"Alchemist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... After which the Scene is discovered, being a Laboratory or Alchemist's work-house. Vulcan looking at the registers, while a Cyclope, tending the fire, to the cornets began ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... very pretty," said the young man, glancing at it a moment. "Those little blue tongues, dancing on top of the crimson embers, are extremely picturesque. They are like a fire in an alchemist's laboratory." ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... a peculiar substance, chiefly of animal origin. It is mostly procured by the decomposition of the phosphoric acid which is found in bones. It was accidentally discovered at Hamburgh, in 1669, by an alchemist named Brandt. ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... drama is like which he wishes to substitute for the foul drama of his contemporaries; and, to bring the matter nearer home, let us take one of the plays in which he hits deliberately at the Puritans, namely the 'Alchemist,' said to have been first acted in 1610 'by the king's majesty's servants.' Look, then, at this well-known play, and take Jonson at his word. Allow that Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome are, as they very probably are, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... when your back is towards him. His heart is a lump of congealed snow: Prometheus was asleep while it was making. He differeth altogether from God; for with him the best pieces are still marked out for damnation, and, without hope of recovery, shall be cast down into hell. He is partly an alchemist; for he extracteth his own apparel out of other men's clothes; and when occasion serveth, making a broker's shop his alembic, can turn your silks into gold, and having furnished his necessities, after a month or two, if he be urged unto it, reduce them again to their proper subsistence. ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... physical sciences which we have mentioned, it has always been working itself clearer and clearer, and depositing impurity after impurity. There was a time when the most powerful of human intellects were deluded by the gibberish of the astrologer and the alchemist; and just so there was a time when the most enlightened and virtuous statesmen thought it the first duty of a government to persecute heretics, to found monasteries, to make war on Saracens. But time advances; facts ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... like an alchemist's den, the light of falling day reflected from test tubes and crucibles, revealing in dark corners uncouth appliances, queer diagrams, strange odours. Upon the floor the inert figure of the foremost of New York's chemists; above his prostrate form, wild-eyed with ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... pockets, and recovered sight only by throwing away the plunder. A brother of the Ada chief offered to show this magic-fenced placer to the late Mr. Nicol Irvine, moyennant the trifle of 50l. The transaction reminded me of the Hindu alchemist who asks you ten rupees to make ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... ticketed. She only saw piles of letters and papers, marked, some with people's names, some with a Greek or Latin word, or one of the curious old Arabic signs, for which her father had always a turn, having, as his mother used to tell him, something of the alchemist in his composition. One of these parcels, fastened with elastic rings, must be magnum bonum, and Janet, though without much chance of distinguishing it, was reading the labels with a strange, sad fascination, when, long before she had expected ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of life,—no dearth of wedded joys along-side!—christenings, business, discord and difficulties, those who still after all that can compass the singing of a beautiful song, those, mark me, are entitled masters!" Aye, first, as a modern poet has said, warm natural drops of blood; later, the alchemist's laborious spheres of chemic gold. In youth, all-sufficient inspiration,—later, labour and rule, with meritorious concentration substituting for impetus and fire the beauty of careful form, and making durable in this ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... the bars, put them to the test, and found them genuine. "You must either fancy," continued the alchemist, "that I begin by getting a heap of ducats, and then melt them down like a fool, or else you cannot have another word to say. Will you keep these two bars as a remembrance? I make you ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... tower and high crocketed pinnacles, each pointed by a cross. The roof is adorned by 'bosses, carved and painted with heads, flowers and leaves, and also figures or marks which obscurely shadow forth the learning of the alchemist.' The presence of these symbols is explained by a tradition that the church was built by miners. 'On one of the bosses is the combination of three rabbits, each with a single ear, which join in the centre, forming a triangle—a ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... mysteries, but a wicked old spendthrift, greedy like a miser for the Philosopher's Stone. Everybody in Douai, from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie to the people, knew all about old Claes, "the alchemist." His home was called the "Devil's House." People pointed at him, shouted after him in the street. Lemulquinier said that these were murmurs of applause ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... touches of the sun, Like some potent alchemist, In heat and dews, in rain and mist, As in a subtle menstruum, Hath dissolved the icy charm, And laid on that cold breast of hers,— Nature's breast—that faintly stirs, With his fragrant kisses warm, Sweet as myrrh and cinnamon,— Snow-drops, ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... here to say that he was born at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, in 1493, the son of a physician, from whom he appears to have had his early training both in medicine and in chemistry. Under the famous abbot and alchemist, Trithemiusof Wurzburg, he studied chemistry and occultism. After working in the mines at Schwatz he began his wanderings, during which he professes to have visited nearly all the countries in Europe ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... but articles of a special character which gave it the appearance of some alchemist's laboratory in the middle ages: stuffed owls, skeletons, skulls, copper alembics, astrolabes and all around, hanging on the walls, amulets of every description, mainly hands of ivory or coral with two fingers pointing to ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... taken to drinking to dull the monotony. The crew think you are an alchemist and are making diamonds. Their interest in this fact seemed to me excessive, so I killed one of ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... I shall need some alchemist to help me, who call upon men to sell their books and to build furnaces; quitting and forsaking Minerva and the Muses as barren virgins, and relying upon Vulcan. But certain it is, that unto the deep, fruitful, and operative study of many sciences, specially natural philosophy and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... the popular voices of the day to the comments of those capable of appraising genius, "What a master of composition Fielding was!" exclaimed Coleridge, "Upon my word I think 'Oedipus Tyrannus,' the 'Alchemist,' and 'Tom Jones' the three most perfect plots ever planned." To Sir Walter Scott Tom Jones was "truth and human nature itself." Gibbon described the book as "the first of ancient or modern romances"; and, as we have seen, declared that its pages would outlive ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... some fairy alchemist had melted in magic crucible topaz, ruby, sapphire, gold, and amethyst, to deck ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... to be more lenient. Pardons and reprieves were issued to women already condemned,[26] while some attempt was made to curb popular excitement. The attitude of the queen towards the celebrated John Dee was an instance in point. Dee was an eminent alchemist, astrologer, and spiritualist of his time. He has left a diary which shows us his half mystic, half scientific pursuits. In the earlier part of Mary's reign he had been accused of attempting poison or magic against the queen and had been imprisoned ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... before him, and his father's father, even back to Adam, who walked thus with God! There is a tincture of iron that seeps into a boys blood with the ozone of the earth, that can come to him by no other way. Let him run if he will; Heavens air is a better elixir than any that the alchemist can mix. What if he roams the woods and lives for hours in the water? What if he prefers the barn to the parlor? What if he fights? Does he not take the risk of the scratched face and the bruises? Should he not be in some measure ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... the same person. 'Tom Jones,' on the contrary, has a carefully constructed plot, if not, as Coleridge asserts, one of the three best plots in existence (its rivals being 'Oedipus Tyrannus' and 'The Alchemist'). Its excellence depends upon the skill with which it is made subservient to the development of character and the thoroughness with which the working motives of the persons involved have been ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... flutter of mortality, to lose some peculiarity of the skeleton, some jag of the vast crooked scythe of the spectre. The most ingenious of poets, the most subtle of divines, whose life had been spent in examining Man in the crucible of his own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to preserve to the very last his powers of unflinching spiritual observation. The Dean of St. Paul's, whose reputation for learned sanctity had scarcely sufficed to shelter him from scandal on the ground ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... Earth to sit up late, all alone in the sky. This was not the "pale moonlight" Sir Walter wrote of, and looked to for inspiration in his "Lay of the Last Minstrel," but a light of silvered rose which seemed made for love and joy. I thought, if an alchemist or magician should pour melted gold and silver together in a rose-coloured glass, and hold it up to the sun, it would give out a light like this. It might have been an elixir of life, for it gave back the Abbey's youth, and more than its youthful beauty. The ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Castle of Udolpho," " A Bit of Old England," "The Fairies are Out," and "Everybody for Ever." The last is crowded with thousands of figures and heads, so that it is almost impossible to condense the drawing into a small compass. To these I added "The Alchemist," "Old Mortality," "Robinson Crusoe," and a bit of English scenery, which I called "Gathering Sticks." I need not say with how much pleasure I executed these drawings in my evening hours. They were not "published," but I drew them with lithographic ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... he answered. "Don't you see what I am?—a poor devil; a sort of philosopher or alchemist, who receives spare thanks for great favours he confers on his friends; one who has no enjoyment in this world, except a little experimentializing:—but sign, I pray—ay, just there on the ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... interesting one is the AEsculapius subject, which De Diversis saw in the carver's hands in 1435, planned, as he says, by Nicolo de Lazina, a Cremonese noble, who was chancellor at the time. It is interesting both from the point of view of the carving and costume, and as showing the apparatus of an alchemist's laboratory. Close by it on the wall is the "metrical epitaph," which De Diversis says the chancellor composed. The columns, which are of Curzola marble, belong to the earlier building, though the entasis shows ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... is 'most comfortable in his worldly affairs' and just this comes of it! He lives the best twenty years of his life after the way of his own heart—and when one presses in to see the result of the rare experiment ... what the one alchemist whom fortune has allowed to get all his coveted materials and set to work at last in earnest with fire and melting-pot—what he produces after all the talk of him and the like of him; why, you get pulvis et cinis—a man at the mercy ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... indeed had made any sensible preparations for ceasing, from any land in Europe. It was a clear case, therefore, that, howsoever Europe might please to dream upon the matter when pauperism should have reached that glorious euthanasy predicted by the alchemist of old and the economist of 1800, for the present she must deal actively with her own pauperism on some avowed plan and principle, good or evil—gentle or harsh. Accordingly, in the train of years between 1820 and 1830, enquiries were made of every ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... battles for his country's right Hath compensation in the world's applause. The victor when returning from the field Is crowned with laurel, and his shining way Is full of shouts and roses. If he fall, His nation builds his monument of glory. But mark the alchemist who walks the streets, His look is down, his step infirm, his hair And cheeks are burned to ashes by his thought; The volumes he consumes, consume in turn; They are but fuel to his fiery brain, Which being fed requires the more to feed on. The people gaze on him with ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... of Cologne deals with the famous magician and alchemist, Albertus Magnus, who at one time dwelt in the convent of the Dominicans, not far from that city. It is recorded that on one occasion, in the depth of winter, Albertus invited William of Holland to a feast which was to be held in the convent garden. The recipients of the curious invitation, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... holding his wrist, pulled him closer. I could not hear what was said, though somehow I had an impression that they were talking about Prescott, for it would not have been at all strange if the old man had been greatly impressed by the alchemist. ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... running a stick through the ceiling of a low passage to find some new chamber, which could be made effective for some flights of his vivid imagination." He was very much attached to his sisters, and used to entertain them with stories, in which "an alchemist, old and grey, with a long beard," who was supposed to abide mysteriously in the garret of Field Place, played a prominent part. "Another favourite theme was the 'Great Tortoise,' that lived in Warnham Pond; and any unwonted noise was accounted for by the presence of this great beast, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... eighteenth century the romance of the middle ages, though dying, was not dead, and the occult sciences still found followers among the Oxford towers. From his early years Temple's mind seems to have been set strongly towards mysticism of all kinds, and he and Jocelyn were versed in the jargon of the alchemist and astrologer, and practised according to the ancient rules. It was his reputation as a necromancer, and the stories current of illicit rites performed in the garden-rooms at St. John's, that contributed largely to his being dismissed from that ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... practised. The large apartment, which served as waiting and consultation room, was oddly furnished, being crowded with objects of strange and unfamiliar form. It resembled at once the operating-room of a surgeon, the laboratory of a chemist and alchemist, and the den of a sorcerer. There, mixed up together in the greatest confusion, lay instruments of all sorts, caldrons and retorts, as well as books containing the most absurd ravings of the human ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... different chambers being opened successively, every individual was effectually silenced by the sound of one cabalistical word, which was no other than Waistcoat. A charm which at once cowed the King of P——, dispossessed the fanatic, dumbfounded the mathematician, dismayed the alchemist, deposed the Pope, and deprived the squire ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... served as a table, and whereat he and the artist had eaten many a meal of roast chestnuts and black coffee; "I never wanted her; she is a weather vane, never still two moments; she is a spaniel that quits the Plantagenet the moment the battle goes against him, and fawns on Bolingbroke; she is an alchemist's crucible, that has every fair and rich thing thrown into it, but will only yield in return the calcined stones of chagrin and disappointment; she is a harlot, whose kisses are to be bought, and who runs after those who brawl the loudest and swagger the finest in the world's market-places. No! ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Alchemist in Cambridge Poets Series; also in Thayer, Best Elizabethan Plays (Ginn and Company), which includes in one volume plays by Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Beaumont ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... application. Considering that at the present time it is a frequent source of complaint that physicians often prescribe remedies with even whose physical appearance they are not familiar and whose composition is often quite unknown to them, this complaint of the old-time chemist alchemist will be all the more interesting for the modern physician. It is evident that when Basil Valentine allows his ire to get the better of him it is because of his indignation over the quacks who were abusing medicine and patients in his time, as ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... if the mediaeval dream had ever come true, and an alchemist had ever turned a grain of lead into gold, he could have turned all the lead in the world in time, and with crucibles and furnaces enough. The first step is all the difficulty, and if you and I have been changed from enemies into ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the beau ideal of epistolary art. When we and our friends have achieved it, distance will be annihilated and there will be no such thing as separation. We shall draw from our little box a small white packet, and, though Nostradamus may offer us every secret of magician or alchemist in exchange for it, we shall refuse offhand. How shall he lure us with a shadow, a ghostly visitant, savoring of the pit and summoned only by the most marrow-freezing incantations? Here in our hand is a mysterious, more potent charm, bringing ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... of fallacious ideals. Two forms of pseudo-science were peculiarly prevalent—alchemy and astrology. Neither of these can with full propriety be called a science, yet both were pursued by many of the greatest scientific workers of the period. Moreover, the studies of the alchemist may with some propriety be said to have laid the foundation for the latter-day science of chemistry; while astrology was closely allied to astronomy, though its relations to that science are not as intimate as has ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... into a huge block of both stocks and bonds from the various expansions of stock and consolidations of property that had meanwhile taken place. The Kimballs had come from the Pacific coast, where the same alchemist's result had been wrought with a block of Southern Pacific Railway stock. The family tree of the Earls had rooted itself into the subsoil of real culture, while that of the Kimballs was mostly displayed above ground with only here and ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... suggested to Sheridan the falling of the screen in the "School for Scandal." But the chief distinction of Fielding lies in his having carried the novel to a high point as a work of art. It was the opinion of Coleridge that the "Oedipus Tyrannus," "The Alchemist," and "Tom Jones," were the three most perfect plots ever planned.[176] It is to this excellence of plot—the subordination of each minor circumstance to the general aim, the skill with which all events are made to lead up to the final denouement—that Fielding, if any one, deserves ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... and though I might not profess to scorn glory as a cynic, I yet made very slight account of that honor which I hoped to acquire only through fictitious titles. And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... however, speak for themselves, and in one, ascribed to Basil-Valentine, an alchemist of the Fifteenth century, called "The Great Hermetic Arcanum," the supreme and significant point of the illustration, shows, within the circle of Experience, through which the initiate travels in his search for ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... and read us passages describing a visit in Edinburgh, where he was the guest of Mrs. Crowe. She was one of those ladies of Edinburgh, he said, "who could turn to me, as she did, and say, 'Whom would you like to meet?' Of course I said, Lord Jeffrey, De Quincey, Samuel Brown, called the alchemist by chemists, and a few others. She was able, with her large hospitality, to give me what I most desired. She drove with Samuel Brown and myself to call on De Quincey, who was then living most uncomfortably in lodgings ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... in spite of some stumbling into theologic pitfalls, persevered in a truly scientific path, was Roger Bacon. His life and works seem until recently to have been generally misunderstood: he was formerly ranked as a superstitious alchemist who happened upon some inventions, but more recent investigation has shown him to be one of the great masters in the evolution of human thought. The advance of sound historical judgment seems likely ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... a single voussoir from the arch of truth, the temple itself is shaken, so cunningly are the stones fitted together. All roads lead to Rome, and every symbol is a key to the Great Mystery: for example, read in the light of these correspondences, the alchemist's transmutation of base metals into gold, is seen to be the sublimation of man's lower nature into "that highest ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... gone, 'squire Limberhamo, for the easiest fool I ever knew, next my naunt of fairies in the Alchemist[4]. I have escaped, thanks to my mistress's lingua Franca: I'll steal to my chamber, shift my perriwig and clothes; and then, with the help of resty Gervase, concert the business of the next campaign. My father sticks in my stomach still; but I am resolved to be Woodall with him, and ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... true, Dr. Whewell does not give these discoveries, in the spirit of an alchemist, as marvels,—but in the spirit of a philosopher, as intellectual triumphs. Few men of our times have shown a more active and powerful mind, a more earnest love of truth for truth's sake, than the author of this History,—and few men have had a wider or more thorough ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... and discover to them the true significance of the Torah (Law), hitherto hidden in the points and strokes of the Pentateuch, in its vowels and accents, and even in the potential transmutations of the letters of its words. Lurya, the great German Egyptian Cabalist, with Vital, the Italian alchemist, sojourned to the grave of Simon bar Yochai, its fabled author. Lurya himself, who preferred the silence and loneliness of the Nile country to the noise of the Talmud-School, who dressed in white on Sabbath, and wore a fourfold garment to signify the four letters of the Ineffable Name, and who ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... himself up to his full height and held up his precious treasure, in the fragile glass: "Found! won! gold!" he cried, stretching up his hand with the glass which glittered in the sunbeams: his hand shook, and the alchemist's glass fell to the ground shivered into a thousand atoms. The last bubble of his welfare was shattered too. Whew! whew! fare away! and away I ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... an opportunity for Scaife," he told John. "He may distinguish himself very greatly, and the discipline of the camp will transmute the bad metal into gold. War is an alchemist." ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon unprofitable lines of the alchemist's dreams; there was a considerable amount of discussion and expectation in that more intelligent section of the educated publics of the various civilised countries which followed scientific development; but for the ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... were soon identified with the electrons of the cathode ray. Then followed the discovery that the gas helium, previously treated as a separate element, evolved itself as one consequence of the disintegration of radium. Transmutation, till then laughed at as a superstition of the alchemist, passed quietly into the region of accepted natural phenomena, and the chemical elements were seen to be bodies built up of electrons in varying number and probably in varying arrangements. So at last ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... (uncoined gold). Associated words: alchemist, alchemy, auriferous, alloy, assay, assayer, assaying, filigree, aurated, auric, aureate, aurific, aurigraphy, aurivorous, aurocephalous, platinum, aurous, billet, carat, chlorination, chrysography, cupel, foil, cupellation, gild, orphrey, vermeil, gilded, gilding, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... but an expert in dyes would know what it was, while from the formula name any chemist familiar with such compounds could draw its picture, tell how it would behave and what it was made from, or even make it. The old alchemist was a secretive and pretentious person and used to invent queer names for the purpose of mystifying and awing the ignorant. But the chemist in dropping the al- has dropped the idea of secrecy and his names, though equally appalling to the layman, ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... from the Dutch" (Scott). Nares criticises Scott for using the word as a noun. It is generally found in the phrases "upsee Dutch" and "upsee Freeze" (the same thing, Frise being Dutch), which appear to mean "in the Dutch fashion." Cf. Ben Jonson, Alchemist, iv. 6: ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... hears of an ALCHEMIST, who lives at the village of Lilley, midway between Luton and Hitchen. The whole of his interview with this eccentric personage, will doubtless be interesting to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... treasury could use the rent and tax exacted from Jews and demanded of the stranger. The Jew consented to the magistrate's requirement, but as it soon became known that he pored over huge volumes all day long and pursued no business, yet paid for everything in good money, he was believed to be an alchemist and sorcerer. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... first collected by a German, named Stauf, in 1741. Of course there was no question of gas-making then, and the German, who was more of an alchemist than a chemist, was looking for other things than ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... yourself an alchemist, and try to discover a process to turn other things into gold, you will entertain far-reaching and interesting projects, but you will fail to reach the apex of your ambition. Wealth will prove a myth, ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... mayor of Canterbury, certainly once owned the fifteenth-century catalogue of the St. Augustine's Abbey library, and seems to have possessed many manuscripts. Both catalogue and manuscripts were transferred to Dr. John Dee, the famous alchemist. The catalogue, with some other books belonging to the doctor, got to the library of Trinity College, Dublin. But the manuscripts passed into the hands of Brian Twyne, John's grandson, who bequeathed them to Corpus Christi College, Oxford; they are still there.[2] John Stow, whose gatherings ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... love with when I was a young man, but she died long ago. She wanted me to kiss her. Oh no, I would not do that.' 'Why not?' I said. 'Oh, she might have got power over me.' 'Has your alchemical research had any success?' I said. 'Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour,' (The alchemist may have been Elephas Levi, who visited England in the sixties, & would have said anything) 'but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... the wire, my friend, I will explain to you how that was probably created and, right or wrong, there is nobody on this earth at present who can prove my theory to be mistaken. Be sure that a medieval alchemist, searching in vain for elixir vitae, or the philosopher's stone, chanced upon this infernal synthesis and fusion. For him, no doubt, it proved a philosopher's stone in earnest, for the Borgia always extended a generous hand to those who could assist their damnable ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... of that universal solvent which they so long and vainly endeavored to discover; still, for all this, not only the alchemist of old, but his more immediate successor, the chemist of to-day, has found no solvent so universal as water. No liquid has nearly so wide a range of dissolving powers, and, taking things all round, no liquid exercises so slight ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... the city which I have just left, the ruler of the Nation's money, the President of the Consolidated Banker's Exchange, died in a pot of molten lead which he had been brought to hope would be turned into gold under the touch of an alchemist. The lust of gold that in life had been his only incentive, proved ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... dear, just at present Mr Karswell is a very angry man. But I don't know much about him otherwise, except that he is a person of wealth, his address is Lufford Abbey, Warwickshire, and he's an alchemist, apparently, and wants to tell us all about it; and that's about all—except that I don't want to meet him for the next week or two. Now, if you're ready to leave ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... carpenters still at work on the roof nailing down the last sheaf of shingles. On the lower corner stands another dwelling,—destined, at some period of its existence, to be the abode of an unsuccessful alchemist,—which shall likewise survive to our own generation, and perhaps long outlive it. Thus, through the medium of these patriarchal edifices, we have now established a sort of kindred and hereditary acquaintance with the ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... small that you should be able to open your front door without getting out of bed; you look down out of the deep embrasure of your window on to the tree-tops in the "Stag's Moat." The height of the wall from your window to the ditch does not invite you to try a leap by way of escape, so Rudolph's alchemist guests had to produce something or suffer from the King's displeasure. This, for instance, happened to two gentlemen from the British Isles, Dr. John Dee and Mr. Kelly. Both these visitors were going to supply Rudolph with wonders of alchemy, gold in profusion. They failed to give satisfaction, ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... strawberry moon, Her heart with Nature's heart in tune A maid went forth to meet the sun. That wonderous alchemist of day With mystic pigments had begun To tint the dark with twilight gray; On mystic fans the breezy hills Bestirred the air with perfumed thrills, And mystic voices tried to tell What dewy benedictions fell Through all the silent hours of ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... The May-Pole of Merrymount The Devil and Tom Walker The Gray Champion The Forest Smithy Wahconah Falls Knocking at the Tomb The White Deer of Onota Wizard's Glen Balanced Rock Shonkeek-Moonkeek The Salem Alchemist Eliza Wharton Sale of the Southwicks The Courtship of Myles Standish Mother Crewe Aunt Rachel's Curse Nix's Mate The Wild Man of Cape Cod Newbury's Old Elm Samuel Sewall's Prophecy The Shrieking Woman Agnes Surriage Skipper Ireson's Ride Heartbreak Hill Harry Main: The Treasure ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... cried in triumph. "Why that is the name of another Icelander, a savant of the sixteenth century, a celebrated alchemist!" ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... boundaries at which philosophy says, 'Knowledge ends,'—then he is like all other travellers in regions unknown; he must propitiate or brave the tribes that are hostile,—must depend for his life on the tribes that are friendly. Though your science discredits the alchemist's dogmas, your learning informs you that all alchemists were not ignorant impostors; yet those whose discoveries prove them to have been the nearest allies to your practical knowledge, ever hint in their mystical works at the reality of that realm which is open to magic,—ever hint that some ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Washington Irving's Brace-Bridge Hall will recollect a pleasing and popular exposition of the alternately splendid and benevolent, and always passionate reveries of the Alchemist, in the affecting story of the Student ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... of mystical persons invariably gross or trivial? To my plain mind, it is inane to raise the dead in order to hear from their phantom lips nothing but commonplaces. And I really cannot see that the alchemist who spent his life in the attempted manufacture of gold was a more respectable object than the ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... literature, that of the prose poem was the form Des Esseintes preferred. Handled by an alchemist of genius, it contained in its slender volume the strength of the novel whose analytic developments and descriptive redundancies it suppressed. Quite often, Des Esseintes had meditated on that disquieting problem—to write a novel concentrated in a few phrases which should contain the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... while, Johann, who at one time promised well in practical life, had taken to Alchemy; and was busy with crucibles and speculations, to a degree that seemed questionable. Father Friedrich, therefore, had to interfere, and deal with this "Johann the Alchemist" (JOHANNES ALCHEMISTA, so the Books still name him); who loyally renounced the Electorship, at his Father's bidding, in favor of Friedrich; accepted Baireuth (better half of the Culmbach Territory) ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... his large amount of humorous illustration, which must have been mostly ephemeral, tended to cut short his fame. The best of it is interwoven with his several designs and plots, as where, in "The Alchemist," a gentleman leaves his house in town, and his housekeeper fills it with fortune-tellers vagabonds, who carry on their trade there; and in "The Fox" a rich and childless man is courted by his friends, from whom he obtains presents under the pretence ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... had an ancestress, somewhere before or after Hengist, who enjoyed the reputation of understanding that unpopular mode of volatility. Pommade Dupuytren and Eau de toilette have taken the place of the witch-ointments; and if the spice-powder of the old alchemist Mutio di Frangipani has risen from the recipes of the Middle Ages into modern fashion, rest assured that it will never work wonder more, save in connection with bright eyes, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... lingering romance of the glorious mediaeval life," with a glance at Miss Dabstreak, "that middle age which in beauty was the prime of age, from which began and spread all your most glorious ideas, your government, your warfare, your science. Did you never have an alchemist in your family, Uncle John? Surely he found for you the golden secret, and it is his touch which has beautified ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... disease and like the small-pox. Some die, some become deformed, others are more or less scarred, while upon others the disease does not leave any visible trace."—The Alchemist, by C. HAUCH. ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... money made for the King by his alchemist friends and found a large alloy of tin, copper and zinc. He explained to the King that by mixing the metals they did not change their nature nor value. Gold was gold, and copper was copper—God had made these things and hid them in the earth and men might deceive some men—a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... thought of that mysterious man Alexander Sethon who, under the name of the Cosmopolite, went all over Europe, operating before princes, in public, transforming all metals into gold? This alchemist, who seems to have had a sincere disdain for riches, as he never kept the gold which he created, but lived in poverty and prayer, was imprisoned by Christian II, Elector of Saxony, and endured martyrdom like a saint. He suffered himself to be beaten with rods and pierced ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... open the door and feast your eyes on orderly piles of neatly laundered towels, sheets, tablecloths, napkins, tea towels. Mrs. Pardee marketed and cooked, contentedly. She was more than a merely good cook; she was an alchemist in food stuffs. Given such raw ingredients as butter, sugar, flour, eggs, she could evolve a structure of pure gold that melted on the tongue. She could take an ocherous old hen, dredge its parts in flour, brown it in fat sizzling with onion at the bottom of an iron kettle, add water, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... beyond recall, and no Residents, and even no native princes, could now afford to be so "generous." India, this "most precious diamond of the British crown," is utterly exhausted, like a pile of gold in the hands of an alchemist, who thriftlessly spent it in the hope of finding the philosopher's stone. Besides ruining themselves and the country, the Anglo-Indians commit the greatest blunders, at least in two points of their present Government system. These two ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... consciousness whose manifestations, delights, and activity are in time, and of time alone. Their glorious message is not essentially different from that which we can conceive as brought to us by some great alchemist, who had discovered the secret of conferring upon us and upon our friends a mundane perpetuity of youth and health. Its highest religious claim is that it enlarges the horizon of our opportunities. As such, then, let us hail it with gratitude and relief; but, on peril of our salvation, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... satisfy themselves that they were in good condition, and finally selected their victims. Vincent was bought by a fisherman who, finding that his new slave got hopelessly ill whenever they put out to sea, repented of his bargain and sold him to an alchemist. ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... in one swift upward glance. "Your valor, sir, should prove your surest charm. But there is the new alchemist—" ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... am afraid, insoluble, until it has been decided whether the Fraternity of R. C. ever had an actual existence. Anthony a Wood states that Thomas Vaughan was a zealous Rosicrucian, but probably Anthony a Wood took the term in the general sense of mystic and alchemist. On the other hand Vaughan himself, in his preface to the English translation of the Rosicrucian manifestoes, seems to disavow any personal acquaintance with the members of the fraternity. Even this is not conclusive, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... glass tube; his eyes were so intently fixed on the bowl that he did not discover the presence of a stranger. A lamp burning on the table shed the light around on the wizen countenance of the aged alchemist, on the walls of the chamber, and on the roof, from which hung suspended several iron chains, and stuffed birds and beasts and other creatures of curious form, unlike anything the Count had before seen. He stood for some time watching the ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... done for a child always brought forth the same result, then it might be possible to form an absolute system of pedagogy, as, with fixed elements, there is formed the science of chemistry. But the quick atoms of spirit that manifest their affinities under the eye of that alchemist, the teacher, are far more subtle than the elements that go into the crucible in any ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... possessed the secret of ever-burning lamps,[242] claimed later by the Rosicrucians, which suggests the possibility that some kind of luminous gas or electric light may have been known to the Jews. In alchemy they were the acknowledged leaders; the most noted alchemist of the fourteenth century, Nicholas Flamel, discovered the secret of the art from the book of "Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer, and Philosopher," and this actual book is said to have passed later into the possession of ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... seekers of knowledge called themselves, meant by this was precisely the same as the conception we have here reached through our own way of studying matter ('Salt' standing for 'functional phosphorus', 'Mercury' for 'functional carbon'). Only the alchemist's way ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... which no one can deny to be amusing. For instance, if I were to tell you that the Princess and the Baron rode out together daily to inspect the cannon, it is either a piece of politics or scandal, as I turn my phrase. I am the alchemist that makes the transmutation. They have been everywhere together since you left,' she continued, brightening as she saw Otto darken; 'that is a poor snippet of malicious gossip - and they were everywhere cheered - and with that addition all ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Jonson's Alchemist having taken gold from Abel Drugger, the Tobacco Man, for the device of a sign—'a good lucky one, a thriving sign'—will give him nothing so commonplace as a sign copied from the constellation he ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... at the encouragement of the king and his prime minister, enjoyed their fine new title to flaunt before the world which lacked it, pored over their new Articles of Faith, and awaited the new artist and the new alchemist of colours. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... medicine, became an alchemist, and was possessed with a consuming desire to learn the secrets of life and of ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera, a charlatan and a wretched dabbler in necromancy and something of an alchemist, who has lately written the life of another Pope's son—Cesare Borgia, who lived nigh upon half a century ago, and who did more than any man to consolidate the States of the Church, though his true aim, like Pier Luigi's, was to found a State for himself. I am given to think that for ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... chase. He buys on one day Mr. Milbourn's books, and on the next all that Mr. Hawkins left; he sees Mrs. Backhouse of London about the purchase of her late husband's library. In 1667 he writes: 'I bought Mr. John Booker's study of books, and gave L140.' Being somewhat of an alchemist, he was glad to become the owner of Lilly's volumes on magic, and most of Dr. Dee's collection came into his hands through the kindness of his friend Mr. Wale. When Ashmole brought out his book upon the Order of the Garter he became the associate ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... and, in place of the heroes and villains of every day life, we have beings that belong in part to another sphere, and that deal with mysterious and occult agencies. Once more the old forgotten lore of the Cabala is unfolded; the furnace of the alchemist, whose fires have been extinct for centuries, is lighted anew, and the lamp of the Rosicrucian re-illumined. No other works of the author, contradictory as have been the opinions of them, have provoked such a diversity of criticism as these. To some persons they represent a temporary ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... containing sugar; in other words, the matter of sugar, when subjected to a certain temperature, undergoes a change, and the elements of which the sugar was previously composed enter into a new combination, which constitutes the fluid named Alcohol, or Spirits of Wine. Raymand Lully, the alchemist, (thirteenth century,) is said to have given it the name of Alcohol; but the art of obtaining it was, in that age of darkness and superstition, kept a profound mystery. When it became more known, physicians prescribed it only as a medicine, and imagined ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... subjects design to anatomy, and composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have that impression which those around Leonardo 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 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 ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... in A.D. 932 the Confucian Canon was printed for the first time. In 981 orders were issued for the T'ai P'ing Kuang Chi, an encyclopaedia extending to many volumes (see above) to be cut on blocks for printing. Movable types of baked clay are said to have been invented by an alchemist, named Pi Sheng, about A.D. 1043; and under the Ming dynasty, 1368-1644, these were made first of wood, and later of copper or lead, but movable types have never gained the favour accorded to block-printing, by means of which most of China's great typographical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... philosophy for consolation: he set himself to read attentively Arnold of Villenova. This 'great theologian, skilful physician, and learned alchemist,' as we are assured by Andreas, a celebrated lawyer of his day, was in the habit of making gold at pleasure; but not satisfied with this triumph, he would needs interfere in the concerns of religion, and more especially scandalised the whole orthodox ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... from Ben Jonson's Alchemist gives a curious clue to the derivation of the popular term "scab" found in No. VI. Webster's forcible ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... stout visitant was Queen of Fairies, and that he had since attended her by the express command of that lady, his queen and mistress. This reminds us of the extreme doting attachment which the Queen of the Fairies is represented to have taken for Dapper in "The Alchemist." Thome Reid attended her, it would seem, on being summoned thrice, and appeared to her very often within four years. He often requested her to go with him on his return to Fairyland, and when she refused, he shook his head, and said she would ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... possessed in his parish, in his very church, at his door, beneath his eyes, beneath his hand, a real blessing from Heaven, a grace of God, a Pactolus always rolling down a mine of Peru, a secret of an alchemist, the veritable philosopher's stone caught sight of by Nicolas Flamel, and vainly sought for till the time of Cagliostro, a marvel which made him at once honoured and envied, which made his name celebrated, which gave him a preponderant voice in the Chapter and a place ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... Edward Kelley. Among the common people, as Dee well knew, Kelley had the reputation of being a bold and wicked wizard. He had been born in Worcester, and trained in the apothecary's business, but, tempted by the prospect of securing great wealth at a minimum of trouble, he had turned alchemist and magician. It was rumored that on at least one occasion he had disinterred a freshly buried corpse, and by his incantations had compelled the spirit of the dead man to speak to him. There was more truth in the report that the reason he always wore a close-fitting skull-cap was to conceal ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... no means given up the popular stage when he turned to the amusement of King James. In 1605 "Volpone" was produced, "The Silent Woman" in 1609, "The Alchemist" in the following year. These comedies, with "Bartholomew Fair," 1614, represent Jonson at his height, and for constructive cleverness, character successfully conceived in the manner of caricature, wit and brilliancy of dialogue, they ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... line. In unusually rational moments, I would even go so far as to seek a natural explanation, attributing the early deaths of my ancestors to the sinister Charles Le Sorcier and his heirs; yet having found upon careful inquiry that there were no known descendants of the alchemist, I would fall back to my occult studies, and once more endeavour to find a spell that would release my house from its terrible burden. Upon one thing I was absolutely resolved. I should never wed, for since no ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... enthusiast; make Arabian Nights out of dull foggy London Days; with your beautiful female imagination, shape burnished copper Castles out of London Fog! It is very beautiful of you;—nay, it is not foolish either, it is wise. I have a guess what of truth there may be in that; and you the fair Alchemist, are you not all the richer and better that you know the essential gold, and will not have it called pewter or spelter, though in the shops it is only such? I honor such Alchemy, and love it; and have myself done something in that kind. Long may the talent abide with you; long ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that with logic absolute Both Standard Oil and Copper can confute; The Sovereign Alchemist that in a trice National Lead ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... an exaggeration," replied Rodin, with feverish impatience; "all these passions are at work, but the moment is critical. As the alchemist bends over the crucible, which may give him either treasures or sudden death—I ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... last revised, the organic bodies were little dealt with. We know that we owe this universal "oil" to the old alchemist, much in the same way as "spirit" has been used, but a little consideration quickly indicates the folly of its continued use. We can no longer call otto of rosemary, or otto of nutmegs, essential oil of rosemary or nutmegs, with any more propriety than we can term sulphuric acid "oil" of ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... there is no chance for success in life so far as money is concerned. John Randolph, the eccentric Virginian, once exclaimed in Congress, "Mr. Speaker, I have discovered the philosopher's stone: pay as you go." This is, indeed, nearer to the philosopher's stone than any alchemist has ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... the awful Presence glided out of Nothingness, and sat, sphinx-like, at the feet of the Alchemist. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... less impious than futile. His "Canon Yeoman's Tale," a story of imposture so vividly dramatic in its catastrophe as to have suggested to Ben Jonson one of the most effective passages in his comedy "The Alchemist," concludes with a moral of unmistakeable solemnity against the sinfulness, as well as uselessness, of "multiplying" (making gold by ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... romance at the present moment than the fortunes of WILLIAM OF ORANGE, and if Miss MARJORIE BOWEN'S Prince and Heretic (METHUEN) shows some traces of having been rather hastily finished it is easy to pardon this defect. The alchemist's assistant, part seer and part quack, whom she introduces into the earlier part of the story foretells the violent deaths of the young princes of the house of Nassau and the ravaging and looting ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... Jonson into the party was wholly appropriate, if one may call to witness some of Jonson's writings. The subject under discussion was one that Jonson was acquainted with, in The Alchemist: ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... themselves. Especially eager were the rulers of the different European countries, who were clever enough to see that such production would greatly increase their national fame and prosperity. Now there chanced to be a Prussian by the name of Boettger, an alchemist, who because of the wars had fled for safety to Meissen. He was a man well-versed in the composition of minerals and chemicals, and in consequence Augustus II, who was at that time Elector of Saxony, sent for ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... origin is not less singular. The Dutch physician, Van Helmont, lived in the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century—in the transition period between alchemy and chemistry—and was rather more alchemist than chemist. Appended to his "Opera Omnia," published in 1707, there is a very needful "Clavis ad obscuriorum sensum referendum," in which the ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... brilliant concert in Bath, when that city was at the height of its fame, Herschel would rush home, and without even delaying to take off his lace ruffles, he would plunge into his manual labours of grinding specula and polishing lenses. No alchemist of old was ever more deeply absorbed in a project for turning lead into gold than was Herschel in his determination to have a telescope. He transformed his home into a laboratory; of his drawing-room he made a carpenter's shop. Turning lathes were the furniture of his best bedroom. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... in his "Alchemist," acted in 1610, also indicates the current popularity of this tale, when Face, the housekeeper, brings Dapper, the lawyer's clerk, to ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... apt to confound mere alertness of mind with attention. The one is but the flying abroad of all the faculties to the open doors and windows at every passing rumor; the other is the concentration of every one of them in a single focus, as in the alchemist over his alembic at the moment of expected projection. Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... there without word or motion, so that none of those lords had any sport out of him. Some of them went away to roast pippins at the Widow Amnot's, some to speak with the alchemist that, on the roof, watched the stars. So one and the other left the room; the torches burned out, most of them, and, save for two lords of the Archbishop's following, who said boldly that they would ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... the power— a princess in the story. This fight with the demon must be fought by everyone who would enter the land of the Gods, whether in conscious occult adventure or half-consciously after death, when the strange alchemist Nature separates the subtile from the gross in the soul in this region which Oisin passes through. Tir-na-noge, the land of Niam, is that region the soul lives in when its grosser energies and desires have been ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... vexed the reverie of a lover. Lucian saw no reason why the boys should offend him more than the spider, or why he should pity the dog more than he pitied the fly. The talk of the men and women might be wearisome and inept and often malignant; but he could not imagine an alchemist at the moment of success, a general in the hour of victory, or a financier with a gigantic scheme of swindling well on the market being annoyed by the buzz of insects. The spider is, no doubt, a very terrible brute with a hideous ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... and the Philosopher.—G. Clint. The anecdote of Rubens and Brondel, the alchemist, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... place. Conceivably it might have been the scene of scientific experiments, but its aspect surely belied such a supposition. The average imagination would instantly pronounce it the abode of a maniac, or the lair of an alchemist. Again, that it might be the laboratory of an extremely slovenly veterinary was suggested by the several filthy cages to be seen resting against the wall. All of these were unoccupied except one in a dark corner, from which issued a sound ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... Prairie The Hearth Eternal The Soul of the City Receives the Gift of the Holy Spirit By the Spring, at Sunset I Went down into the Desert Love and Law The Perfect Marriage Darling Daughter of Babylon The Amaranth The Alchemist's Petition Two Easter Stanzas The Traveller-heart The North Star Whispers ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... we must do, that Tycho was not only a professed alchemist, but that he was practically occupied with its pursuits, and continually misled by its delusions, it may not be uninteresting to the reader to consider how far a belief in alchemy, and a practice ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster |
