"Elixir" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "I don't know that I could have got away myself any earlier. I've been so absorbed in the laborrit'ry, what with three rejuvenators and an elixir all on the simmer together, I almost gave way under the strain of it; but they're set to cool now, and I'm ready to go as ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... age, I shall owe the blessing in a great measure to the discovery, years ago, that I am hired not by the job, but by the day. If you, dear friend, will receive this truth into a good and honest heart, and believing, abide in and live by it, you will find it the very elixir of life to ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... yet lovelier as the track wound through deep wooded ravines, or snaked along the narrow tops of spine-like ridges; the air became cooler, damper, and more like elixir, till at a height of 1500 feet we came upon Makaueli, ideally situated upon an unequalled natural plateau, a house of patriarchal size for the islands, with a verandah festooned with roses, fuchsias, the water lemon, and other passion flowers, and with ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... supremest glory of motion, the souls of those who had left the slough of humanity behind them. These transcendental notions were entirely corrupted at a very early date by the introduction of belief in an elixir of life, and later still by the practice of alchemistic experiments. Opposed by Buddhism, which next laid a claim for a share in the profits of popular patronage, Taoism rapidly underwent a radical transformation. It became a religion, borrowing certain ceremonial, vestments, liturgies, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... moment circulating in his blood, and prompting the very sophistries that his brain produced. He who is cured begets a wholesome aversion toward what has harmed him; he feels no curiosity to prove whether or no he be yet open to mischief from it. Bressant's poison was in fact an elixir, whose delicious intoxication he had experienced once, and which his whole nature secretly but ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... are artists, skilled in the arts and wiles of persuasiveness. There is one with a long, horse-hair wig which he occasionally brushes back from his eyes with a dignified flourish. This man has found the supreme elixir and the secret of perpetuity. He is the only man in the world, this modern Ponce de Leon, who knows the secret. Surely we need not blush to listen to its exposition, $2 is a small sum to pay for such a bonanza. Forty thousand people have used it in the last thirty-nine days. Think of it. "Take ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... had, during fourteen years, concealed from every one, except Lady Sundon, an incurable disorder, that of hernia. In November (1737) she was attacked with what we should now call English cholera. Dr. Tessier, her house-physician, was called in, and gave her Daffey's elixir, which was not likely to afford any relief to the deep-seated cause of her sufferings. She held a drawing-room that night for the last time, and played at cards, even cheerfully. At length she whispered ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... the same cogency to Coleridge. Coleridge began in rheumatic pains. What then? That is no proof that he did not end in voluptuousness. For our parts, we are slow to believe that ever any man did, or could, learn the somewhat awful truth, that in a certain ruby-coloured elixir, there lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing this power. To taste but once from the tree of knowledge, is fatal to the subsequent power of abstinence. True it is, that generations ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... the thing itself, it is something better: it is an ideal combination of its principal forms, a luminous tint made up of its brightest colors, an intoxicating balm of its purest perfumes, a delicious elixir of its best juices, a perfect harmony of its sweetest sounds—in short, it is a concentration of all its good qualities. For this Truth, and nothing else, should strive those works of art which are a moral representation of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... man shall be conducted by a few doses of Robert Montgomery's Devil's Elixir, called "Satan," or by a portion, or rather a potion, of "Oxford." Apollo, we know, was the god of medicine as well as of poetry. Behold, in this our bard, his two ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... the rattletrap and the racket of filling the tank with the elixir finished her sleep, however. She woke in confusion, finding herself sitting up, dressed, in her little room, with three strange ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... as Carlyle might have put it, is the Hero as Artist. When we have admitted this, all dregs and sediments of the analytical alembic sink to the bottom, leaving a clear crystalline elixir of the spirit. About the quality of his genius opinions may, will, and ought to differ. It is so pronounced, so peculiar, so repulsive to one man, so attractive to another, that, like his own dread statue of Lorenzo de' Medici, "it fascinates and is intolerable." ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... gone, my hair was flying in the wind, and all the first fright was lost in the feeling of exhilaration over the fact that I was the one who was controlling that great iron monster as she tore along the track. I—I was doing it all by myself. It was like the elixir of life to an invalid. My fireman came ever to me at one time and said in my ear that I'd better call for brakes or the first thing we knew we would land in the river. Brakes! Not on your life. I didn't ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... the sewers and sinks With all such drinks, And after them tumble the mixer! For a poison malign Is such Borgia wine, Or at best but a Devil's Elixir. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to the White Hare of the Moon, and ask him for a bottle of the elixir of life. If you drink that you will live for ever," said one ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... it were poor, the great, sullen, almost unhappy-looking hills held clasped to their bare cold bosoms, exposed to all the bitterness of freezing winds and summer hail, the warmth of household centuries: their peat-bogs were the store-closets and wine-cellars of the sun, for the hoarded elixir of physical life. And although the walls of the castle, as it was called, were so thick that in winter they kept the warmth generated within them from wandering out and being lost on the awful wastes of homeless hillside and moor, they also prevented the ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... and the sea was calm and blue. The Pacific is more desolate than other seas; its spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it has somehow the feeling of an adventure. The air you breathe is an elixir which prepares you for the unexpected. Nor is it vouchsafed to man in the flesh to know aught that more nearly suggests the approach to the golden realms of fancy than the approach to Tahiti. Murea, the sister isle, comes into view in rocky splendour, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... us comfortable and anticipate every want. I was so anxious about H. that I remember nothing except that the cold drinking-water taken from a cistern beneath the building, into which only the winter rains were allowed to fall, was like an elixir. They offered luscious peaches that, with such water, were nectar and ambrosia to our parched lips. At night the housekeeper said she was sorry they had no mosquito-bars ready, and hoped the mosquitos would not ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... journey by that track, he saw Miss Fancy's figure, clothed in a dark-gray dress, looking from a high open window upon the crown of his hat. The friendly greeting resulting from this rencounter was considered so valuable an elixir that Dick passed still oftener; and by the time he had almost trodden a little path under the fence where never a path was before, he was rewarded with an actual meeting face to face on the open road before ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... the Roman, the Tartar, the Arab, and the Turk have passed through its walls; yet it still exists and still flourishes; is full of life, wealth, and enjoyment. Here is a city that has quaffed the magical elixir and secured the philosopher's stone, that is always young and always rich. As yet, the disciples of progress have not been able exactly to match this instance of Damascus, but it is said that they have great faith in the future ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... ungoverned feminine imagination can coin in sickliest indolence,—ball-room amours, combats of curled knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties, charities in costume,—a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish vanity—impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir, and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural veracity; the faces falsely drawn—the lights falsely cast—the forms effaced or distorted, and all common human wit and sense extinguished in the vicious ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... a predominant expression to the child's face, belonged rather to a boy of twelve or fourteen than to one so young. His first movement was to free himself by a violent push from the encircling arms of his mother, and to rush forward to the casket from whence the count had taken the phial of elixir; then, without asking permission of any one, he proceeded, in all the wilfulness of a spoiled child unaccustomed to restrain either whims or caprices, to pull the corks out of ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... have put into my pocket a little tract which I shall press upon you with all the Christian solicitude which brother can show towards brother. Here it is; I have the greatest confidence in it; perhaps you have heard the name; it is known as Kitchens's Spiritual Elixir. The Elixir has enlightened millions; and, I will take on me to say, will convert you in twenty-four hours. Its operation is mild and pleasurable, and its effects are marvellous, prodigious, though it does not consist of more than ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... is not tan," he persisted, thrilled for a moment by the discoveries he was making. "It is the wind; it is the open; it is the smoke of camp-fires; it is the elixir of balsam and cedar and pine. That is what I see in your face—unless it ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... was or ever will be, as may readily be supposed, a brilliant effort of the mind. In all young men not tainted by corruption such a letter is written with gushings from the heart, too overflowing, too multifarious not to be the essence, the elixir of many other letters begun, rejected, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... solid golden statues fixed on pedestals in the Belforest gardens, where she wandered about, vainly calling them. Then her husband's voice, sad and reproachful, seemed to say, "Magnum Bonum! Magnum Bonum!" and she fancied it the elixir which alone could restore them, and would have climbed a mountain in search of it, as in the Arabian tale; but her feet were cold, heavy, and immovable, and she found that they too had become gold, and that the chill was creeping upwards. With a scream of "Save ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and air This year is the hundredth year, 200 I feed my fire with a sleepless care, Watching my potion wane or wax: Elixir of Life is simmering there, And ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... antidote a great deal. In fact, it was a reckless compound conceived in a cynical and angry spirit by Sturk, and as the fireworker afterwards declared, while expressing in excited language his wonder how Puddock (for he never suspected Sturk's elixir) had contrived to compound such a poison—'The torture was such, my dear Madam, as fairly thranslated me into the purlieus ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear, that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... love, and even the April sunshine or morning air, bring about a certain rejuvenescence in man prophetic of what is not ideally impossible—perpetuity and constant reinforcement in his vital powers. Had nature furnished the elixir of life, or could art have discovered it, the whole face of human society would have been changed. The earth once full, no more children would have been begotten and parental instincts would have been atrophied for want of function. All men would have been contemporaries and, having ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... substances of the three kingdoms of nature, tried the distinction and affinities of alcalis and acids, and converted the poisonous minerals into soft and salutary medicines. But the most eager search of Arabian chemistry was the transmutation of metals, and the elixir of immortal health: the reason and the fortunes of thousands were evaporated in the crucibles of alchemy, and the consummation of the great work was promoted by the worthy aid of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... himself a lover of the liquid happiness he dispenses, and filled with a fine scorn of all those lesser felicities conferred by love or fame or wealth or any of the roundabout agencies for which his fiery elixir is the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... members of the Press who had discussed my personal failings for the benefit of their readers, as several years older than I really am (all due, no doubt, to my premature baldness). So I asked for the secret of the American hair-preserving elixir, and my charming companion assured me that she had really and truly discovered an infallible composition for producing hair! This she promised to send to me, and upon my return to England I received the following charming letter, which I publish for ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... covetous man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a modern man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of life—he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his business habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say, you will ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unavailing tears. I should have preferred going with my family to that blessed Utopia where there are neither births, deaths, marriages, divorces, breaches of promise, nor return tickets; only, unfortunately, I was not invited. So I became a posthumous orphan, soothed by Daffy's elixir and the skim-milk of human kindness. The milk was none too sweet, human kindness did not spare the rod, and I firmly believe it was Daffy's elixir that turned my hair red. However, I grew up at length into stand-up ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... carpenter, who, the neighbors say, has got up in the world, and paints his house to show that he feels above poor folks-and find we have reached the sooty and gin-reeking grocery of Mr. Korner, who sells the devil's elixir to the sootier devils that swarm the cellars of his neighbors. The faded blue letters, on a strip of wood nailed to the bricks over his door, tell us he is a dealer in "Imported and other liquors." Next door to Mr. Korner's tipsy looking ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... to appreciate the day, and to be inspired with its subtle and exhilarating elixir; but after a mile or two of over-spirit, he sobered down into his long, easy, springy, untiring gallop. They passed the fields and went along the hard and dry highway, till she reached the diverging trail that struck off through the woods ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... and the pride of the faculty, but still little more than an overgrown, care-free boy in his outlook on life. Glimpses there had been over into the Promised Land of manhood, but the brimming cup of college work and play quaffed in health-giving heartiness is the elixir of youth. The speculative habit of the boy slept in the college undergraduate. The days were full, each of the things of itself, and if Tom looked forward to the workaday future,—as he did by times,—the boyish ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... composed by Boiviel; and his sole regret at the end of his days was, not having foreseen the death, or disappearance—a matter quite as disastrous—of his alchemist, who could have furnished him with the means of compounding the elixir for himself as it ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... of love's garden! How trill her tears, th' elixir of my senses! Ambitious sickness, what doth thee so harden? Oh spare, and plague thou me for her offences! Ah roses, love's fair roses, do not languish; Blush through the milk-white veil that holds you covered. If heat or cold may mitigate your anguish, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... King's heart by ceasing to be attractive to him. Men, you know, set great value on certain things, and I have the misfortune to be of a very cold temperament. I, therefore, determined to adopt a heating diet, in order to remedy this defect, and for two days this elixir has been of great service to me, or, at least, I have thought I felt its good effects." The Duchesse de Brancas took the phial which was upon the toilet, and after having smelt at it, "Fie!" said she, and threw it into the fire. Madame de Pompadour scolded her, and said, "I don't ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... preliminary flush, and then the rapid suffusions of scarlet and growth of gold? If it is not ourselves that we look at then, it is at one of the tokens and emblems which claim a likeness with us, a link to hold us up to the clear space that washes itself so suddenly in an elixir costly as the golden chances of youth, and the crimson rose of love. With what a sigh, even youth itself will mark that outpouring of coloured glory! It whelms the world and overcomes the sky, and then, while ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... is my intoxicant—and it keeps me in high spirits. My system doesn't crave artificial stimulation because my daily exercise quickens the blood sufficiently. Then, too, I manage to keep busy. That's the real elixir—activity! Not always physical activity, either, for I must read good books in order to exercise my mind in other channels than just my daily routine—and add to my ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... have seldom failed to perform more than those who never deviate from the common roads of action: many valuable preparations of chymistry are supposed to have risen from unsuccessful inquiries after the grand elixir: it is, therefore, just to encourage those who endeavour to enlarge the power of art, since they often succeed beyond expectation; and when they fail, may sometimes benefit the world ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... waters of Lethe and the elixir vitae have equally to be discovered. I imagine that they belong to Paradise—and we have lost Paradise, you know: though I have found my Eve," added Monsieur, with a gallant bow to his cara sposa; "and have been ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... subterranean chambers of the great structure we are exploring, the 'Etudes philosophiques.' They are twenty in number, four being novels, one a composite volume of tales, and the rest stories. The titles run as follows:—'La Peau de chagrin,' 'L'Elixir de longue vie' (The Elixir of Life), 'Melmoth reconcilie,' 'Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu' (The Anonymous Masterpiece), 'Gambara,' 'Massimila Doni,' 'Le Requisitionnaire,' 'Adieu,' 'El Verdugo,' 'Les Marana,' 'L'Auberge rouge' (The Red Inn), 'Un Drame au bord de la mer' (A Seaside ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... with a sluggish, half-dead body and a torpid soul, had he not responded to the influences under which our gay party spent the next few hours. Innumerable snow-flakes had carried down from the air every particle of impurity, and left it sweet and wholesome enough to seem the elixir of immortal youth. It was so tempered also, that it only braced and stimulated. The raw, pinching coldness of the previous day was gone. The sun, undimmed by a cloud, shone genially, and eaves facing the south were dripping, the drops falling like ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... sowing wit like clover-grass on barren subjects which would yield nothing before. This is very useful for the times, wherein, some men say, there is no room left for new invention. He will take three grains of wit like the elixir, and projecting it upon the iron age, turn it immediately into gold. All the business of mankind has presently vanished; the whole world has kept holiday; there have been no men but heroes and poets, no women ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... with Mrs. Todd over the picket fence. The conversation became at once professional after the briefest preliminaries, and he would stand twirling a sweet-scented sprig in his fingers, and make suggestive jokes, perhaps about her faith in a too persistent course of thoroughwort elixir, in which my landlady professed such firm belief as sometimes to endanger the life ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... blood on my hands. We must drink together to our friendship, that all may be forgotten." Brangaena has been tremblingly preparing the potion, and, not knowing what to do—not daring to give the poison, not daring to disobey her mistress—she has poured out the elixir of love. Isolda hands it to Tristan, who fully understands Isolda's meaning and half of her intention—if, indeed, there is another half, for Wagner has given Isolda a true touch of womanly character in ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... pursuit of transmutation, and the search after the elixir of immortality grew into vogue, the adepts became desirous of investing them with the venerable garb of antiquity. They endeavoured to carry up the study to the time of Solomon; and there were not wanting some who ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool who looks for the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he had been in unusually high spirits. The peril and responsibility seemed to act as an elixir, and he threw off much of his constraint. But as the day broke on August 29 he looked long and earnestly in the direction of Thoroughfare Gap, and when a messenger from Stuart brought the intelligence that Longstreet was through the pass, he drew ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... unacceptable to him (p. 111). The Oriental scenes that are brought before our mind, both in this poem as well as in "Memnon" (vol. vii. p. 5 seq.), are of course portrayed with poetic feeling as well as scholarly accuracy. The haji who owns the wonderful elixir,—which, by the way, is said to come from India (p. 33),—and who interprets each vision that the poet lives through from the standpoint of the pessimistic sceptic, shows the influence of 'Umar Xayyam. In fact he indulges sometimes in unmistakable reminiscences of the quatrains ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... civil wars, the "honest men," as Don Jose called them, could breathe freely for the first time in half a century. The Five-Year-Mandate law became the basis of that regeneration, the passionate desire and hope for which had been like the elixir of everlasting youth for Don ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... an elixir fine Exhilarates like sparkling wine; Where mere existence brings a joy Life's trifling ills ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... this professional adventuress penetrated to Mary's conscience, though it held in it the truth to which her conscience bore witness, to which she had tried to shut her ears.... And now from the man came something like a draught of elixir to her conscience—like the trump of doom to ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... way of innumerable, vivid, but faintly connected points. "I begin to see," thought Ian, "how things travel together, like with like!" His body was rested, recovered, his mind invigorated. He had had with him for long days the very elixir of solitude. Relations and associations that before had been banked in ignorance came forth and looked at him. "You surely have known us before, though you had forgotten that you knew us!" He found that he was taking delight in these expansions of ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... bird from the depths of a gloomy cave." [57] It is the celestial soma or mead which Indra loves to drink; it is the ambrosial nectar of the Olympian gods; it is the charmed water which in the Arabian Nights restores to human shape the victims of wicked sorcerers; and it is the elixir of life which mediaeval philosophers tried to discover, and in quest of which Ponce de Leon traversed ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... beaker with a voice of joyous mockery that carried at once defiance and respect to a distant man. "The health of Louis of Nevers!" he said, and drained his green wine as cheerfully as if it had been the elixir of ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- 'alchemy,' 'alcohol,' 'alembic,' 'algebra,' 'alkali,' 'almanack,' 'azimuth,' 'cypher,' 'elixir,' 'magazine,' 'nadir,' 'tariff,' 'zenith,' 'zero '?—for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit cleaving to them. In like manner, even though history were silent on the matter, we might conclude, and we know ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... of Hermetic Philosophy, coming forth therefrom as a champion in defence of a much misunderstood class. This ingenious work, entitled "Alchemy and the Alchemists," published in 1857, was written to prove that the alchemists were not foolish seekers for sordid gold, nor vain believers in the elixir of life, but philosophers of deep thought and high aims, who, in days when a man dared not say his soul was his own, veiled in mystic language, perfectly understood by each other, theological and philosophical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... is a bad sign. The lowering system never answers—never. Doctor, I'll just trouble you"—for Small, in a fit of absence, had omitted to pass the bottle, though not to help himself. "Had he stuck to this"—holding up a glass, ruby bright—"the elixir vitae—the grand panacea—he might have been hale and hearty at this present moment, and as well as any of us. But he wouldn't be advised. To my thinking, as that was the case, he'd have been all the better for a little of your reverence's sperretual advice; and his conscience ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... eyebrow over the cold and snaky eye beneath, the same wolfish mouth and permanent hungry smile. But he looked better, stouter, stronger; more cheerful. It seemed as if my lady's society had done him a world of good, and acted as a kind of elixir of life. ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... algebra, assassin, camphor, caravan, chemistry, cipher, coffee, elixir, gazelle, ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... "The bottle is on the second shelf. Take it in a spoonful of that elixir of eucalyptus. ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... which flickered and dripped as they fitfully shone on the shrunken features of the corpse. He had been a reprobate and an assassin, but, luckily for him, a pious woman, not wishing to see him die "in his sins," had sprinkled Holy Water on him. The said "Elixir of Life" had been brought eighty miles, and was kept in her house to use only in extreme cases. The poor woman had paid the price of a cow for the bottle of water, but the priest had declared that it was an effectual soul-saver, and they never ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... same that ran past the maloca. My friends were at a short distance from me, beating their way through the underbrush, when I stooped to quench my thirst. The cool water looked to me like the very Elixir of Life. At that moment, literally speaking, I was only two inches from death. Hearing a sharp cry behind me I turned slightly to feel a rough hand upon my shoulders and found myself flung backwards ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... by little, he knows what he is about. One might write a play: an old chemist invents the elixir of life—take fifteen drops and you live for ever; but he breaks the phial from terror, lest such carrion as himself and his wife might live for ever. Tolstoy denies mankind immortality, but my God! how much that is personal there is in it! The day before yesterday ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... least name the Three Kaisers, or Triple-elixir of No-Kaiser; though, except as chronological landmarks, we have not much to do with them. First Kaiser is William Count of Holland, a rough fellow, Pope's protege, Pope even raising cash for him; till William perished ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... moment the German people, but more particularly the German official and governing class, and her naval and military men, would appear to have imbibed of some distillation of their Emperor's exaggerated pride, and found it too heady an elixir for their sanity. It would ill become us to dilate at length upon the extremes into which their arrogance and luxuriousness led them. With regard, at all events, to the luxury and indulgence, we ourselves had been very far from guiltless. But it may be that our extravagance was ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... become acquainted with a very remarkable man. You have heard of Count St. Germain, about whom so many marvellous stories are told. You know that he represented himself as the Wandering Jew, as the discoverer of the elixir of life, of the philosopher's stone, and so forth. Some laughed at him as a charlatan; but Casanova, in his memoirs, says that he was a spy. But be that as it may, St. Germain, in spite of the mystery surrounding him, was a very fascinating person, ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... hurriedly return from the scene of their labour to the dungeon or the den, which is still by courtesy called "home." The expense is not great: laudanum and treacle, administered in the shape of some popular elixir, affords these innocents a brief taste of the sweets of existence, and keeping them quiet, prepares them for the silence of their impending grave. Infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in England, as it is on the banks of ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... is replete with grace and graciousness, and full of charm, a quality more valuable to its possessor than juvenility, our author tells us in a chapter concerning the lost elixir of youth. Neither form nor matter assume ponderous shape in this volume, which in the quality of its contents reminds one faintly of Franz Blei's lady's breviary, "The Powder Puff," but Saltus's book is the more ingratiating of the two. Satan's ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... knows that moderate drinking is healthful to the stomach. If a man drinks too much, he is liable to trouble, just like a man who eats too much, or sleeps too much, or even talks too much about temperance. (Applause and laughter.) I tell you, my good friends, a little of that elixir of life is just as good for my stomach as it was for Timothy's, and the good man Paul would say the same thing if he were here to-day. (Cries from the world of "that's so!" and "hurrah for Paul!") I am satisfied to have a great man like Paul on my side, even if I must ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... difficult to penetrate to their emotions. For one woman who testifies publicly that she has been cured of cancer by some swindling patent medicine, there are at least twenty masculine witnesses. Even such frauds as the favourite American elixir, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, which are ostensibly remedies for specifically feminine ills, anatomically impossible in the male, are chiefly swallowed, so an intelligent druggist ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... in man's own language to the mind. The other arts appeal imperatively, each in its own region, to man's senses; and the mind receives art's message by the help of symbols from the world of sense. Poetry lacks this immediate appeal to sense. But the elixir which it offers to the mind, its quintessence extracted from all things of sense, reacts through intellectual perception upon all the faculties that make ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... nature or a personal mythological narrative, it must have been subsequently forgotten or at least has not survived in China. But for Ko Hung's eccentricity and his wish to experiment with cinnabar from Cochin-China in order to find the elixir of life, P'an Ku would probably never have been invented, and the Chinese mind would have been content to go on ignoring the problem or would have quietly acquiesced in the abstract philosophical explanations of the learned which it did not understand. Chinese cosmogony ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... recently emancipated from over two hundred years of unrequited toil—a race that had always regarded freedom from the necessity for work as an indication of superiority—was not a hopeful task. To them education was the antithesis of work. It was the magic elixir which emancipated all those fortunate enough to drink of it from ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... horse-fanciers, shop people, clerks on a holiday, with here and there a person of less humble station, but she bent to her work with a will, encouraged by the example of the Circassian lady next to her who was selling in brown bottles an elixir which was a cure for all things except love and the goiter. The sword-swallower next them was already busy, and the Homme Sauvage, a hirsute person, whose unprofessional mien was both kind and peaceable (as ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... an early grave, and fully aware of his own state, saw life somewhat differently from his soldier sire, and felt little sympathy for that lust of conquest which was to the great Edward as the elixir of life. The lad's thoughts were more of that eternal crown laid up in the bright land where the sword comes not, and where the trump of war may never be heard. The glory of an earthly diadem was as nothing to him, and he had all that deep love for his fellow men which often characterizes those ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... purity, and sit lost in meditation." "Can one gain eternal life in this way?" "No." "Then I will not learn it." "The way of deeds is also a good way." "What does that teach?" "It teaches one to equalize the vital powers, to practise bodily exercise, to prepare the elixir of life and to hold one's breath." "Will it give one eternal life?" "Not so." "Then I will not learn it! I will not learn it!" Thereupon the Master pretended to be angry, leaped down from his stand, took his cane and scolded: "What an ape! ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... rugged surly kind of fellow, much-enduring, not intrinsically bad; splenetic without complaint, standing oddly inexpugnable in that natural stoicism of his; taciturn, yet with strange flashes of speech in him now and then, something which goes beyond laughter and articulate logic, and is the taciturn elixir of these two, what they call 'humor' in their dialect: this is pretty much the REVERSE of Voltaire's own self, and therefore all the welcomer to him; delineated always with a kind of mockery, but with evident love. What excellences are in England, thought Voltaire; no Bastille in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... elixir for a heavy heart— to see this splendid Englishman fight! ... If there is ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... "I presume it is. Certainly it is for the genius; probably even for any man of high and true talent, a man able to lose himself in his own creation. Undoubtedly that is the only real elixir of life, the only ineffable exaltation. But isn't that carrying your argument out too far? We can scarcely set a standard for creative geniuses—there are too few of them. You spoke of the men who create their own ideas. How many of them are there? There are thousands of near-authors, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... the paring of his nails; and being as believer in astrology, and a student in the occult sciences, occasionally mentions his own superstitious observances. Thus, April 11, 1681, he notes—"I took, early in the morning, a good dose of elixir, and hung three spiders about my neck, and they drove my ague away. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the same) and pour it delicately into the bowl. Apply a lighted match, and let the liquor burn itself out. It will do so, he avouches, with a gentle blue flame of great beauty and serenity. The action of this burning elixir, he maintains, operates to sizzle and purge away all impurity from the antique incrustation in the bowl. After letting the pipe cool, and then filling it with a favourite blend of mingled Virginia, Perique, and Latakia, our friend asserts that he is blessed with a cool, saporous, and enchanting ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... astonishing clearness, sometimes slowly, so that the letters cannot be read till next day. It is not always successful; it is of no use to apply it to writing in red, and its smell is overpowering, but it is the elixir ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... letters, brought to her room every morning by Bronson, contained the elixir which sent her to her day's work with shining eyes and flushed cheeks. Sometimes she read bits of them to Bronson. Sometimes, indeed, there were only a few lines for herself, for Derry was being intensively trained in a Southern camp, working like an ant, with innumerable other ants, all in ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... scraps, and gazed at them blankly. His consignments were carefully timed to overlap one another. By rights the jar should have contained quite a fortnight's supply of his elixir vitae: and it took him one or two seconds to grasp the full significance of that ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... situations eccentric, the denouements unexpected. Love is made the solvent and reformer of vice. The sinner seems not actually depraved, but ever ready to return to the path of virtue. Forgiveness is the elixir of reformation and regeneration. Charity controls the inner life. The work contains passages of great beauty, though the style is often broken and rugged. It is philanthropic, and full of pity for the erring. We fail to understand the characters, because we have never ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... affected. The ignorant talker is affected in the company of the intelligent; the uneducated in the company of the educated; the poor in the company of the rich; the young lady in the company of the one who is superior to her, and into whose heart she wishes to distil a drop or two of Cupid's elixir. ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... is the strength of our body, The gladness of Jesus, the balm for our pain, His life and His fulness, our fountain of healing, His joy, our elixir ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... mark ye well, I am not one to follow phantom themes, To waste my time in seeking for the stone, Or chrystalizing carbon to o'erflood The world with riches which would keep it poor; Nor do I seek the elixir that would make Not life alone, but misery immortal; But something far more ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... I understand all now," whispered Justine, her breast heaving in a new and strange emotion, flooding her chilly veins as with a subtle fiery elixir. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the poignant sweetness of the Castilian roses. He throbbed with a sudden exultant premonition that he stood on the threshold of an historic future, with a pagan joy in mere existence, a sudden rush of desire for the keen wild happiness of youth. Such is the elixir of California in the ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... to recover myself in quiet on the bench, hastened, with as much alacrity as his age permitted, to a cottage adjoining the shed, and returning in a few moments, presented me some water in a wooden bowl, into which he let fall several drops of an elixir composed of innumerable herbs, and having performed this deed of charity, signified to me by a look, in which benevolence, compassion, and perhaps some little remains of curiosity were strongly painted, how sorry he was to be restrained by his vow of silence from inquiring into the ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... looked round for some one whom I could benefit. There was a young priest of Thoth, Parmes by name, who had won my goodwill by his earnest nature and his devotion to his studies. To him I whispered my secret, and at his request I injected him with my elixir. I should now, I reflected, never be without a companion of the same ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... certain distance on our homeward way the rower relinquished rowing, the steerer stopped steering, and the boat drifted down-stream with the gentle flow, while two-thirds of its occupants tasted of the elixir— ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... the perfect stimulus, an elixir too volatile to be drunk, rather to be breathed. Bedient felt the door of his inner chambers swing open before fragrant winds. The heart of him became greatly alive, and his brain in grand tune. It is true, she played upon his faculties, as the Hindus play upon the vina, that strange, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... ten thousand pities," said Eene, "that she fell so love-sick for Franois. Did he give her some philtre, some elixir, do you think? Franois is a fine fellow though, I'll not deny it, but he's had the devil's own luck, and by our patron St. Nicholas there be ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that day; still, with its capabilities, "dog cheap." Admitting, what no one at the time denied, the general marketableness of states as private property, this is the one practical result, thinks Carlyle (not likely to think wrong), of that oecumenical deliberation, four years long, of the "elixir of the intellect and dignity of Europe. And that one thing was not its doing; but a pawnbroking job, intercalated," putting, however, at last, Brandenburg again under the will of one strong man. On St. John's day, 1412, he first ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... bring him wealth and cause him always to rise in the world, just as babies are carried upstairs by superstitious nurses nowadays, and he had "scarlet laid on his head to keep him from harm." He was dosed with various nostrums that held full sway in the nursery even until Federal days, "Daffy's Elixir" being perhaps the most widely known, and hence the most widely harmful. It was valuable enough (in one sense of the word) to be sharply fought over in old England in Queen Anne's time, and to have its disputed ownership the cause of many lawsuits. Advertisements of it frequently appear in the Boston ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... who have, by some, been improperly confounded with the Freemasons, the word lux was used to signify a knowledge of the philosopher's stone, or the great desideratum of a universal elixir and a universal menstruum. This ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... can be jealous. One pities her, and that is akin to a more tender sentiment; one pities her while she sits in the corner, and Becky's green eyes flatter her oaf of a husband; one pities her in the poverty of her father's house, in the famous battle over Daffy's Elixir, in the separation from the younger George. You begin to wish some great joy to come to her: it does not come unalloyed; you know that Dobbin had bad quarters of an hour with this lady, and had to disguise a little of his tenderness for his own daughter. ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... bother me, and I'll fix your foot in two or three minutes so it won't hurt again," Mrs. Vernon declared. "The elixir's famous and I haven't known it to miss. I always carry some when we camp in the woods." She turned to her son. "Tell Barbara how soon I cured you when you hurt ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... deliberately, "that you are more worthy of my attention than I had formerly supposed. A man who can solve the secret of the Golden Elixir (I had not solved it; I had merely stolen some) should be a valuable acquisition to my Council. The extent of the plans of Mr. Commissioner Nayland Smith and of the English Scotland Yard it is incumbent upon me to learn. Therefore, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... serious illness at Cambridge, however, proved a turning-point; for long afterwards he enjoyed fairly good health. Early hours, daily exercise on horseback, and liberal potations of port wine—his elixir of strength at this time, although it helped in later years to undermine his constitution—made him far stronger after his illness than ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... coarse, something Godlike. It is 'sentiment', in my sense of the term—sentiment jealously hidden, but genuine, which extracts the venom from that formidable Thackeray, and converts what might be corrosive poison into purifying elixir. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... imparted in its natural order, brings an immediate interest. It is no nebulous scheme of combining instruction with amusement which is to be sought. One might as well look after the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. Good things are to be had upon no easier terms than privation and work. But there is a wide difference between a man toiling to gain material comforts for those who are dear to him, or laboring to enlighten and reform his own spirit that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... never once turned to look at us, though few pass that way; but kept his eyes fixed upon a vision of surpassing beauty, where the vivid coloring was startling to the eye and the morning air like an elixir. Nothing but the great summer hotel of the future—it will surely come some day and stand right there—can rob the ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the proprietor of a patent medicine who should in those days have attested his having wrought such miracles as we see sometimes advertised, might perhaps have forfeited his life before he established the reputation of his drop, elixir, or pill. ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... you wish, I will do so,' said the father; 'this elixir is not dangerous at my age, as ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... design to anatomy, and composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him that impression which those about him received from him. Poring over his crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying, by a strange variation of the alchemist's dream, to discover the secret, not of an elixir to make man's natural life immortal, but rather of giving immortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of painting, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... had slumbered for two hundred years, waking to the sense of its destiny as a factor of importance in the modern world. Wheat had created Chicago and Winnipeg Adam-like from the ground; but it was rejuvenating Rosario de Santa FA(C) Faust-like, with its golden elixir. It interested the man who called himself Herbert Strange—resident manager of Stephens and Jarrott's great wheat business in this outlet of the great wheat provinces—to watch the impulse by which Decrepitude rose and shook ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... beast had revived Tar-water in those days as a fine medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new fence. On this particular evening the urgency of my case demanded a pint of this mixture, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... complete and intelligible. Love is the synchronous vibration of two cardiac cells, both of which, were it not for the ethics of etymology, should begin with an S. Love is the source of eternal youth, of senile recrudescence. It is the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the fountain of flowers. So love changes not—the particular object is not of much importance. One should never be a bigot in anything and a wise ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... my gorge! It's not a thought to take to bed and go to sleep with if one wants pleasant dreams. I'm stronger than I ever was, my health is perfect, I have few gray hairs, my back is straight. I feel as if the elixir of youth ran hot in my veins. Yet one sees headlines in the papers, "Too Old at Forty." And—one is forty. It didn't matter—that is, I didn't think of it, until the coming ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the same, April 18.-The King's recovery. Proceedings on the Regency-bill. Enmity between Lord Bute and Mr. Grenville. Rumoured changes. State of parties. Lord Byron's acquittal. The Duke of Cumberland's illness. Daffy's Elixir. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... good Sir," ask legions of fond parents, "what do you mean? Is it Dalby's Carminative, Daffy's Elixir, Brown's Syrup of Squills, or White's Magnetic Mixture? Is it of the soothing or the coercing system? a substitute for lollipops or for birch? rock candy or rock ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to-day's offerings this Electro-Magnetic Restorer. You see it is shaped like a thin metal band, and is to be worn upon the brow, clasping at the back of the head. Its virtues surpass those of either the fabulous 'Fountain of Youth,' or the 'Elixir of Life,' so vainly sought for in past ages. For its wearer will instantly become free from any bodily disease or pain and will enjoy perfect health and vigor. In truth, so great are its powers that even the dead ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... they and we are bound for Herzing when we die, the spinsters to howl in the moor and we men in the wood. That is what the lads and lasses say of us;" and he gave a dry little laugh. "Ask my opinion of the water, and I'll answer you straightforward. It's an elixir, a perfect elixir;" and he repeated the sentence with the proud consciousness of using a dictionary word. "As for the house, the master and the old maid, judge for yourselves, or ask them that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... bubbling crucibles. It was surmised in the school that Miss Gibbs, having found a congenial mediaeval atmosphere for her researches, was working on the lines of the ancient alchemists, and attempting to discover the elixir of life or the philosopher's stone. One fact was certain. Miss Gibbs had set up a telescope in her solitary attic. She had bought it second-hand, during the holidays, from the widow of a coastguardsman, and with its aid she studied the landscape by ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... his eyes aglow. The memory of the fight he had dreaded was effaced; the bruises on his sensitive face were forgotten. His heart was drinking an elixir through his ears, and at the sounds floating down from the heights ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... clamped his jaws together harshly and held his tongue imprisoned behind his teeth. His chest lifted and shook as he sucked down a deep breath. There, near her, the glory of the hills outrolled before him, the keen snap of the elixir of love, the deathless, in his blood, life seemed hard, brutally hard. Everything was hard, and wrong. He had come down here for practical purposes, he had come needing every ounce of his energies for those purposes, yet, day by day, and minute by minute, he was being confronted ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... obtaining the active principles of drugs in an available form for administration. It is the basis for spirits, tinctures and elixirs; spirits being solutions of volatile substances in alcohol; tinctures, solutions of active principles of plants, generally obtained by maceration and percolation. An elixir is a cordial flavored with orange and syrup, used as a vehicle for other remedies ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... some minds, and it will display itself in whatever arena they are engaged. In politics the man they vote for is almost a god. In mechanics, they have invented a machine which shall ensure "perpetual motion;" in chemistry, the elixir of life, or a cure for all the ills of human life; in morals, the kingdom of heaven is speedily coming through the ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... newspaper of his State, when she relented and permitted him to console himself in her presence. And although, as the weeks passed and she saw Senator North from the gallery of the Senate only, or for a few impersonal moments in the crowd, and the elixir in her veins lost its strength, still she felt that life was sufferable once more. She had endeavoured to put Mrs. North from her mind, but more than once she caught herself wishing that some one would mention her name. Nobody did in those excited days, and Betty had no ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... It has all powers, and it brings all gifts—the gift of tongues, for it is above words; the gift of prophecy, for it has foreknowledge of its own sadness; the gift of life, for it is itself that elixir in which mankind boasts ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... felt, there are two tales that equally exemplify this class, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" and "The Christmas Banquet." In the first the ghastliness of the reversal of the course of life backward, as the guests drink the elixir of youth, while it suggests the paltriness of our pleasures, is a powerful lesson in the beneficence of that daily death whereby we resign the past; this rejuvenation violates nature, and so shocks us, and by the very shock we are reconciled with nature, from which we had parted in thought. ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... "are you quite sure that this elixir or essence of yours may be depended upon to produce the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood |
