"Elixir" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out, and soon afterwards Nasmyth, whose clothes were now partly dry, lay down, dressed as he was, in his twig-packed bunk, with his pipe in his hand. It was growing a little colder, and a keen air, which had in it the properties of an elixir, blew in, but that was a thing Nasmyth scarcely noticed, and the dominant roar of the river held his attention. He wondered again why he had been drawn into the conflict with it, or, rather, why he had permitted Laura Waynefleet to set him such a task, and ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... force, the precious sovereign remedy, of which society insanely deprives itself—the genius, the intelligence, the inspiration of women. It is dying, inch by inch, in the midst of old superstitions which it invokes in vain, and yet it has the elixir of life in its hands. Let it drink but a draught, and it will bloom once more; it will be refreshed, radiant; it will find its youth again. The heart, the heart is cold, and nothing but the touch of woman can warm it, make it act. We are the Heart of humanity, and let us have ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... laugh at the most constant of your admirers? How many long years have I spent in your service, from the time I began with rocking your cradle, occasionally giving you, to sweeten your humors, a teaspoon of castor oil, or a half-dozen drops of elixir salutis, up to the present time, and thus you reward my devotion! I begin to feel desperate, and have half a mind to transfer my affections to ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... wife," and that not in the manner of Spenser, which you yourself had stigmatised—and the "Man of Ross,"—I doubt whether I should this last. It is not too late to save it. The first proof is only just come. I have been forced to call that Cupid's Elixir "Kisses." It stands in your first volume as an Effusion, so that, instead of prefixing The Kiss to that of "One Kiss, dear Maid," &c., I have ventured to entitle it "To Sara." I am aware of the nicety of changing even so mere a trifle as a title to so short a piece, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... didacticism is rather nakedly felt, there are two tales that equally exemplify this class, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" and "The Christmas Banquet." In the first the ghastliness of the reversal of the course of life backward, as the guests drink the elixir of youth, while it suggests the paltriness of our pleasures, is a powerful lesson in the beneficence of that daily death whereby we resign the past; this rejuvenation violates nature, and so shocks us, and by the very shock we are reconciled with nature, from which we had parted in ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... this long-sought medium; "but," he added, "a philosopher who should go deep enough to acquire the power would attain too lofty a wisdom to stoop to the exercise of it." Not less singular were his opinions in regard to the elixir vitae. He more than intimated that it was at his option to concoct a liquid that should prolong life for years, perhaps interminably; but that it would produce a discord in Nature which all the world, ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... sympathizing companions toiled up the steep hill, drinking in with every inhalation of the balmy air copious draughts of the new-found elixir of life. "Soft eyes looked love to eyes that spake again,"[2] and their hearts melted beneath each tender glance. The little chubby hands that grasped the handle of the pail timidly crept closer together, ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... had entered Isom Chase's house, temptation never had come near Joe Newbolt. He never had kissed a maiden; he never had felt the quickening elixir of a soft breast pressed against his own. And so it fell that the sudden conception of what he had unwittingly come to, bore on him with a weight which his sensitive and upright mind magnified into an enormous and crushing shame. While his intention ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... had in our cellar some fine claret; a few magnums of Leoville, '74, a present from a millionaire friend. We never drank it except upon great occasions. Ajax suggested a bottle of this elixir, not entirely out of charity. Such tipple would warm a graven image into speech, and my brother is inordinately curious. Our guest had nothing to give to us except his confidence, and that ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... graceful efforts to make us comfortable and anticipate every want. I was so anxious about H. that I remember nothing except that the cold drinking-water taken from a cistern beneath the building, into which only the winter rains were allowed to fall, was like an elixir. They offered luscious peaches that, with such water, were nectar and ambrosia to our parched lips. At night the housekeeper said she was sorry they had no mosquito-bars ready, and hoped the mosquitos would not be thick, but they came out in legions. I knew that on sleep ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... Ida, with her hand on the handle of the door. 'Yes, I know that. I despise and loathe myself as much as I despise and loathe you. I have drained the cup of poverty to the dregs, and I languished for the elixir of wealth. When you asked me to marry you, I thought Fate had thrown prosperity in my way—that it would be to lose the golden chance of a lifetime if I ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... wife's faded face had not for a second disturbed his loyalty; but now the beauty of this other woman aroused within him long dormant characteristics, like some wonderful stimulant, not only for the body, but for the soul. When he looked in Ida Slome's beautiful face he seemed to drink in an elixir of life. And yet, down at the roots of the man's heart slept the memory of his wife; for Abby Edgham, with her sallow, faded face, had possessed something which Ida Slome lacked, and which the man needed, to hold him. And always in his mind, at ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... sounds from the bottom of his heart. They reminded him of that infamous apparition, of all he most ardently desired to forget. His laughter died down. Wanly he looked at his mirthful pagans, the embodiment of joys. Yes; these were his distractions, his playmates, his elixir of life, his antidote against the only disease, the only sin, crime, vice which he recognized on earth—a vice none the less, because it happened to be the inevitable—the vice of old age. And all the time that pallid swarm came crowding on: messengers from the inexorable spectre. He felt ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... similar case, the subject being an old Dutch burgomaster, whom he sandwiched between a couple of rosy Netherland maids—also failed to grasp the true condition of the nature of things, or the true philosophical explanation. The exhalations from the aged are by no means an elixir of health or life to the young, and the fact that the young were apt to lose health by sleeping with the aged was wrongly attributed to their loss being the others' gain, and the result of its passing into the bodies of their aged companions, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... me, and I'll fix your foot in two or three minutes so it won't hurt again," Mrs. Vernon declared. "The elixir's famous and I haven't known it to miss. I always carry some when we camp in the woods." She turned to her son. "Tell Barbara how soon I cured you ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... window, throw open the closed shutter, let the fresh air in, and let the housed captive breathe the invigorating elixir of life; better by far than all your pills and cordials, and more strengthening than all the poor-man's plasters that have been or ever ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... not have too sore hearts, for they would know that on the next day they were going home. Each girl who had done her best would have a word of commendation, and only those who were very naughty, or very stubborn, could resist the all-potent elixir of happiness which would be poured out so abundantly for Mrs. Willis' ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... that,—I answered. It is very plainly turbid. I should think that some sediment had been shaken up in it. What is it, Elixir Vitae or Aurum potabile? ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the man who held the secret of Minna Pitts's past and power over her future so long as he could keep alive the unfortunate Thornton—the up-to-date doctor who substituted an elixir of death at night for the elixir of life prescribed for you by him in the ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... was published ten years later, the poet Whittier spoke of it as a failure, and Hawthorne would seem to have considered it so; for he left it in an unfinished condition, and immediately began a different story on the same theme,—the elixir of life. It has no connection with the sketch already mentioned, in which Alcott's personality becomes the mainspring, but with another abortive romance, called "The Ancestral Footstep," which Hawthorne commenced while he was in England. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... proposal he made one sultry June evening to "knock her up" a mint-julep, "the most refreshing beverage on earth, madam, in hot weather, I can assure you." Judge Ashburton Todhunter, of Fauquier County, had taught him to prepare this pungent elixir from a private receipt for which the judge had once refused the sum of fifty dollars, offered to him by Colonel Stanley Bluegrass, of Chattanooga, and this was at a moment, too, when the judge had been losing very heavily ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... throat, but feeling quite refreshed. When I mounted my horse after breakfast the sun was high and the air so keen and intoxicating that, giving the animal his head, I galloped up and down hill, feeling completely tireless. Truly, that air is the elixir of life. I had a glorious ride back to Truckee. The road was not as solitary as the day before. In a deep part of the forest the horse snorted and reared, and I saw a cinnamon-colored bear with two cubs cross the track ahead ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... bar-tender, above all vulgar passions, untouched by commonplace sympathies, himself a lover of the liquid happiness he dispenses, and filled with a fine scorn of all those lesser felicities conferred by love or fame or wealth or any of the roundabout agencies for which his fiery elixir is the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... of Health, first in the Adelphi, then in Pall Mall. He sold his "elixir of life" for [pounds]1000 a bottle, was noted for his mud baths, and for his "celestial bed," which assured a beautiful progeny. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... comfortable, happy and contented by still further improving their condition, which can only be done by studying their nature, and not by the North and South bandying epithets—not by the quackery which prescribes the same remedy, the liberty elixir, for all constitutions. The two races, the Anglo-Saxon and the negro, have antipodal constitutions. The former abounds with red blood, even penetrating the capillaries and the veins, flushing the face and illuminating the countenance; the skin white; lips ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... route to the avenue de l'Opera to buy fine essences of cedar and of that alkermes which makes the person tasting it think he is in an Oriental pharmaceutic laboratory. "The idea is," he said, "not so much to treat Hyacinthe as to astound her by giving her a sip of an unknown elixir." ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... said Eene, "that she fell so love-sick for Franois. Did he give her some philtre, some elixir, do you think? Franois is a fine fellow though, I'll not deny it, but he's had the devil's own luck, and by our patron St. Nicholas there be others as ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and in my forthcoming book, "The Story of the Flood," I have submitted the whole mass of evidence to examination in detail, and attempted to extract from it the real story of mankind's age-long search for the elixir of life. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... shortly before become acquainted with a very remarkable man. You have heard of Count St. Germain, about whom so many marvelous stories are told. You know that he represented himself as the Wandering Jew, as the discoverer of the elixir of life, of the philosopher's stone, and so forth. Some laughed at him as a charlatan; but Casnova, in his memoirs, says that he was a spy. But be that as it may, St. Germain, in spite of the mystery surrounding him, was a very fascinating person, and was much ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... true elixir of life, for which the alchemysts labour in vain to find," exclaimed Manners. "Sir Benedict knows leechcraft, let us take his opinion upon ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... women beautiful for ever; which renews the strength of man; which is a sweet and excellent food, and which provides medicine for various ills, cannot be said to lack many of the attributes of the elixir of life, and is surely entitled to a special paean in a land ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... two hours that night. He awoke rested, refreshed, eager. He did not need sleep. He was Youth's own, tireless, stimulated with the golden elixir. ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... "I don't know that I could have got away myself any earlier. I've been so absorbed in the laborrit'ry, what with three rejuvenators and an elixir all on the simmer together, I almost gave way under the strain of it; but they're set to cool now, and I'm ready to go as soon ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... out,—but how different now the world looked to his eyes! He had not observed before that it was such a lovely spring day. The sky overhead was of heaven's deepest hue. The pure, sweet air was like the elixir of life. The hills were wondrously beautiful, all about the city; and it seemed, that, whichever way he turned, there were birds singing in sympathy with his joy. The Potomac, stretching away with soft and misty glimmer between its hazy banks, was like the river of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... of hydrophobia, and who therefore regards the poor sufferers of whom others despair as not beyond the reach of hope. Christ looks upon a world of men smitten with madness, and in whose breasts awful poison is working, with the calm confidence that He carries in His hand an elixir, one drop of which inoculated into the veins of the furious patient will save him from death, and make him whole. 'The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin.' 'He will not break,' and that means He will restore, 'the bruised reed.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... follower of Trismegistus—cursed with bell, book and candle, by every decorous Church in Christendom—the redoubted Cornelius Agrippa; who, if he left not to his pupil Wierus the secret of the philosopher's stone or grand elixir, seems to have communicated a treasure perhaps equally rare and not less precious, the faculty of seeing a truth which should open the eyes of bigotry and dispel the mists of superstition, which should stop the persecution of the helpless and stay the call for blood. ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... same pent-house of ragged eyebrow over the cold and snaky eye beneath, the same wolfish mouth and permanent hungry smile. But he looked better, stouter, stronger; more cheerful. It seemed as if my lady's society had done him a world of good, and acted as a kind of elixir of life. ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... sailor felt a fraternal affection for these three youths to whom he gave the nickname of the "Three Musketeers," He wished to treat them to the very best which the canteen afforded, so the proprietor produced a bottle of champagne or rather ptisan from Rheims, presenting it as though it were an elixir fabricated of gold. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the said Muggins with the top of her parasol and exciting lively responses from his poodleship, then turning to Mrs. Verne exclaimed, "Mrs. Arnold is looking well. It really seems to me that you Canadians have found the long-sought elixir of youth and beauty." ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... Fortunatus.' Here Dekker the idealist, the poet of luxurious fancy and rich yet delicate imagination, is seen at his best. Fortunatus with his wishing-hat and wonderful purse appealed to the romantic spirit of the time, when men still sailed in search of the Hesperides, compounded the elixir of youth, and sought for the philosopher's stone. Dekker worked over an old play of the same name; the subject of both was taken from the old German volksbuch 'Fortunatus' of 1519. Among the collaborators of Dekker ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... shall be conducted by a few doses of Robert Montgomery's Devil's Elixir, called "Satan," or by a portion, or rather a potion, of "Oxford." Apollo, we know, was the god of medicine as well as of poetry. Behold, in this our bard, his two divine functions ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... brains were turned by occult, scientific, and medical study! Ah! she, Rosita, had heard of such cases before. Had not a paternal ancestor of hers, one Don Diego Castro, believed he had discovered the elixir of youth. Had he not to that end refused even to wash him the hand, to cut him the nail of the finger and the hair of the head! Exalted by that discovery, had he not been unsparingly uncomplimentary to all humanity, especially to ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... and elaborated his idea in the Margrave of A Strange Story, who has no 'soul,' and prolongs his physical and intellectual life by means of an elixir. Margrave is not bad, but he is inferior to the hero, less elaborately designed, of The Haunters and the Haunted. Thackeray's tale is written in a tone of mock mysticism, but he confesses that he likes his own story, in which ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... years' standing was interesting to him, not because it had been caused by the blood of a queen's favourite, slain in her apartment, but because it offered so admirable an opportunity to prove the efficacy of his unequalled Detergent Elixir. Down on his knees went our friend, but ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... an elixir. It should last thee a number of days. Whenever Thou art afraid, or feel drowsy, drink a drop. In that way Thou ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... said deliberately, "that you are more worthy of my attention than I had formerly supposed. A man who can solve the secret of the Golden Elixir (I had not solved it; I had merely stolen some) should be a valuable acquisition to my Council. The extent of the plans of Mr. Commissioner Nayland Smith and of the English Scotland Yard it is incumbent ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Mourning coaches drawn up, drowning their grief. A pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we'll pull up here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation. Elixir of life. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool who ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... digestive organs in their work and keep you animated and cheery. Who of us does not know the inspiration of a walk in the open air after a few days spent in the close atmosphere of the house? Fresh air is the elixir of life. We can't have too much of it, and—oh, my girls—think of the exceeding cheapness of it! It can be got for the asking, which is more than one can say for the various beauty pomades and lotions ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... night, Smoke and Shorty relieved each other at administering the potato juice, rubbing it into the poor swollen gums where loose teeth rattled together and compelling the swallowing of every drop of the precious elixir. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... magic electuary, invented by one "Doctor Cogbourne, famous for fluxes," was by direction of the Navy Commissioners supplied for his use in the West Indies. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1464—Capt. Barker, 14 Oct. 1702.] By Admiral Vernon and his commanders he was dosed freely with "Elixir of Vitriol," which they not only "reckoned the best general medicine next to rhubarb," but pinned their faith to as a sovereign specific for scurvy and fevers. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 161—Admiral Vernon, 31 Oct. 1741.] Lime-juice, known as a valuable ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... my first, reverse its spell, 'Twill make my fourth; and he, note well, Could solve the problems mighty— To square the circle, change to gold, Perpetual motion to unfold, And make elixir vitae. ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... medicine, physic, Galenicals^, simples, drug, pharmaceutical, prescription, potion, draught, dose, pill, bolus, injection, infusion, drip, suppository, electuary^; linctus^, lincture^; medicament; pharmacon^. nostrum, receipt, recipe, prescription; catholicon^, panacea, elixir, elixir vitae, philosopher's stone; balm, balsam, cordial, theriac^, ptisan^. agueweed^, arnica, benzoin, bitartrate of potash, boneset^, calomel, catnip, cinchona, cream of tartar, Epsom salts [Chem]; feverroot^, feverwort; friar's balsam, Indian sage; ipecac, ipecacuanha; jonquil, mercurous ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and the sweet word "dear," from her lovely lips, entered his heart, and ran through all his veins like some rapturous but dangerous elixir. He did not say to himself, "She is a widow with a child, feels old with grief, and looks on me as a boy who has been kind to her." Such prudence and wariness were hardly to be expected from his ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... Lady Belle Isoult was to take her departure from Ireland, the Queen of Ireland came to the Lady Bragwaine and she bare with her a flagon of gold very curiously wrought. And the Queen said: "Bragwaine, here is a flask of a very singular and precious sort of an elixir; for that liquor it is of such a sort that when a man and a woman drink of it together, they two shall thereafter never cease to love one another as long as they shall have life. Take this flask, and when you have come to Cornwall, and when ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... blessing in a great measure to the discovery, years ago, that I am hired not by the job, but by the day. If you, dear friend, will receive this truth into a good and honest heart, and believing, abide in and live by it, you will find it the very elixir ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... centuries advance, it grows ever clearer that regret or surprise at the passing of empires is like regret or surprise at the passing of youth. Man might as well start once more to discover the elixir of life and alchemy's secrets as hope to found an empire that shall ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... fifteen miles through the wind and dust of the day Grant's monument was dedicated. Most of the music played by the band was merely rhythmical embroidery, chiefly in bugle figures, as helpful as a Clementi sonatina; but now and then there would break forth a magic elixir of tune that fairly plucked his feet up for him, put marrow in unwilling bones, and replaced the dreary doggedness of the heart with a great zest for progress, a stout martial fire, and a fierce esprit de corps; with patriotism indeed. In almost every case, that march belonged ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... rather than in the old way of innumerable, vivid, but faintly connected points. "I begin to see," thought Ian, "how things travel together, like with like!" His body was rested, recovered, his mind invigorated. He had had with him for long days the very elixir of solitude. Relations and associations that before had been banked in ignorance came forth and looked at him. "You surely have known us before, though you had forgotten that you knew us!" He found that he was taking delight in these expansions of meaning. He thought, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... see the instrument entering in and out of her luscious grotto while her features expressed the most entrancing enjoyment and her broad white bottom and breasts shivered with pleasure. Her motions did not continue long, however. In a few minutes she succumbed and the elixir of love poured down her white thighs. The voluptuous sight before me and the rubbing of the dildo on my clitoris caused me to emit again at the same moment that she did, and we both sank exhausted on the bed. ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... 1773. His health at this period gave cause for great alarm. A serious illness at Cambridge, however, proved a turning-point; for long afterwards he enjoyed fairly good health. Early hours, daily exercise on horseback, and liberal potations of port wine—his elixir of strength at this time, although it helped in later years to undermine his constitution—made him far stronger after ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... I called back. "The bottle is on the second shelf. Take it in a spoonful of that elixir of eucalyptus. It ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... let be; the philosopher's stone, Elixir call'd, we seeke fast each one; For had we him, then were we sicker* enow; *secure But unto God of heaven I make avow,* *confession For all our craft, when we have all y-do, And all our sleight, he will not come us to. He hath y-made us ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... harmonized, her bright and well-wrought blades, her richly damascened arms, make us aware of our own barbarism. Moreover, little as that may seem, these accursed lands of the "miscreant," ruled by Satan, are visibly blessed with the fairest fruits of nature, that elixir of the powers of God; with the first of vegetables, coffee; with the first of beasts, the Arab horse. What am I saying?—with a whole world of treasures, silk, sugar, and a host of herbs all-powerful to relieve the heart, to ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... clamped his jaws together harshly and held his tongue imprisoned behind his teeth. His chest lifted and shook as he sucked down a deep breath. There, near her, the glory of the hills outrolled before him, the keen snap of the elixir of love, the deathless, in his blood, life seemed hard, brutally hard. Everything was hard, and wrong. He had come down here for practical purposes, he had come needing every ounce of his energies for those purposes, yet, day by day, and minute by minute, he was being confronted ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... beast had revived Tar-water in those days as a fine medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new fence. On this particular evening the urgency of my case demanded a pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat, for my greater comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under her ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... professional after the briefest preliminaries, and he would stand twirling a sweet-scented sprig in his fingers, and make suggestive jokes, perhaps about her faith in a too persistent course of thoroughwort elixir, in which my landlady professed such firm belief as sometimes to endanger the life and ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... lost. The Padre's words and attitude acted like a wonderful elixir upon Chiquita. They buoyed her up, lifted her soul from the dust where it had been flung and ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... of this precious elixir," continued he, "if it touch the form of yon changeling, will dissolve the charm: on the real person of the king it ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... primrose of love's garden! How trill her tears, th' elixir of my senses! Ambitious sickness, what doth thee so harden? Oh spare, and plague thou me for her offences! Ah roses, love's fair roses, do not languish; Blush through the milk-white veil that holds you covered. If heat or cold may mitigate your anguish, I'll ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... to the death! I understand all now," whispered Justine, her breast heaving in a new and strange emotion, flooding her chilly veins as with a subtle fiery elixir. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... he said, as he turned from contemplating the scene without, and resumed his seat near the invalid's couch, "though I cannot promise that Nature will afford you the elixir you require, your case is not, cannot be hopeless, while there is balm in Gilead, while ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... the fever often become dropsical. There are a few cases of consumption. Syphilis is very virulent, and prevails amongst the troops. Ophthalmia and rheumatism are common complaints. Thus Mourzuk is not quite one of those oases, or Hesperian gardens, where the happy residents quaff the elixir of immortal health and virtue. Contrarily, it is a sink of vice and disease within, and a sere foliage of palms and vegetation without, overhung with an ever forbidding sky, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... into the room where the dying man was struggling against the first attack of the agony which had seized him. As for the Franciscan, whether owing to the effect of the elixir, or whether the appearance of Aramis had restored his strength, he made a movement, and his eyes glaring, his mouth half open, and his hair damp with sweat, sat up upon the bed. Aramis felt that the air of the room was stifling; the windows were ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... gold? If it is not ourselves that we look at then, it is at one of the tokens and emblems which claim a likeness with us, a link to hold us up to the clear space that washes itself so suddenly in an elixir costly as the golden chances of youth, and the crimson rose of love. With what a sigh, even youth itself will mark that outpouring of coloured glory! It whelms the world and overcomes the sky, and then, while none withstand it, and all is its own, it will ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... to make it my aim in life to see you drink at that pool." His directness and simplicity stimulated her like some mediaeval elixir. He made her forget her pain. They did not talk much until they were seated on one of the ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... the ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the proposed result had been the Elixir of Life. In his Indian captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients, that these simple medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a share of his own confidence as the European pharmacopoeia, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Ballad; or, Merry Remarks upon Exchange-Alley Bubbles. To a new Tune called "The Grand Elixir; or, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... simply disgusted with the grossness and vulgarity of it all. He is too old—so the Devil concludes—for the role he is playing and must have his youth renewed. So they repair to an old witch, who gives Faust an elixir that makes him young again. The scene in the witch's kitchen was written in Italy in 1788, by which time Goethe had come to think of his hero as an elderly man. The purpose of the scene was to account for the sudden change of Faust's character from ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... had been walking to and fro, during the preceding controversy, "as you seem to agree so ill with each other, I trust you will unite in adopting my course. Let us begin with this cordial; we will then vary the stimulus, if necessary, by means of the elixir, and you will see the salutary effects immediately. A loss of blood would still farther increase the debility of the patient; and I appeal to your candour, Dr. Shuro, whether you ever practised venesection ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... the Han dynasty asserted that a hare inhabited the surface of the moon, and later Taoist fable depicted this animal, called the gemmeous hare, as the servitor of the genii, who employ it in pounding the drugs which compose the elixir of life. The connection established in Chinese legend between the hare and the moon is probably traceable to an Indian original. In Sanskrit inscriptions the moon is called Sason, from a fancied resemblance of its spots to a leveret; and pandits, to whom maps of the moon's ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... were parted and his eyes aglow. The memory of the fight he had dreaded was effaced; the bruises on his sensitive face were forgotten. His heart was drinking an elixir through his ears, and at the sounds floating down from the heights new fancies leaped ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... applies with the same cogency to Coleridge. Coleridge began in rheumatic pains. What then? That is no proof that he did not end in voluptuousness. For our parts, we are slow to believe that ever any man did, or could, learn the somewhat awful truth, that in a certain ruby-coloured elixir, there lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing this power. To taste but once from the tree of knowledge, is fatal to the subsequent power of abstinence. True it is, that generations have used laudanum ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... an Italian, like many other alchemists of that period, had spent years in search of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. His vain experiments to transmute the baser metals into gold reduced him to poverty and want. His quest after these secrets had led him to study deeply the nature and composition of poisons and their antidotes. He had visited the great universities and other schools ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... few sorrows or ailments which would not be materially better for a cup of hot tea. If not the very elixir of life, it was indeed the next thing ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... believer in astrology, and a student in the occult sciences, occasionally mentions his own superstitious observances. Thus, April 11, 1681, he notes—"I took, early in the morning, a good dose of elixir, and hung three spiders about my neck, and they drove my ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... whose forms, and groupings, and shades wrought in me like a poem; for such a harmony could not exist, except they all consented to some one end! A little well of the clearest water filled a mossy hollow in one corner. I drank, and felt as if I knew what the elixir of life must be; then threw myself on a mossy mound that lay like a couch along the inner end. Here I lay in a delicious reverie for some time; during which all lovely forms, and colours, and sounds seemed to use my brain as a common hall, where they ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... suppose these gnats were intended to be shrined in amber? these mere minnows to be treated with the high consideration due only to potted char and white bait? these fleeting thoughts fixed in stone before that Gorgon-head, the public? these ephemeral fancies dropped into the true elixir of immortality, printer's-ink? these——" I stopped him, for this other mighty mouthful of images betrayed the hypocrite—"Yes, I did." An involuntary smile assured me he did too, and the cause proceeded thus: first, a promise not to burn the book; then a Bentley to the rescue, with accessory ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... who have, by some, been improperly confounded with the Freemasons, the word lux was used to signify a knowledge of the philosopher's stone, or the great desideratum of a universal elixir and a universal menstruum. ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... Many a scar on his face tells where trouble lacerated him. He has fought with wild beasts at Ephesus. He has had enough misfortune to shadow his countenance with perpetual despair. Yet he is full of hope. Has he found any new elixir? "No," he says; "I have ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... me, my dear Frank? You know I would scorn such meanness." But rising somewhat disconcerted—"really, early as it is, I think I must retire; my head," putting up his hand to it, "feels unpleasantly; this confounded elixir of logwood, little as I drank of it, has played ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... said the Doctor. "I'm the talking man here. Yes! gentlemen," addressing the attentive cowboys, "I can cure anything that touches the ground—biped, quadruped, or centipede—glanders, botts, greased hoofs, heaves, blind staggers, it makes no odds. My universal, self-acting, double compound elixir of equestrian ointment will perform a cure in each and every case. It is cheap! It is sure! It is patented! It is the best, and it is here. You may roll up, you may tumble up, you may walk up, any ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... number of carriages. Everybody came to purchase stock. "Every fool aspired to be a knave." In the words of a ballad, published at the time, and sung about the streets, ["A South Sea Ballad; or, Merry Remarks upon Exchange Alley Bubbles. To a new tune, called 'The Grand Elixir; or, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... is my intoxicant—and it keeps me in high spirits. My system doesn't crave artificial stimulation because my daily exercise quickens the blood sufficiently. Then, too, I manage to keep busy. That's the real elixir—activity! Not always physical activity, either, for I must read good books in order to exercise my mind in other channels than just my daily routine—and add to my store of ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... was active in attempting to re-establish the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen. He was one of the first of a long line of alchemists who, for several succeeding centuries, expended so much time and energy in attempting to find the "elixir of life." The Arab discovery of alcohol first deluded him into the belief that the "elixir" had at last been found; but later he discarded it and made extensive experiments with brandy, employing it in the treatment of certain diseases—the first record of the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... least name the Three Kaisers, or Triple-elixir of No-Kaiser; though, except as chronological landmarks, we have not much to do with them. First Kaiser is William Count of Holland, a rough fellow, Pope's protege, Pope even raising cash for him; till William perished in the Dutch ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... supposed that tobacco has been without friends, wise, learned, and distinguished; but space forces us to pretermit the mention of many who have ascribed to it as many virtues as were ever ascribed to the grand elixir of Alchemy. We shall content ourselves with two or three miscellaneous testimonies.—Thus Acosta tells us it is a plant, "which hath in it rare virtues, as amongst others it serves for a counterpoison—for the Creator hath imparted his virtues at his pleasure, not willing that any thing ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Mesdames," he began, and took up the wand to emphasize his discourse; "to read in the stars the events of the future—to transform into gold the metals inferior—to discover the composition of that Elixir who, by himself, would perpetuate life, was in past ages the aim and aspiration of the natural philosopher. But they are gone, those days—they are displaced, those sciences. The Alchemist and the Rosicrucian are no more, and of all their race, the professor of Legerdemain alone ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... as the track wound through deep wooded ravines, or snaked along the narrow tops of spine-like ridges; the air became cooler, damper, and more like elixir, till at a height of 1500 feet we came upon Makaueli, ideally situated upon an unequalled natural plateau, a house of patriarchal size for the islands, with a verandah festooned with roses, fuchsias, the water lemon, and other passion flowers, and with a large guest-house attached. ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... pocket a little tract which I shall press upon you with all the Christian solicitude which brother can show towards brother. Here it is; I have the greatest confidence in it; perhaps you have heard the name; it is known as Kitchens's Spiritual Elixir. The Elixir has enlightened millions; and, I will take on me to say, will convert you in twenty-four hours. Its operation is mild and pleasurable, and its effects are marvellous, prodigious, though it does not consist ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... feeling it and inflicting it at the same time; 'tis his pillow; he can punch it an he pleases, and turn it over t'other side, if he's for a mighty variation; there's a dream in it. But our poor couple are staring wide awake. All their dreaming's done. They've emptied their bottle of elixir, or broken it; and she has a thirst for the use of the tongue, and he to yawn with a crony; and they may converse, they're not aware of it, more than the desert that has drunk a shower. So as soon as possible she's away to the ladies, and he puts on his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the library, but in yourself," says Fr. Gregory, "in your self-respect and your consciousness of duty nobly done—that you are to find the 'Fountain of Youth,' the 'Elixir of Life,' and all the other things that tend to ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... air as an elixir fine Exhilarates like sparkling wine; Where mere existence brings a joy Life's ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... a public whose confidence I court. The book is not a record of globe-trotting. I regret it. It would have been a joy to watch M. Anatole France pouring the clear elixir compounded of his Pyrrhonic philosophy, his Benedictine erudition, his gentle wit and most humane irony into such an unpromising and opaque vessel. He would have attempted it in a spirit of benevolence towards his fellow men and of compassion for that life of the earth which is but ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... knowledge, and great rubbish most of them were. Raymond Lully, Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and Van Helmont; they were all there, in French, German, Latin, and English. The Alchemists had two obsessions: one was the discovery of the Elixir of Life, by the aid of which you could live forever; the other that of the Philosopher's Stone, which had the property of transmuting everything it touched into gold. Like practical men, they seemed to have concentrated their energies more especially ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... averred Justin. He had not realized until he took the bills that he had been keeping up all day by main strength, with that caved-in sensation of there being nothing back of it—nothing back of it. There are times when the touch of money is as the elixir of life. Justin, holding on by the skin of his teeth for ten thousand dollars, and needing imperatively at least as much more, felt that with this paltry sixty dollars it was suddenly possible to draw a free breath, felt a sheer ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... attempted much, have seldom failed to perform more than those who never deviate from the common roads of action: many valuable preparations of chymistry are supposed to have risen from unsuccessful inquiries after the grand elixir: it is, therefore, just to encourage those who endeavour to enlarge the power of art, since they often succeed beyond expectation; and when they fail, may sometimes benefit the world ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... for perusal; and I shall feel stronger, less oppressed, when I have talked freely with you. Kiss me, my pure darling, my own little nameless treasure, my fatherless baby; for indeed I need the elixir of my daughter's love to keep me human when I ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... To-morrow morning when he wakes from out His hoggish slumber. Yet I care not. [Re-enter GAOLER with a leathern bottle and two glasses.] Ho! This is the stuff to warm our vitals, this The panacea for all mortal ills And sure elixir of eternal youth. Drink, bonniman! [GAOLER drains a glass and shows signs of instant intoxication. SAV. claps him on shoulder and replenishes glass. GAOLER drinks again, lies down on floor, and snores. SAV. snatches the bunch of keys, laughs long but silently, and creeps out on tip-toe, leaving ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... of the Lord is the strength of our body, The gladness of Jesus, the balm for our pain, His life and His fulness, our fountain of healing, His joy, our elixir for body ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... amours, combats of curled knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties, charities in costume,—a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish vanity—impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir, and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural veracity; the faces falsely drawn—the lights falsely cast—the forms effaced or distorted, and all common human wit and ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... a young Italian, completed in December his fifty days' fast, at the Grand Hotel, Paris, in time to enjoy the festivities of the holidays. Unlike his rival, Succi, he partook of no mysterious elixir, but existed on water alone. At the conclusion of his feat, he was so nearly dead that the surgeons were anticipating by way of dissection more light on the effects of privation from food. He was barely able to move about without help. His stomach was unable to hold any ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... a novel of the same name, by W. Goodwin (1799). St. Leon becomes possessed of the "elixir of life," and of the "philosopher's stone;" but this knowledge, instead of bringing him wealth and happiness, is the source ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... way inside and extinguished the candles, which flickered and dripped as they fitfully shone on the shrunken features of the corpse. He had been a reprobate and an assassin, but, luckily for him, a pious woman, not wishing to see him die "in his sins," had sprinkled Holy Water on him. The said "Elixir of Life" had been brought eighty miles, and was kept in her house to use only in extreme cases. The poor woman had paid the price of a cow for the bottle of water, but the priest had declared that it was an effectual soul-saver, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... bore the journey to Newmarket extremely well, but has been lethargic Since,; yet they have found out that Daffy's Elixir agrees with, and does him good. Prince Frederick is very bad. There is no private news at all. As I shall not deliver this till the day after to-morrow, I shall be able to give you an account of the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... dwelt within these halls a follower of Jesus of Jerusalem,—an Archbishop in the church of Christ. He gave himself up to dreams; to the illusions of fancy; to the vast desires of the human soul. He sought after the impossible. He sought after the Elixir of Life,—the Philosopher's Stone. The wealth, that should have fed the poor, was melted in his crucibles. Within these walls the Eagle of the clouds sucked the blood of the Red Lion, and received the spiritual Love of the Green Dragon, but alas! was childless. In solitude and utter silence ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... World. From that moment the German people, but more particularly the German official and governing class, and her naval and military men, would appear to have imbibed of some distillation of their Emperor's exaggerated pride, and found it too heady an elixir for their sanity. It would ill become us to dilate at length upon the extremes into which their arrogance and luxuriousness led them. With regard, at all events, to the luxury and indulgence, we ourselves had been very far from guiltless. But it may ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... youth granted to middle age," I continued,—"in vino juventus, one might say; and may you, my dear young friend, long remain so proudly independent of that great Elixir—though I confess that I have met no few young men under thirty who have been excellent critics ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... the rattletrap and the racket of filling the tank with the elixir finished her sleep, however. She woke in confusion, finding herself sitting up, dressed, in her little room, with three strange ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... his suffering wife from the physical dangers which have succeeded her mental disease. The proposition has been made to him by Margrave, a wanderer in many countries, who has followed the Fenwicks from England to Australia. Margrave declares that he needs an accomplice to secure an "elixir of life" which his own failing strength demands. His mysterious mesmeric or hypnotic influence over Mrs. Fenwick had in former days been marked; and on the basis of this undeniable fact, he has endeavored to show that his own welfare and Mrs. Fenwick's are, in some ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... grew to believe me, and carefully covering me from mosquitoes, it became invariable that at a certain distance on our homeward way the rower relinquished rowing, the steerer stopped steering, and the boat drifted down-stream with the gentle flow, while two-thirds of its occupants tasted of the elixir— ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... the hidden stone, the Manna lies; Thou art the great Elixir rare and Choice; The Key that opens to all Mysteries, The Word in Characters, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... investing it. As in the old days, he was always putting "twenty-five or forty thousand dollars," as he said, into something that promised multiplied returns. Howells tells how he found him looking wonderfully well, and when he asked the name of his elixir he learned that ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the magic crystal to the light of the lamp, as a drinker examines his bottle at the end of a repast, he had not seen his father's eye pale. The cowering dog looked alternately at his dead master and at the elixir, as Don Juan regarded by turns his father and the phial. The lamp threw out fitful waves of light. The silence was profound, the viol was mute. Belvidero thought he saw his father move, and he trembled. Frightened by the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- 'alchemy,' 'alcohol,' 'alembic,' 'algebra,' 'alkali,' 'almanack,' 'azimuth,' 'cypher,' 'elixir,' 'magazine,' 'nadir,' 'tariff,' 'zenith,' 'zero '?—for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit cleaving to them. In like manner, even though history were silent on the matter, we might conclude, and we know that ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... actually made Aunt Myra laugh heartily more than once; and Rose did her so much good by letting in the sunshine, singing about the silent house, cooking wholesome messes, and amusing the old lady with funny little lectures on physiology, that she forgot to take her pills and gave up "Mum's Elixir," because she slept so well, after the long walks and drives she was beguiled into taking, that she needed ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... hunter was bathing the stranger's wounds with a gentleness that seemed out of keeping with his own rude aspect, and administering occasional draughts of cool well water, that appeared to revive the sufferer as though it were the very elixir of life. ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... revealed his secret and his wish, and put Doctor Coctier on his guard. "Ah," he said to himself, "you have your eye on the King with your elixir of life." And then he added aloud, "He is ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... favourite studies. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge. Under the guidance of my new preceptors I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention. Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death! Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... tale is this of a Spanish friar who wastes the elixir of life upon Lutheran dogs? I' faith, I had bodeful dreams last night, and waked this morning now hot, now cold. I'll end my days with no foul fever—an I can help it! What's ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... had brought a remedy which would cure gangrene, he said. The sore on the leg was hopeless, but they gave the king a dose of the elixir in a glass of Alicante. "To life and to death," said he as he took the glass; "just as it shall please God." The remedy appeared to act; the king recovered a little strength. The throng of courtiers, which, the day before, had been crowding to ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the bar of public justice, to answer to the offended laws of his country, they will make it a salutary lesson of instruction. They will realize the deceptive and ruinous nature of wrong-doing—how, while promising them the very elixir of happiness, it pours naught but bitterness and poison into the cup of life, entailing degradation and wretchedness upon its victims. They will become satisfied of the solemn truth of the words of the Most High, that "though hand join in ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... returned, fork in hand. What a flood of old memories came surging back with the touch of the implement! Again he was in Vermont in the stretch of mowings that fronted the old white house where he was born. The scent of the hay in his nostrils stirred him like an elixir, and with a thrill of pleasure he set to work. He had not anticipated toiling out there in the hot sunshine at a task which he had always disliked; but to-day, by a strange miracle, it did not seem to be a task so much ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... down the unsubstantial trifle, and asks impatiently if that is all? At any rate, it is enough. Into that frothy sweetness his subtle hand has insinuated a single drop of some strange liquor—is it a poison or is it an elixir of life?—whose penetrating influence will spread and spread until the remotest fibres of the system have felt its power. Contemporary French readers, when they had shut the book, found somehow that they were looking out ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... cutlets, I think they call them, that is to say, chops screwed up in large curl papers, and such-like trifles. I saw some chaps drinking small glasses of stuff, so I asked the waiter what it was, and, thinking he said "Elixir of Girls," I banged the table, and said, "Elixir of Girls! that's the stuff for my money—give me a glass." The chap laughed, and said, "Not Girls, sir, but Garus"; and thereupon he ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... a higher grade than the last, and played a distinguished part at the court of Louis XV. He pretended to have discovered the elixir of life, by means of which he could make any one live for centuries; and allowed it to be believed that his own age was upwards of two thousand years. He entertained many of the opinions of the Rosicrucians; boasted of his intercourse with sylphs and salamanders; ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... those to whom the present cannot be good save as a mode of the infinite. In such their divine origin asserts itself. Once known for what it is, the poorest present is a phial holding the elixir of life. ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... open-mouthed from him to me, from me to him, scarce able to grasp such magnanimity. To the peasant, money is a commodity to be struggled for, fought for, grasped, prized; to be doled out like the drops of a priceless Elixir Vitae. Paragot had the aristocratic, artistic scorn of it; and I, as I have said before, was the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... height, and she was filled with a beautiful astonishment, a sort of divine amazement, as if it were toward this that always, inevitably, she had been moving,—and now it was here! Her blood leaped to it, and went racing fierily through her veins, as if there had been poured into it the elixir of life. She was gloriously conscious of her youth and her womanhood. A quick and vivid rush of warm blood stained her, brow to bosom. Her every-day mind was saying, "It is the stranger who's staying at Grandma Baker's—the ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... thousand years old, and that at the end of five centuries its hair becomes white. Instead of seeing a man in the moon, they imagine they see a hare standing on its hind-legs, and pounding drugs in a mortar. There are great creatures like gigantic men, called genii, who live in the moon, and make "the elixir of life," a draught of which confers very long life. The hare is their steward, and spends his time in pounding the precious roots and bark of the "tree of the king of drugs," from which the elixir ...
— Harper's Young People, July 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high pastures. I would keep some book of natural history always by me as a sort of elixir, the reading of which should restore the tone of the system. To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health. To him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty no harm nor disappointment can ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... as Carlyle might have put it, is the Hero as Artist. When we have admitted this, all dregs and sediments of the analytical alembic sink to the bottom, leaving a clear crystalline elixir of the spirit. About the quality of his genius opinions may, will, and ought to differ. It is so pronounced, so peculiar, so repulsive to one man, so attractive to another, that, like his own dread statue of Lorenzo de' Medici, "it fascinates ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... had been interrupted in the middle of a sentence. "What should you say was the supreme moment of this thing, or was the radioactive property, the very soul? Of course, it is there where Nemorino drinks the elixir and finds himself freed from Adina; when he bursts into the joyous song of liberation and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... if he had been given the elixir of life. Likewise the members of the team appeared to be under the spell of a powerful stimulus. The sprinter's words struck fire from ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... never had to do with such a serious case as this before, but I have obtained from the Patriarch of the Taoist Church a small vial of the Elixir of Life, which has the marvellous property of prolonging the existence of whoever drinks it. We shall try it on the King and, as there is no sign of vital decay, let us hope that it will be effective in ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... the "Twice-Told Tales." In 1840, also, we find in the journal: "If a man were sure of living forever, he would not care about his offspring." The "Mosses from an Old Manse" supply another link in this train of reflection; for "The Virtuoso's Collection" includes some of the elixir vitae "in an antique sepulchral urn." The narrator there represents himself as refusing to quaff it. "'No; I desire not an earthly immortality,' said I. 'Were man to live longer on earth, the spiritual would die out ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... little, he knows what he is about. One might write a play: an old chemist invents the elixir of life—take fifteen drops and you live for ever; but he breaks the phial from terror, lest such carrion as himself and his wife might live for ever. Tolstoy denies mankind immortality, but my God! how much that is personal there is in it! ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... me to tell you all," he said. "I know and I have the words, but, somehow, when I try to fit the words to the thing, they run asunder and will not mix, like water and oil. But see, Hugo, here is an elixir of rare value. Drop a drop or two on my tongue if ye see me wander. It will bring me back ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... and the sea was calm and blue. The Pacific is more desolate than other seas; its spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it has somehow the feeling of an adventure. The air you breathe is an elixir which prepares you for the unexpected. Nor is it vouchsafed to man in the flesh to know aught that more nearly suggests the approach to the golden realms of fancy than the approach to Tahiti. Murea, the sister isle, comes into view in rocky splendour, rising from the desert sea mysteriously, like ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... grandeurs of the visible True; but it is not the thing itself, it is something better: it is an ideal combination of its principal forms, a luminous tint made up of its brightest colors, an intoxicating balm of its purest perfumes, a delicious elixir of its best juices, a perfect harmony of its sweetest sounds—in short, it is a concentration of all its good qualities. For this Truth, and nothing else, should strive those works of art which are a moral representation of life-dramatic works. To ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... for daily cares had not yet brought discord to the instruments tuned by sleep and touched by sunshine into pleasant sound; never had the whole race seemed so near and dear to her, for she was unconsciously pledging all she met in that genuine Elixir Vitae which sets the coldest blood aglow and makes the whole world kin; never had she felt so truly her happiest self, for of all the costlier pleasures she had known not one had been so congenial as this, as she rippled farther and farther up the stream and seemed ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... must live. Remember that I am young and you are old. I have no place in the world except the place I make for myself. I cannot live in a pig-sty amongst the snows like Naudheim. I cannot find the whole elixir of life in thoughts and solitude as he does. There are other things—other things for men of ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... even the April sunshine or morning air, bring about a certain rejuvenescence in man prophetic of what is not ideally impossible—perpetuity and constant reinforcement in his vital powers. Had nature furnished the elixir of life, or could art have discovered it, the whole face of human society would have been changed. The earth once full, no more children would have been begotten and parental instincts would have been atrophied for want of function. All men would have been contemporaries and, having all time ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... sinks With all such drinks, And after them tumble the mixer! For a poison malign Is such Borgia wine, Or at best but a Devil's Elixir. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... rare elixir," said he, after taking a deep draught, "prepared by the great enchanter Alquife, and of a magic potency." Then, being exhausted by his violent exertions of body and mind he stretched himself on the couch and soon sank into a ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... which contain little or no fixed air, have been tried in the scurvy with little success, I would answer, that I doubt that in those trials they have never been sufficiently diluted; for it is easy to conceive, that in the small quantity of water the elixir of vitriol, for instance, is commonly given, that austere acid can scarce get beyond the first passages; considering the delicate sensibility of the mouths of the lacteals, which must force them to shut and exclude so pungent a liquor. It were therefore a proper experiment to be made, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... who dive into the inmost recesses of the human frame in pursuit of knowledge, and who search through the mineral and vegetable kingdom for relief, when will you produce a balm so healing, a specific so powerful, an elixir so instantaneous ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and I hesitated with terror at the snap in his dear old eyes, back under their white brows. Then I let my eyes uncover my heart full of the elixir I had prepared for him, and offered him as ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... me. "We'll see how the wound looks first," said he. "But you must take a little of my elixir asafoetidae et liquorice first. You evidently properly appreciate its virtues by recommending that Spellman should have more ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... whatever real knowledge they possessed was corrupted by their inveterate propensity for mystical and occult science. They too often exhausted both health and fortune in fruitless researches after the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. Their medical prescriptions were regulated by the aspect of the stars. Their physics were debased by magic, their chemistry degenerated into alchemy, their astronomy ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott |
