"Alchemist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... accident that they all happen to 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 thought out. Fielding claims—even ostentatiously—that he is writing a history, not a romance; a history ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 golden ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... lady of the ancien regime, in the great Brinvilliers poisoning-period, and she is buying from an old alchemist in his laboratory the draught which is to kill her triumphant rival. Small, gorgeous, and intense, she sits in the strange den and watches the old wizard set about his work. She is due to dance at the King's, but ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... been 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 the coal-oil which ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... Dudley The Loss of Jacob Hurd The Hobomak Berkshire Tories The Revenge of Josiah Breeze 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 ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... 'Nay, nay,' said the alchemist, smiling and shaking his head. 'It can indeed be done, but only slowly and in order, small pieces at a time, and with much expenditure of work and patience. For a man to enrich himself at it he must labour hard and long; yet in the end I will not deny that he may compass ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of theory, Raymond Lulli (1235-1315), of Majorca, the famous Alchemist, who is credited with the first suggestion of the idea of seeking a way to India by rounding Africa on the West ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... 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 ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... mischief, for which he was rebuked, was 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 ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Tabard, with the company that Captain Sentry or Peregrine Pickle would be likely to encounter at a suburban inn, to see how the face of English society had changed between 1400 and 1700. What has become of the knight, the prioress, the sumner, the monk, pardoner, squire, alchemist, friar; and where can they or their equivalents be found in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... rugged strength; their picturesqueness, color, graceful outlines, dizzy steeps and awe-inspiring lengths and breadths. And fusing all these into itself, height on height, and breadth on breadth, entrancing charm on charm, with all the hues that the Great Alchemist can throw from His vast prism, it ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... into simpler parts. We are watching the disintegration of the "atoms" of the chemist, hitherto believed indestructible and eternal, and measuring the liberation of some of the long-suspected store of internal atomic energy. We have stumbled on the transmutation dreamed by the alchemist, and discovered the process of a ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... 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 ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... endowment of research, in the case of Winter, who has quite recovered from his injuries, and still hopes to fly. But he has never trusted himself again on his machine, which, moreover, has never flown again. Winter, like the alchemist who once made a diamond by chance, in Balzac's novel, has never recovered the creative moment. But he makes very interesting models, in which Mrs. Barton's little boy begins ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... 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, and memory is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... floated in from the belfries. Although startled by the dropping of the leaf, he closed the volume, leisurely placing it between the pages as a marker—it, so brittle! so yellow! so typical of decay and mortality! The book comprised the writings of Sir Cornelius Agrippa. Having tossed the old alchemist from him with an air of overwhelming dejection, the student abandoned himself ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... the course of the Arno, and in the following year he lost his father. In 1505 he modelled the group which we now see over the northern door of the San Giovanni, at Florence. In 1514 he was invited to Rome by Leo X., but more in his character of philosopher, mechanic, and alchemist, than as a painter. Here Raphael was at the height of his fame, and engaged in his greatest works, the frescos of the Vatican. The younger artist was introduced to the elder; and two pictures which Leonardo painted while at Rome—the "Madonna of St. Onofrio," and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... 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
... ceased, nor 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 separate state in Europe, what were those ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... administration at London was inclined 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 and examined by the privy ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... each newly-fallen bone That once thrilled soft, a little limb, within her womb; And mark yon alchemist, with zodiac-spangled zone, Wrenching the mandrake root that fattens in ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... lazy master cared, And served each one with what was e'er prepared By him, who in a sombre vault below, Peppered the royal pig with peoples' woe, And grimly glad went laboring till late— The morose alchemist we know as Fate! That ev'ry guest might learn to suit his taste, Behind had Conscience, real or mock'ry, placed; Conscience a guide who every evil spies, But royal nurses early pluck out ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... bells were ringing. The sun was careering in the heavens. Under a burning fever the alchemist had watched all night: he had boiled and cooled—mixed and distilled. I heard him sigh like a despairing creature; I heard him pray; I perceived that he held his breath in his anxiety. The lamp had gone out—he did not seem to notice it. I blew on the red-hot cinders; they ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... that can with logic absolute The two and seventy jarring sects confute: The sovereign Alchemist that in a trice Life's leaden metal into ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... 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
... 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 evanescent dreams of youth. ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... 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 ordinary science had reached one important result of the occult research ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... had scarce had its laugh at Bell, and its shout of "I told you so!" at poor Langley, when lo! the telephone became the world's nervous system, and aeroplanes began to multiply like summer flies. To common sense the alchemist's dream of transmuting lead into gold seems preposterous, yet in a hundred laboratories radium is breaking down into helium, and the new chemistry bids fair to turn the time-honored jeer at the alchemists completely upside ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... sat 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 watch and care for this man, because he was the Queen's cousin, ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... Paracelsus is divided into five parts, each of which describes an important period in the experience of Paracelsus, the celebrated German-Swiss physician, alchemist, and philosopher of the sixteenth century. Book I tells of the eagerness and pride with which he set out in his youth to compass all knowledge; he believed himself commissioned of God to learn Truth and to give it to mankind. Books II and III show him followed ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the Seer spoke, 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
... 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 ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... by 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 stand alone in English drama. "Volpone, or the Fox," is, in a ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... 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, and the woman you love will hold a ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... 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 of its arts, have a foundation in the weakness of human ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... imprudent is honoured and the wise despised. The alchemist died of poverty and distress, while the blockhead found ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Douai he was not a scientific genius wrestling with Nature for her hidden 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... seat at the back of the box, painfully affected, as if his heart's wounds had been touched by those accents. But when the curtain rose he stood up again, and saw Doctor Faust, lost in sorrowful meditation, seated in his alchemist's laboratory. ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... prose is the form, above all others, they prefer; handled by an alchemist of genius, it should contain in a state of meat the entire strength of the novel, the long analysis and the superfluous description of which it suppresses...the adjective placed in such an ingenious and definite way, that it could not be legally dispossessed of its place, would ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... drawing; his treatise remained in manuscript. The adventurers who risked their lives on wings of their own making are truer ancestors of the flying man. In 1507 John Damian, who was held in esteem as an alchemist and physician at the court of King James IV of Scotland, 'took in hand to fly with wings, and to that effect he caused make a pair of wings of feathers, which being fastened upon him, he flew off the castle wall of Stirling, but shortly he fell to the ground and brake ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... 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 them, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... or the lowest kind of comedy, that degree of heightening is used, which is proper to set off that subject: It is true the author was not there to go out of prose, as he does in his higher arguments of comedy, "The Fox" and "Alchemist;" yet he does so raise his matter in that prose, as to render it delightful; which he could never have performed, had he only said or done those very things, that are daily spoken or practised in the fair: for ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... who, with his yeoman, overtakes the pilgrims, is the rich canon, the alchemist who could pave with gold "all the road to Canterbury town." He is said to have already ridden three miles, but whence he had come it is impossible to say. That the pilgrims who had ridden not quite five miles had come from Ospringe might seem certain, and since ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... laid in a small block of New York, New Haven and Hartford stock, which had grown 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 ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... beautiful church, with its very fine 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 favourite alchemical ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... small wooden bowl lay five or six little diamonds, of which M. d'Asterac made no mention. My tutor asked him if they also were of his make, and, the alchemist ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... "The 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 ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... barks but 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, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... when thy flames do scourge us? Our sins breathe fire; thy fire returns to purge us. Lord, what an alchemist art thou, whose skill Transmutes to perfect good from ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... Alchemist in Cambridge Poets Series; also in Thayer, Best Elizabethan Plays (Ginn and Company), which includes in one volume plays by Marlowe, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the 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 of ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... a picture of an alchemist not unlike this. He can even discern the intent eagerness of the face as the fingers delicately manipulate something. So interested is he that he forgets his recent perplexity, and, seating himself on a rocky ledge, watches. The air is tensely clear, the river blue ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... century. In 1609, a Chiaus sent by Sir Robert Shirley, from Constantinople to London, had chiaused (or choused) the Turkish and Persian merchants out of L4,000, before the arrival of his employer, and had decamped. The affair was quite recent in 1610, when Jonson's "Alchemist" appeared, in which it is ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... 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 ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... engage in the compositions he alludes to, I may be tempted to an act of presumption—to attempt an improvement on one of Ben Jonson's best characters, the character of the Angry Boy, in the "Alchemist."' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Preface Whalley's Life of Jonson Every Man out of His Humour Poetaster Fall of Sejanus Volpone Epicene The Alchemist Catiline's Conspiracy Bartholomew Fair The Devil is an Ass The Staple of News The ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... tale 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
... "Alchemist," acted in 1610, also indicates the current popularity of this tale, when Face, the housekeeper, brings Dapper, the lawyer's clerk, to Subtle, and recommends ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... 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 ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... fable as amplified by Rabelais; but what is cited illustrates the accretive power of a jest when it involves a principle of general application. The same idea—that of roguery rewarded according to the letter—is involved in an anecdote, which tells us that a certain alchemist having dedicated to Pope Leo the Tenth a book containing the whole art of making gold, received as recompense a great empty purse, with the words: 'If thou canst make gold, thou art far richer than I; but herein is a purse wherein thou mayest ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... lines of Caleb's face, and his absorbed and dreamy manner, which would have sat well on some alchemist or abstruse student, were at first sight an odd contrast to his occupation, and the trivialities about him. But, trivial things, invented and pursued for bread, become very serious matters of fact; and, apart from this consideration, I am not ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... the fire is 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
... the ever-swelling proofs of an unlimited consonance in creation, of which these analogies are the smallest types. But the idea of numerical analogy is not new to our age, now that the atomic theory is established, and people are turned back to the days when the much bescouted alchemist pored with rheumy eyes over the crucible, about to be the tomb of elective affinity, and whence a golden angel was to develop from a leaden saint: when they are reminded of the Pythagorean numbers, and the arithmetic of the realists of old, they may very well imagine that the vain world, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and so Oisin battles with Fomor and releases 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 subdued, dominated and brought under the control of light; where the Ray ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... substantive pronounced adept, if as an adjective adept; from Lat. adeptus, one who has attained), completely and fully acquainted with one's subject, an expert. The word implies more than acquired proficiency, a natural inborn aptitude. In olden times an adept was one who was versed in magic, an alchemist, one who had attained the great secrets of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... 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 that classical feeling was beginning to affect ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... (1743-1793), Italian alchemist and impostor, was born at Palermo on the 8th of June 1743. Giuseppe Balsamo—for such was the "count's" real name—gave early indications of those talents which afterwards gained for him so wide a notoriety. He received the rudiments of his education at the monastery of Caltagirone in Sicily, but ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... sad picture, miss, for old age. Do not the gentler virtues of our nature ever ripen with time? Is it the alchemist who always turns the sweets of youth to the sours of age? There are many examples in every community to refute your position. I would instance the venerable negro we visited to-day. He wept as he placed his ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... imagine a better subject for 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 of the Netherlands by ALVA, Defender ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... Accusers, and Impostors of all such descriptions. They lay on one another in heaps, or attempted to crawl about—some itching madly with leprosies—some swollen and gasping with dropsies—some wetly reeking, like hands washed in winter-time. One was an alchemist of Sienna, a nation vainer than the French; another a Florentine, who tricked a man into making a wrong will; another, Sinon of Troy; another, Myrrha; another, the wife of Potiphar. Their miseries did not hinder them from giving one another malignant ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... potteries, who sit all day grinding colors in the sun, could tell you Pu was once a humble Chinese workman, who grew to be a great artist by dint of tireless study and patience and by the inspiration of Heaven. So famed he became that some deemed him an alchemist, who possessed the secret called White-and-Yellow, by which stones might be turned into gold; and others thought him a magician, having the ghastly power of murdering men with horror of nightmare, by hiding charmed effigies ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... in all the biographies. Suffice it 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 and ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... 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 to bring the fame of the two who bear the name of Bacon nearly to equality. Bacon of the chancellorship ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... alchemist is Mary Carolyn Davies, poet of Oregon and Brooklyn. She knows both coasts of America, she understands the American spirit of idealism and self-sacrifice, and her verses have a direct hitting power that will ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... forms of 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 essence ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... allowed by Mother 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 bullet-shattered stone turned to blocks ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the old Alchemist; "you may be sure that you will not get into the Hole, until you have ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... another name for this peculiar liquid—namely, "alcohol," and its 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 referandum," in which the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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; ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... The eccentric German alchemist and philosopher, Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), described a prosperous charlatan of his day as "clad in brave apparel, and having on his fingers showy rings, glittering with precious stones; a fellow who had gotten fame on account of his travels in far countries, and by reason of his obstinate ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... alike, if a certain act 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 other of ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... 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 ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • 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
... from Ben Jonson's Alchemist gives a curious clue to the derivation of the popular term "scab" found in No. VI. Webster's forcible picture ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... examples given above, tobacconists, more than most tradesmen, seem to have continued to use signs that had at least some relevance to their trade. Abel Drugger was a "tobacco-man," i.e. a tobacco-seller in Ben Jonson's play of "The Alchemist," 1610, so that it is not very surprising to find the name used occasionally as a tobacconist's sign. Towards the end of the eighteenth century one Peter Cockburn traded as a tobacconist at the sign of the "Abel Drugger" in Fenchurch Street, and informed the public on the advertising ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... 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 ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... 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
... her practice, and earned money for further study by writing waltzes and other popular dance music. She became proficient in making orchestral arrangements, and has been eminently successful as a leader of many large New York organizations. Among her operettas are "The Alchemist," also a version of the old French romance, "Fleurette," and an adaptation from Tennyson, called "Day Dreams." She is also the ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... that a madrigal brought out by him was pirated from another Italian composer; whereupon Bononcini left England, humiliated to the dust, and finally died obscure and alone, the victim of a charlatan alchemist, who succeeded in obtaining all ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... share of that peculiar homage which ignorance paid to knowledge. There were, here and there, individuals, the record of whose eccentricity opens up for us vistas into the marvellous domain of magic and mystery which cast its glamour of romance over the old world of the alchemist in pursuit of the philosopher's stone. One of the most remarkable of latter-day disciples of Peter Woulfe, of whom some interesting particulars are given in Timbs' Modern Eccentrics, has a peculiar claim to notice here, if only for having ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... for violin and orchestra, nine symphonies, four oratories, of which "The Last Judgment" is perhaps the best, ten operas, many concert overtures, etc.—in all more than 200 works, many of them of large dimensions. His best operas are "Jessonda" (1823), "Faust" (1818), "The Alchemist" (1832) and "The Crusaders" (1845). His orchestral works are richly instrumented, and the coloring is sweet and mellow, yet at times ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... the perpetuation in time of that lower 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, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... 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 Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... anxiety in this matter led him to do what scarcely any of the dramatists of that age did—that is, invent his plots. It is not a first perusal that suffices for the full perception of the elaborate artifice of the plots of the Alchemist and the Silent Woman;—that of the former is absolute perfection for a necessary entanglement, and ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... think I ply this base mechanic art for aught but to profit by the ignorance of the vulgar? Or think by pots and pans and mixing vile substances to make this, which by nature is this, into that which by nature it is not! I, a scholar? A scholar? No, I tell you, there was never alchemist yet could transmute but one thing—poor into rich, rich ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... faith, when Thou my dust shalt bring To dust, remember well, Great Alchemist, Yearly to change my wintry earth to spring, That I with Beauty still may ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... the illness of Princess Solima. A strange crew they were, ranged in a semi-circle before the king. There was the renowned astrologer from Egypt, a little man with a humpback; the mixer of mysterious potions from China, a long, lank yellow man, with tiny eyes; the alchemist from Arabia, a scowling man with his face almost concealed by whiskers; there was a Greek and a Persian and a Phoenician, each with some special knowledge and fearfully anxious to display ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa |
