimented with the most boasted substances,—cinchona, aconite, mercury, bryonia, belladonna. Aconite, for instance, he says he administered in more than forty cases of that collection of feverish symptoms in which it exerts so much power, according to Hahnemann, and in not one of them did it have the slightest ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the lovesome fancies that flitted through Lizzie's spirit in those busy hours could have found their way into the texture of the dingy yarn, as it was slowly wrought into shape, the eventual wearer of the socks would have been as light-footed as Mercury. I am afraid I should make the reader sneer, were I to rehearse some of this little fool's diversions. She passed several hours daily in Jack's old chamber: it was in this sanctuary, indeed, at the sunny south window, overlooking the long road, the wood-crowned heights, the gleaming river, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... consideration. Speaking generally, Donatello was neither more nor less restrictive than his Florentine contemporaries, and it was only at a later period that the isolated statue received perfect freedom, such as that in the Cellini Perseus, or the Mercury by Gian Bologna, or ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... simple faith of medieval herbalists—a faith surviving in some old women even to this day. The name is said to be a corruption of athanasia, derived from two Greek words meaning immortality. When some monks in reading Lucian came across the passage where Jove, speaking of Ganymede to Mercury, says, "Take him hence, and when he has tasted immortality let him return to us," their literal minds inferred that this plant must have been what Ganymede tasted, hence they named it athanasia! So great credence having been given to its medicinal powers in Europe, it is ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... just purchased a considerable tract of land," etc. Most philosophical of paragraphists! "Celebrated English banker!"—that sentence is a better illustration of verbal fallacies than all Ben tham's treatises put together. "Celebrated!" O Mercury, what ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fired upon impact, a detonator exploding the main charge. The detonator, comprising fulminate of mercury, is placed in the head or tail of the missile. To secure perfect detonation and to distribute the death-dealing contents evenly in all directions, it is essential that the bomb should strike the ground almost at right angles: ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... families in the neighbourhood would go to hear him; and he lodged in my house, and had pleasant ways with him, and was what I call a scollard. But still I don't want to deceive ye, and I should judge him to have been a wild dog in his day. Mercury ill-aspected,—not a doubt of it. Last year it so happened that one of the great gents who belong to a Lunnon theatre was here at fair-time. Whether he had heard of Waife chanceways, and come express to judge for hisself, I can't say; like eno'. And when he had seen Gentleman ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that felicity of the dramatist's case that his synthetic "whole" IS his form, the only one we have to do with. I like to profit in his company by the fact that if our art has certainly, for the impression it produces, to defer to the rise and fall, in the critical temperature, of the telltale mercury, it still hasn't to ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... through subspace at a speed which left laggard light far behind. Since subspace distances do not coincide with normal space distances, the SOS was first picked up by a Fomalhautian freighter bound for Capella although it had been issued from a point in normal space midway between the orbit of Mercury and the sun's corona in ...
— A Place in the Sun • C.H. Thames
... As for Mercury, Uranus, and Neptune, the former is very near the sun, and seldom seen; while Uranus and Neptune are so inconspicuous as to lead to no confusion on ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... Mercury did her bidding more effectively was proved by her finding the doctor at the bedside when she arrived the ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford
... only two, and people began to show themselves in the streets, while the sun tried to break through the grey clouds which shrouded the wintry sky. But this was only temporary, for before noon the mercury fell again to eight below, the wind began to rise, and when the New York train came panting to the station at half-past six, clouds of snow so dense and dark were driving over the hills and along the line of track that nothing ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... salts, and earth, their virtues cannot be properly ascribed, as they have been, to the metals which they contain. It might be further proved, that iron cannot possibly enter the blood, retaining its essential qualities; for metals in general, except mercury, are suspended in liquids in solutis principiis, or principles disengaged, which are thus deprived of their metallic properties. Iron, entering the body as a volatile vitriolic acid, cannot act by its specific gravity as mercury does; it ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... around: "A wooden king!" the banks resound. Fear once remov'd they swim about him, And gibe and jeer and mock and flout him; And messengers to Jove depute, Effectively to grant their suit. A hungry stork he sent them then, Who soon had swallow'd half the fen. Their woes scarce daring to reveal, To Mercury by night they steal, And beg him to entreat of Jove The direful tyrant to remove. 'No,' says the God, 'they chose their lot, And must abide what they have got:' So you, my friends, had best go home In peace, ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... winter had followed, which not only cooled the passions of all for a while, but convinced many a slave-holder of the futility of introducing African slaves into a climate, where on occasion the mercury would freeze in the thermometer. In the spring hostilities were resumed. Under cover of executing certain writs in Lawrence, Sheriff Jones and a posse of ruffians took revenge upon that stronghold of the Emigrant Aid Society, by destroying the newspaper offices, burning some public ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... a 'cello—sat in summer evening weather in a garden. This garden was full of bloom and odor, and was shut in by high walls of ripe old brick. Here and there were large-sized plaster casts—Venus, Minerva, Mercury, a goat-hoofed Pan with his pipes, a Silence with a finger at her lips. They were all sylvan green and crumbled with exposure to the weather, so that, in spite of cheapness, they gave the place a certain Old-world and stately aspect to an ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... produced will surprise no one who considers the build of the most musical of their instruments. The mandolin is by way of being a guitar, or banjo—only in a very small way indeed. Nothing has been added to the idea since first Mercury stumbled on the original testudo—indeed, I should guess that the dried sinews of a tortoise would give out a far purer sound than the jingling wires with which the mandolin is mounted. I have sometimes stood at the door of a cafe, or, to give it the real name ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... only sodium stearate, oleate and palmitate, which form the bulk of the soaps of commerce, but also the linoleates of lead, manganese, etc., used as driers, and various pharmaceutical preparations, e.g., mercury oleate (Hydrargyri oleatum), zinc oleate and lead plaster, together with a number of other metallic salts of fatty acids. Technically speaking, however, the meaning of the term soap is considerably restricted, being generally limited to the combinations ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... The difference between them is said to have been widened by Burke's growing intimacy with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and by Barry's feeling some little jealousy of the fame and fortune of his rival "in a humbler walk of the art." About the same time he painted a pair of classical subjects, Mercury inventing the lyre, and Narcissus looking at himself in the water, the last suggested to him by Burke. He also painted a historical picture of Chiron and Achilles, and another of the story of Stratonice, for which last the duke ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... deities, male and female, as many as you can use. Separate them into two equal parts, and keep Jupiter in the middle. Let Juno put him in a ferment, and Venus mollify him. Remember on all occasions to make use of volatile Mercury. If you have need of devils, draw them out of Milton's Paradise, and extract your spirits from Tasso. The use of these machines is evident; for since no epic poem can possibly subsist without them, the wisest way is to reserve them for your greatest ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... they were got into their several places and ceased their clamour. Then King Agamemnon rose, holding his sceptre. This was the work of Vulcan, who gave it to Jove the son of Saturn. Jove gave it to Mercury, slayer of Argus, guide and guardian. King Mercury gave it to Pelops, the mighty charioteer, and Pelops to Atreus, shepherd of his people. Atreus, when he died, left it to Thyestes, rich in flocks, and Thyestes in his turn left it to be borne by Agamemnon, that he might be lord ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... the evenness of our own, and the reports I know thee has heard to the contrary are mistaken. The mercury not unfrequently falls to thirty-five and forty degrees below zero in many localities, but the air is dry, and does not try one as much, perhaps, as thee would imagine: the bitter winds, however, sweep across these prairies and through and about the valleys until it verily seems, Friend ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... of the fattest, and who, after having twice performed the journey to Ione's house, now saw himself condemned to a third excursion (whither the gods only knew), hastened after her, deploring his fate, and solemnly assuring Castor and Pollux that he believed the blind girl had the talaria of Mercury as well as ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... send sum wiskey 'long with the segars. Those are the principel points to bare in mind, and if you follow em up rite, you'll become a grate and good jurnerlist. If you ever run short of sensashuns, get on the track of the "mercury" liar and foller him up, till you strike his ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... Brighton party, and your fine weather. When I was at Abbotsford the mercury was down at six or seven in the morning more than once. I am hammering away at a bit of a story from the old affair of the diablerie at Woodstock in the Long Parliament times. I don't like it much. I am obliged to hamper my fanatics ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... good foil for your smile," she replied. "Indeed, I think the mercury rose a little while you ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... realized the most tragic truth of my life. I had taken one of the deadliest poisons in the world. The odor of the released gas of cyanogen was strong. But more than that, the metallic taste and the horrible burning sensation told of the presence of some form of mercury, too. In that terrible moment my brain worked with the incredible swiftness of light. In a flash I knew that if I added malic acid to the mercury—perchloride of mercury or corrosive sublimate—I would have calomel or subchloride ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... but much more quickly than gunpowder does. It were better to say that a powder detonates when it all explodes at the same instant. Gunpowder appears to do so, but in reality it does not. One of the best detonators is fulminate of mercury. Detonating caps are therefore made of this, and one such cap put into the middle of that cartridge of dynamite and set fire to, by any means, would convert the cartridge itself into a detonator, and explode it ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... quotation, whether drawn by his own hand or that of another. The Champion for May 24, 1740, contains a vision of the Infernal Regions, where Charon, the ghostly boatman, is busy ferrying souls across the River Styx. The ferryman bids his attendant Mercury see that all his passengers embark carrying nothing with them; and the narrator describes how, after various Shades had qualified for their passage, "A tall Man came next, who stripp'd off an old Grey ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... contraction of area, which from time to time vitiates the labour of every surveyor, and has caused much professional animosity. Old men with one foot in the grave, in this year 1895, are still accusing each other of embezzling acres of it; the devil of Discord, and Mercury the god of thieves, encamped upon it; the Port Albert Company fell into its Slough of Despond, which in the Court of Equity was known as "Kemmis v. Orr," and ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... mercury, every point of information he could furnish, Sir George ordained silence upon him, lest uneasiness might be caused among the people of Auckland. Then, on the plea of making a rapid tour of the outposts of the Colony, he organised a move on Wanganui. He went thither ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... proved to Swedenborg that these bodies are not made to wander through space puts all human science out of sight beneath the grandeur of a divine logic. According to the Seer, the inhabitants of Jupiter will not cultivate the sciences, which they call darkness; those of Mercury abhor the expression of ideas by speech, which seems to them too material,—their language is ocular; those of Saturn are continually tempted by evil spirits; those of the Moon are as small as six-year-old children, their ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... wave suddenly out of the West—a tidal wave of bitter winds and blizzardy snow-storms, that sent the mercury down into the shoes ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... guest on the adjoining estate during the past week, shooting with the fervor of the true sportsman, making love in the intervals to Adeline Cavan, and apparently in the best of spirits. As far as was known there was nothing to lower his mental mercury, for his rent-roll was a large one, Miss Cavan blushed whenever he looked at her, and, being one of the best shots in England, he was never happier than in August. The suicide theory was preposterous, all agreed, ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... have been printed with "ed" rather than "t", participial adjectives and substantives, such as 'past,' alone excepted. In the case of 'leap,' which has two preterite-forms, both employed by Shelley (See for an example of the longer form, the "Hymn to Mercury", 18 5, where 'leaped' rhymes with 'heaped' (line 1). The shorter form, rhyming to 'wept,' 'adapt,' etc., occurs more frequently.)—one with the long vowel of the present-form, the other with a vowel-change (Of course, wherever this vowel-shortening takes place, whether indicated by a corresponding ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... date back to mythology. Tradition tells us that Hermaphroditus, a son of Venus and Mercury, was educated by the Naiades dwelling on Mount Ida. At the age of fifteen years, he began his travels; while resting in the cool shades on the woody banks of a fountain and spring near Caira, he was approached by ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... or did the opposite. The most popular medicines were derived from the vegetable kingdom, and as they were chiefly those recommended by Galen, they were, and still are, called by his name. Many important mineral medicines were introduced by the Arabians, particularly mercury, antimony, iron, etc. There were in addition scores of substances, the parts or products of animals, some harmless, others salutary, others again useless and disgusting. Minor surgery was in the hands of the barbers, who performed all the minor operations, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... a supper was spread in the big hall in the basement, below stairs, the sons and daughters of Ham came down like the fowls of the air upon a rice-field, and Bras-Coupe, throwing his heels about with the joyous carelessness of a smutted Mercury, for the first time in his life tasted the blood of the grape. A second, a fifth, a tenth time he tasted it, drinking more deeply each time, and would have taken it ten times more had not his bride cunningly concealed it. It was like stealing a ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... invigorating delight, as they might dash into a crisp ocean surf on a hot day. These know that nature is stern, hard, immovable and terrible in unrelenting cruelty. When wintry winds are out and the mercury far below zero, she will allow her most ardent lover to freeze on her snowy breast without waving a leaf in pity, or offering him a match; and scores of her devotees may starve to death in as many different languages before she will offer a loaf of bread. She does not deal in matches and ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... the mineral dye, (cinnabar or red sulphate of mercury), and the insect dye; the first was probably used in mural painting. It is translated in our Bible as vermilion, in the account given by Jeremiah of a "house, ceiled with cedar, and painted with vermilion."[298] Also Ezekiel gives us another ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... six orbits, Jupiter's right on the line. And Mercury won't be leaving until Jupe crosses that line." The "line" that Mike had indicated with his pencil across the screen would have, in the first display shown all but one of the first six planets already on the same side of the sun and in the new display, two days later, it showed ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... I broke the bulb of one of my clinical thermometers and, placing the small quantity of mercury thus obtained in the bottom of a tray, I threw a few of the grains into it, and found that they immediately united, forming a dirty-grey amalgam. I was now sure the substance was gold and in less than five hours I collected enough to fill five photographic ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... Amalgamate Battery Plates. To keep the zinc plates or rods in cells from being eaten or dissolved when the circuit is opened, they should be amalgamated; that is, they should have a coating of mercury. The local currents (see text-book) aid in rapidly destroying the zinc, unless it is amalgamated. Do not amalgamate copper ...
— How Two Boys Made Their Own Electrical Apparatus • Thomas M. (Thomas Matthew) St. John
... ever on time, and the Government was forced to do away with time entirely. Another thing that was abolished was hot weather. It had been found too tedious to tilt the axis of the earth, therefore all the thermometers were re-scaled. When the temperature was really 96 degrees, the mercury registered only 70 degrees, and every one was saying how jolly cool it was for the time of year. This, of course, was careless, for there was no such thing as time or year, but still people kept on saying it. Bleak was thinking ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... inches is continually frozen, appears to me exceedingly remarkable—and from a general point of view the occurrence of insects in a land which is exposed to a winter cold below the freezing-point of mercury, and where the animal cannot seek protection from it by creeping down to a stratum of earth which never freezes, presupposes that either the insect itself, its egg, larva, or pupa, may be frozen stiff without being killed. Only very few species of these small animals, however, appear to survive ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... world, and small as it appears amidst the ethereal regions, it is still enormous, for its size is 1,400,000 times that of the earth. Around it gravitate eight planets, struck off from its own mass in the first days of creation. These are, in proceeding from the nearest to the most distant, Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Between Mars and Jupiter circulate regularly other smaller bodies, the wandering debris, perhaps, of a star broken up into thousands of pieces, of which the telescope has discovered eighty-two at present. ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... "is palpably the proper emblem of rest, on account of the security and firmness of the superficies." He further tells us that the pyramid is an image of the triangular flame ascending from a square altar; and since no one knows, his guess is as good as any. At any rate, Mercury, Apollo, Neptune, and Hercules were worshiped under the form of a square stone, while a large black stone was the emblem of Buddha among the Hindoos, of Manah Theus-Ceres in Arabia, and of Odin in Scandinavia. Everyone knows of the Stone of Memnon in Egypt, which was said to speak at ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... her in an awed voice, "invisible, oh Zara, in a cloak contrived by Dantor, the Rulan scientist." Then blind rage overcame him. She had tried to kill Ulana; before his eyes! "You she-devil!" he roared. "I've half a mind to choke the vile life from your tainted body. Damn you! May the heat devils of Mercury burn and sear and shrivel ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... had been previously obtained, of the relation of the weight of air to the weight of mercury, had furnished a direct value of the coefficient of the barometrical formula which served for ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... Another nephew of his was Theodore Dwight, the brother of Yale's president, who led the Federal civilians, and who was editor of the "Hartford Courant," the organ of the Connecticut Federalists. The Hartford "American Mercury" voiced the sentiments of the Republicans. The latter party throughout the state was formally organized in 1800 at a meeting in New Haven, the home of Mr. Edwards and of his henchman, Abraham Bishop, son of that ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... forty dancing satyrs crowned with golden ivy-leaves, with their naked bodies stained with gay colours, each carrying a crown of vine leaves and gold; then two Sileni in scarlet cloaks and white boots, one having the hat and wand of Mercury and the other a trumpet; and between them walked a man, six feet high, in tragic dress and mask, meant for the Year, carrying a golden cornucopia. He was followed by a tall and beautiful woman, meant for the Lustrum ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... his tongue; and when, a week later, he walked in Helston and bought a 'Mercury' off the Sherborne rider, and got the landlord of the 'Angel' to spell out the list of killed and wounded, sure enough, there among the killed was Drummer John Christian, of the ...
— The Roll-Call Of The Reef • A. T. Quiller-Couch (AKA "Q.")
... did not move, and the somber blanket of winter thickened. More snows fell and the icy rains came again. Then the mercury slid down until it reached zero. Thick ice formed over everything and some of the shallower brooks froze solidly in their beds. The Southern lads were not nearly so well equipped against the winter as their foes. Not many had ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... helpful. Says Paracelsus: "The true use of chemistry is not to make gold, but to prepare medicines." He admits four elements—the STAR, the ROOT, the ELEMENT and the SPERM. These elements were composed of the three principles, SIDERIC SALT, SULPHUR, and MERCURY. Mercury, or spirit, sulphur, or oil, and salt, and the passive principles, water and earth. Herein we see the harmony of the two words, Alchemy and Chemistry. One is but the continuation of the other, and they blend so into each other that, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... To dream of mercury, is significant of unhappy changes through the constant oppression of enemies. For a woman to be suffering from mercurial poison, foretells she will be deserted by and separated ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... howlings the wolves were still a long distance from the camp. The hearing of the Indians is very acute, and when the temperature is down so low that the mercury is frozen, sounds are heard very much more distinctly, and from a greater distance, than under ordinary atmospheric conditions. Thus there was fortunately a little time for preparation ere they would have ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... and yourself in any one of a store of berths wrought into that most unpicturesque tufa, of which the exterior face constitutes the whole of the sea view of Baiae. If ever there were decorations in these caverns, they are gone; but there probably never were. Diana, Mercury, Venus, and Apollo all claim brick tenements, called temples, in this little bay, all close together on the seaside, and none having any claim at present either on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... most remarkable of modern actors has never, since the public were first aware of his qualities, decreased. Robson is always sure to draw. The nights of his playing, or of his non-playing, at the Olympic, are as sure a gauge of the receipts as the rising and falling of the mercury in the thermometer are of the variations of the temperature. A month's absence of Robson from London always brought about an alarming depletion in the Olympic treasury. Unhappily, these absences have of late years become more frequent, and more and more prolonged. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... of course recognize that this is the story of Cupid and Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and translated with such felicity by Pater in his Marius, Pt. i., ch. 5. Though the names of the gods and goddesses—Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Juno, Proserpine, etc.—are scattered through the tale, it is now acknowledged on all hands that it has nothing to do with mythology but is a fairy tale pure and simple, as indeed is acknowledged by Apuleius who calls it a "fabella anilis." ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... Parliament, was but a King in name. He had a great compass of knowledge, tho' he was never capable of much application or study. He understood the Mechanicks and Physick; and was a good Chymist, and much set on several preparations of Mercury, chiefly the fixing it. He understood navigation well: But above all he knew the architecture of ships so perfectly, that in that respect he was exact rather more than became a Prince. His apprehension was quick, and his memory good. He was ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... timidity, if they are influenced by such mean and unworthy passions that a popular clamor is sufficient to shake the resolution they build upon the solid basis of a legal principle, I would endeavor to fix that mercury by a positive law. If to please an administration the judges can go one way to-day, and to please the crowd they can go another to-morrow, if they will oscillate backward and forward between power and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... nations. Alongside, the dignity of such is placed, and their several inventors are named. But on the exterior all the inventors in science, in warfare, and in law are represented. There I saw Moses, Osiris, Jupiter, Mercury, Lycurgus, Pompilius, Pythagoras, Zamolxis, Solon, Charondas, Phoroneus, with very many others. They even have Mahomet, whom nevertheless they hate as a false and sordid legislator. In the most dignified position I saw a representation ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... ended, Barlow removed to Hartford, where he studied law, edited the American Mercury,—a weekly paper he had helped to found,—- and with John Trumbull, Lemuel Hopkins, and David Humphreys formed a literary club which became widely known as the "Hartford Wits." Its chief publication, a series of political lampoons ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... upon this picture, and on this; The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. See, what a grace was seated on this brow: Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself; An eye like Mars, to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury, New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill; A combination, and a form, indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal, To give the world assurance of a man. Hamlet, Act iii. Sc. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... that one may see the more, inwardly. Perhaps the eyes of the mystic Ficino, now long past the midway of life, had come to be thus half-closed; but when a young man, not unlike the archangel Raphael, as the Florentines of that age depicted him in his wonderful walk with Tobit, or Mercury, as he might have appeared in a painting by Sandro Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo, entered his chamber, he seems to have thought there was something not wholly earthly about him; at least, he ever afterwards believed ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... these are found to constitute not a merely external thread, a superficial series, but are the inward guiding soul of the occurrences and actions that occupy a nation's annals. For, like the soul-conductor, Mercury, the Idea is, in truth, the leader of peoples and of the world; and Spirit, the rational and necessitated will of that conductor, is and has been the director of the events of the world's history. To become acquainted with Spirit in this, its office of guidance, is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... as mercury, it seemed. Frances despised her for her fickleness, scorned her for the mean face of friendship over the treachery of her soul. Not that she regretted Major King. Nola was free to take him and make the most of him. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... health, however, won a larger portion of indulgence than was good for me. The doctors into whose hands I had fallen, were of the school now happily very much exploded: they had one panacea for almost every ill, and that was the perilous drug mercury. With it, they rather fed than physicked me; and its deleterious effects on the nervous system were doubly injurious to me, as increasing tenfold the excitability that required every curb. Among all the marvels of my life, the greatest is that of my having grown ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... valley of the sayings and doings in the world outside. Nothing was thought of this until one day the passing pedler brought the startling news that the Lord Protector was dead. The family were at breakfast in the kitchen of the old house when this tardy representative of the herald Mercury arrived, and, in reply to the customary inquiry as to the news he carried, announced the aforesaid fact. Wilson was alive to its significance with a ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... miscarriages, or at least to make a faithful report of its incidents. Captain Thomas Dover, the third in command, was a proprietor also. He was bred a physician, and afterwards made a noise in the world by recommending the use of crude mercury. He was a man of rough temper, and could not easily agree with those about him, yet his morose disposition hindered him from making any party to support him in his ill humours. Captain Cooke, fourth in command, was second to Captain Courtney. The pilot in the larger ship was Captain William Dampier, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... mercury, arsenic, and even strychnine, are the subjects of several patents. A mixture of coal tar and ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... merit; but you will never, please; and without pleasing you will rise but heavily. Venus, among the ancients, was synonymous with the Graces, who were always supposed to accompany her; and Horace tells us that even Youth and Mercury, the god of Arts and Eloquence, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... to feel more comfortable, their spirits commenced to go upward again, just as the mercury in a thermometer rises with the ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... when the mercury wuz way out of sight, And the frost it wuz on every nail, With jist the mail sack and specie box, The greaser and I hit the trail. We picked two passengers up at Big Pine, And while the broncos were changed that day I noticed them ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... read and write were still rare accomplishments in the country, and Dogberry expressed a common notion when he said reading and writing come by nature. Sheets of news had become common in the town in James's time, the first newspaper being the English Mercury, which appeared in April, 1588, and furnished food for Jonson's satire in his "Staple of News." His accusation has a familiar sound when he says that people had a "hunger and thirst after published pamphlets of news, set ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in whose writings they are girded, and wear thick or embroidered Phrygian robes. Mercury stands with them for the same reason, not because argument or eloquence commends benefits, but because the painter chose to do so. Also Chrysippus, that man of piercing intellect who saw to the very bottom of truth, who speaks only to the point, and makes ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... although they be wicked, are honored as standing in God's place, and as representing the community over which they are placed, according to Prov. 26:8, "As he that casteth a stone into the heap of Mercury, so is he that giveth honor to a fool." For, since the gentiles ascribed the keeping of accounts to Mercury, "the heap of Mercury" signifies the casting up of an account, when a merchant sometimes substitutes a pebble [*Lapillus ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of the early plaintive strains of Greek popular poetry, and used to be sung by corn-reapers. Other traditions represented Daphnis as beloved by a nymph who exacted from him an oath to love no one else. He fell in love with a princess, and was struck blind by the jealous nymph. Mercury, who was his father, raised him to Heaven, and made a fountain spring up in the place from which he ascended. At this fountain the Sicilians offered yearly sacrifices.—See Servius, Comment. in Virgil. Bucol., v. 20, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... one could likewise see, Phoebus Apollo, Vulcan, Lady Venus, Pluto and Proserpine and Mercury, God Bacchus and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... she had a fancy to put on her "freak" dress. It was of gold tissue with little trousers of the same, tightly drawn in at the ankles, a page's cape slung from the shoulders, little gold shoes, and a gold-winged Mercury helmet; and all over her were tiny gold bells, especially on the helmet; so that if she shook her head she pealed. When she was dressed she felt quite sick because Jon could not see her; it even seemed a pity that the sprightly young ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in the moral world where he has the sun in the physical, to regulate, enlighten, and cheer." C. C. Burleigh, alluding to this remark, in our meeting at the Tabernacle, said: "Thus he calls his Convention, in which Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, and Neptune are appointed a committee of arrangements, and says ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... be discovered. At the meeting of the British Association at Southampton, Professor Oersted communicated to the Chemical Section some curious examples of the influence of time in determining chemical change, as shown in the action of mercury upon glass in hermetically sealed vessels. The character of Professor Oersted's mind was essentially searching and minute; thus he observed results which escaped detection in the hands of those who took more general ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... cobbler once, long ago, who kept a shop quite out of the common run and marvelous in its way. It stood in a shadowy city over whose dark streets the buildings toppled, until spiders spun their webs across from roof to roof. And to this cobbler the god Mercury himself journeyed to have wings sewed to his flying shoes. High patronage. And Atalanta, too, came and held out her swift foot for the fitting of a running sandal. But perhaps the cobbler's most famous customer was a well-known giant who ordered of him his seven-league boots. These boots, as ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... I have some faint notion of what you mean; it might be made to answer, no doubt—but in my time we employed scarcely any thing else than the Bichloride of Mercury." ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... by the offer, Philip was much more offended by the refusal. "As you like; I hate pride," said he; and he gave the gun to the groom as he vaulted into his saddle with the lightness of a young Mercury. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... they must have found it, for it appeared that they had already been becalmed five days, and had not altered their position as many miles; and there seemed every prospect of their being becalmed five days more, for the glass was as steady as if the mercury had been solid. ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... also known that the density of the air adjacent to the instrument will depend both on the weight of air above it, and on the heat of the air at that place. If, therefore, we can measure the density of the air, and its temperature, the height of a column of mercury which it would support in the barometer can be found by calculation. Now the thermometer gives information respecting the temperature of the air immediately; and its density might be ascertained by means of a watch and a small instrument, ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... who have traveled all over the world say that they never suffered so much from the cold as in India, and it is safe to believe them. The same degree of cold seems colder there than elsewhere, because the mercury falls so rapidly after the sun goes down. However, India is so vast, and the climate and the elevations are so varied, that you can spend the entire year there without discomfort if you migrate ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... he lapsed into helpless hypochondria. One of his pet ideas was that a copious dose of calomel would ensure his restoration to perfect health. Unfortunately, however, during the prevalence of the plague, our medicine chest had one day been accidentally left exposed, and our mercury was abstracted. Still there was no use to attempt calming him with the assurance that his nostrum could not be had. The more we argued the impossibility of supplying him, the more was he urgent and imperative for ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer |
