"Crucible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... himself. Before being a house surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, Horace Bianchon had been a medical student lodging in a squalid boarding house in the Quartier Latin, known as the Maison Vauquer. This poor young man had felt there the gnawing of that burning poverty which is a sort of crucible from which great talents are to emerge as pure and incorruptible as diamonds, which may be subjected to any shock without being crushed. In the fierce fire of their unbridled passions they acquire the most impeccable honesty, and get into the habit of fighting the battles which await genius with ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... leaving consequences to follow in their natural course. These, my first impressions, were fully confirmed by subsequent intercourse, in situations and under circumstances which, by experience, I have found an unfailing alembic for the trial of character—a crucible wherein, if the metal be impure, the drossy substances are sure to display themselves. It is not my province to extol or pronounce judgment upon his acts; they are a part of the military and civil history of our country, and as such will be applauded ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... common weaver bird, Phoceus baya, Blyth. 'Ploceinae, the weaver birds. . . . They build nests like a crucible, with the opening downwards, and usually attach them to the tender branches of a tree hanging over a well or tank. P. baya is found throughout India; its nest is made of grasses and strips of the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... stone slab, and Clarke watched him drearily as he bent over a row of phials and lit the flame under the crucible. The doctor had a small hand-lamp, shaded as the larger one, on a ledge above his apparatus, and Clarke, who sat in the shadows, looked down at the great shadowy room, wondering at the bizarre effects of brilliant light and undefined darkness contrasting with ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... weighed gold entrusted to the craftsman for working; in another example (at Beni Hasan) the washing and melting down of the ore is represented; and again at Thebes, the goldsmith is depicted seated in front of his crucible, holding the blow-pipe to his lips with the left hand, and grasping his pincers with the right, thus fanning the flame and at the same time making ready to seize the ingot (fig. 283). The Egyptians struck neither coins nor ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... for its phosphorescent quality after having been burnt in a sulphurous fire; and exposed when cold to the sun's light. It may be thus well imitated: Calcine oyster-shells half an hour, pulverize them when cold, and add one third part of flowers of sulphur, press them close into a small crucible, and calcine them for an hour or longer, and keep the powder in a phial close stopped. A part of this powder is to be exposed for a minute or two to the sunbeams, and then brought into a dark room. The calcined Bolognian stone becomes a calcareous hepar of sulphur; ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... submit to the crucible of your criticism; and a little reflection will probably suggest to you, that perhaps you are unduly enlarging the limits, and prematurely exercising the rights of anticipated censorship. There are blunders ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... upon the grass of English graves—that of Keats, among them—with an effect of poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But the most touching element of all is the appeal of the pious English inscriptions among all these Roman memories; touching because of their universal expression of that trouble within trouble, misfortune in a foreign ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... piece of iron dropped in a crucible full of glass will eat through it. Crucibles are made of ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... Parson, candidly; "but, on consideration, there is a medium. There are schools which unite the best qualities of public and private schools, large enough to stimulate and develop energies mental and physical, yet not so framed as to melt all character in one crucible. For instance, there is a school which has at this moment one of the first scholars in Europe for head-master,—a school which has turned out some of the most remarkable men of the rising generation. The master sees at a glance if a boy be clever, and takes ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a poor man had occasion either to buy or sell a farthing's worth of goods, he was obliged to weigh the farthing. The operation of assaying is still more difficult, still more tedious; and, unless a part of the metal is fairly melted in the crucible, with proper dissolvents, any conclusion that can be drawn from it is extremely uncertain. Before the institution of coined money, however, unless they went through this tedious and difficult operation, people must always have been liable to the grossest frauds ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Igorots obtained black copper or native copper by blasting, they prevented loss (by oxidation) by setting up a crucible of good fire-proof clay in the form of a still; by which means it was easier for them to pour the metal into the forms which it would acquire from the same clay. The furnace being arranged, they supplied it with from eighteen to twenty kilograms of rich or roasted ore, which, according to the ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... glance, and calculate the chances in his favor. These were nothing but hazy ideas that floated over his mental horizon; they were less cynical than Vautrin's notions; but if they had been tried in the crucible of conscience, no very pure result would have issued from the test. It is by a succession of such like transactions that men sink at last to the level of the relaxed morality of this epoch, when there have never been so few of ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... alchemist, and the dross of outer events turned to gold in the marvellous crucible of his mind. Fortune should have known this and abandoned the vain attempt to torment him. He had failed, but no other man could have come so near success. He was alone, therefore free: poor, therefore independent; desirous of hiding, therefore of importance: in a foreign land, therefore ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... blankets, and is retorted by the Chinamen themselves, and then they bring it for sale. The retorting has usually been badly done, and there remains a good deal of quicksilver and nitric acid adhering to the gold. The only way of dealing with it is to put the whole into a crucible, then make it red hot, and keep the gold at the melting-point for five ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... invert society, to play the part of merciless innovators to imperil religion, to place all civil and religious freedom in jeopardy; that if our ends were accomplished all the public and private virtues would be melted as in a crucible and thrown upon the ground, thence to cry aloud to heaven like the blood of righteous Abel. Were it not that curiosity is largely developed in this class, they would go down to their graves wholly uninformed of our true principles, motives, and aims. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... true of the cultivation of science for its own sake. The stargazer with his telescope, the chemist with crucible and retort, the physiologist with his chemical and optical aids, the purely scientific thinker—all who prosecute science for the love of it—have wrought out results which are breaking as light of the clear morning sun upon the history ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... me as I proceed—and so our Lord bade me not to fear, but to esteem this grace more than all the others He had given me; for the soul was purified by this pain—burnished, or refined as gold in the crucible, so that it might be the better enamelled with His gifts, and the dross burnt away in this life, which would have to be burnt away ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... that the dross in her character should be burned away, and your two lives fused, there are in His providence just the fiery trials, just the circumstances that will bring it about." (Was she unconsciously uttering a prophecy?) "The crucible of affliction, the test of some great emergency, will often develop a seemingly weak and frivolous girl into noble life, where there is real gold of latent worth to be ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... struggling hard for the mastery over himself, and you may be sure, madam, that he will gain it. Your son is a young man of no light stamp of character; and he will come out of this ordeal, as gold from the crucible." ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... all his energies, walked straight up to the crucible, drew it out of the furnace, and looked in. The gold was all melted, and its surface as smooth and polished as a river; but instead of reflecting little Gluck's head, as he looked in, he saw, meeting his glance from beneath the gold, the red nose and sharp eyes ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... foretell—surely not this writer—with anything approaching certainty what will be the final effect of this war on the soldier-workman. One can but marshal some of the more obvious and general liabilities and assets, and try to strike a balance. The whole thing is in flux. Millions are going into the crucible at every temperature; and who shall say at all precisely what will come out or what conditions the product issuing will meet with, though they obviously cannot be the same as before the war? For in considering this question, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... softened the hearts in the same crucible that hardened the hands. The arrogance of the strong mellowed into consideration for the weak; wisdom and culture went hand in hand with ignorance and brawn; malice and rancour left the hearts of the lowly and met half-way the departing insolence of the lofty; ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Peak and look down upon the world and the sea gives one a great notion of the making of things. Once the world was a crucible. The islands are all volcanic, all ash and cinders, lava and pumice. But I perceived that the Peak itself, the final peak, the last five thousand feet of it, was but the last result of a dying fire—a mere gas spurt to what had been. The whole anatomy of the island is laid bare; the ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... were so graceful as you; Wild flow'rs in profusion were there, But your eyes were a lovelier blue; And the tint on your cheek shamed the rose, And your brow as the lily was white, And your curls, bright as gold, when it glows, In the crucible, liquid and bright. ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... analyse the conception of a cause to the bottom, we find as the last residuum in our crucible nothing but what Hume found there long ago, and that is simply the idea of invariable sequence. Whenever we say that something is the cause of something else, all that we really mean is that the latter is invariably preceded by the former, so that whenever we find the second, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... branches crackle, the crucible shines as with gold, As they carry the hot flaming metal in haste from the fire to the mould; Loud roars the bellows, and louder the flames as they shrieking escape, And loud is the song of the workmen who watch o'er the fast-filling shape; To and fro in the red-glaring chamber the proud ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... might fairly make use of Aaron's explanation. They have put into the crucible of life their gold, themselves, God's finest gold intrusted to their hands. And under their manipulation what has come out is as a vealy, callow calf, a bull calf at that too, scrub stock, fit ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... belief. But it was not so. There are degrees of calamity. Dumfounded, stunned, aghast, Sabre would not have believed that conspiracy against him of all the powers of darkness could conceivably worsen his plight. They had shot their bolt. He was stricken amain. He was in the crucible of disaster and in its heart where the ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... it would be a vain task to seek anywhere in nature for evidence of Divine action, such that no one could sanely deny it. God will not allow Himself to be caught at the bottom of any man's crucible, or yield Himself to the experiments of gross-minded and irreverent inquirers. The natural, like the supernatural, revelation appeals to the whole of man's mental nature and not ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... dust and ashes, tempt coy Truth in many light and airy forms from the bottom of her well, and discover one crumb of comfort or one grain of good in the commonest and least-regarded matter that passes through our crucible. Spirits of past times, creatures of imagination, and people of to-day are alike the objects of our seeking, and, unlike the objects of search with most philosophers, we can insure their coming at ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... private judgment," and our "Christian liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free;" to add fuel to the fire of investigation, and in the crucible of deep inquiry, melt from the gold of pure religion, the dross of man's invention; to appeal from the erring tribunals of a fallible Priesthood, and restore to its original state the mutilated Testament ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... I caught an expression In her brow's undisturbed self-possession Amid the Court's scoffing and merriment, As if from no pleasing experiment She rose, yet of pain not much heedful So long as the process was needful,— 110 As if she had tried in a crucible, To what "speeches like gold" were reducible, And, finding the finest prove copper, Felt the smoke in her face was but proper; To know what she had not to trust to, Was worth all the ashes and dust too. She ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... adolescence Tasso played for a while with philosophical doubts. But though he read widely and speculated diffusely on the problems of the universe, he failed to pierce below the surface of the questions which he handled. His own beliefs had been tested in no red-hot crucible, before he recoiled with terror from their analysis. The man, to put it plainly, was incapable of honest revolt against the pietistic fashions of his age, incapable of exploratory efforts, and yet too intelligent to rest satisfied with gross dogmatism or smug hypocrisy. Neither ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... greetings, the transports and bliss, Which, of course, duly followed a meeting like this, And come down to business;—for such the intent Of the lady who now o'er the crucible leant, In the glow of a furnace of carbon and lime, Like a fairy called up in the new pantomime;— And give but her words as she coyly looked down, In reply to the questioning glances of Brown: "I am taking the drops, and am using the paste, And the little, white powders ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... glad of the other's existence. They loved one another and were ready without hesitation to commit all sorts of follies, deeming them mere bagatelles, which on solid land they would never have condoned in themselves. Their rejoicing was a crucible melting together all the barriers by which convention divides man from man. They experienced a sense of relief and liberation, and drew in deep breaths ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... perhaps, they have just learned to name; without truly knowing what they see, they think they know those regions of the earth which never can be seen; and they judge of the great operations of the mineral kingdom, from having kindled a fire, and looked into the bottom of a little crucible. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... nothing must be lost. It is easy to see shrivelled pieces of plant, but not easy to pick them out; the simplest plan is to burn them away. The soil must be carefully tipped on to a tin lid, or into a crucible, heated over a flame and stirred {5} with a long clean nail. First of all it chars, then there is a little sparkling, but not much, finally the soil turns red and does not change any further no ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... the noblest feelings, the sublimest dramas of our youth must end. We start at dawn, as I from Tours to Clochegourde, we clutch the world, our hearts hungry for love; then, when our treasure is in the crucible, when we mingle with men and circumstances, all becomes gradually debased and we find but little gold among the ashes. Such is life! life as it is; great pretensions, small realities. I meditated long about myself, debating what I could do after ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... drawn freely upon the thoughts of ethical teachers, classic and contemporary. These ideas are, or ought to be, common property; and it has been impracticable to trace them to their sources and offer detailed acknowledgment. Nothing has been presented here that has not first passed through the crucible of my own thinking and experience; and where the sparks came from that kindled each particular thought I am sure ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... successful turning movement. Their little force was being increased by every reserve that they could muster and arm. From India they brought their native troops, long-service men trained by British officers. These, at a time when every man of any kind was needed, were thrown into the crucible of the coming conflict, which reached its climax during the last days of October in the chill rains and mists of Flanders, with rich fields of a flat country turned ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... the first to whom it offered "the way out," who went to it for the solution of their own set problem. Suddenly, as he stood with Jasmine in the little room where so many lives were tossed into the crucible of Fate that morning, the newsboy's voice shouting, "War declared!" had told him the path ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... who fears, in 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 his fantastic defence of suicide, was familiar ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... questions in theology. I certainly was desirous of finding the Orthodox system true. But the more I studied it, the more I doubted. My doubts sprung, first, from a more critical study of the New Testament. In Professor Stuart's crucible, many a solid text evaporated, and left no residuum of proof. I was startled at the small number of texts, for instance, which his criticism left to support the doctrine of "the personality of the Holy Spirit." I remember saying to him in the class ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... been really quite hateful about her, Betty and I. Down in our hearts we like her. She was a spoiled child, of course, and all that sort of thing, but heaven knows she's been pretty thoroughly made over in a new crucible. We used to feel terribly sorry for her, even while we were deriding her for the fool she had made of herself in marrying him. I've seen her hundreds of times driving about alone in Vienna, where they spent two winters, a really pathetic figure, ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... born?'... A purpose there must have been, and, surely, mine was an exalted destiny, because I feel that within my soul are powers immeasurable... But I was not able to discover that destiny, I allowed myself to be carried away by the allurements of passions, inane and ignoble. From their crucible I issued hard and cold as iron, but gone for ever was the glow of noble aspirations—the fairest flower of life. And, from that time forth, how often have I not played the part of an axe in the hands of fate! Like an implement of punishment, I have fallen ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... medical union was now in a fine attitude by act of Parliament. It could talk its contempt of medical women, and act its terror of them, and keep both its feigned contempt and its real alarm safe from the test of a public examination—that crucible in which cant, surmise, and mendacity are soon evaporated or precipitated, and only the ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... the clear evening light from the Porta del Popolo to his lodgings in the Via Sistina, was of a prodigious accumulation of architectural effects, a crowding of century on century, all fused in the crucible of the Roman sun, so that each style seemed linked to the other by some subtle affinity of colour. Nowhere else, surely, is the traveller's first sight so crowded with surprises, with conflicting challenges to eye and brain. Here, as he passed, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... is reproduced to our senses directly. Not only the main conception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is brought home to us, have been put through the crucible of another man's mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of liberty and largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of things are thrown ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the shade of a great ash-tree for a few moments, and snatched a mouthful of luncheon. Then he spoke a little and asked some questions, but lapsed into a moody silence afterwards. His life and nature were being passed through a fiery crucible. In all the years that had gone, he had had an ungovernable desire to kill both Bignold and Marcile if he ever met them, a primitive, savage desire to blot them out of life and being. His fingers had ached for Marcile's neck, that neck in which he had lain his face so often in the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... silver in the form of a chloride by hydrochloric acid. Next wash the precipitate with hot water until the washings cease to redden litmus paper. Next mix the pure chloride of silver while yet moist with its own weight of pure crystallized carbonate of soda, place the mixture in a covered porcelain crucible and heat very gradually until the fusing point of silver is reached. The reduced silver will be pure and may be removed by breaking the crucible. Wash the button thoroughly with hot water to remove the flux. In dissolving the pure silver ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... that he should be a tenor and an actor, and give pleasure to his fellow-men. I see there the power and the strength of a broader mastery than that which bends the ears of a theatre audience. One day we may see it. It needs the fire of hot times to fuse the elements of greatness in the crucible of revolution. There is not such another head in all Italy as Nino's that I have ever seen, and I have seen the best in Rome. He looked so grand, as he sat there, thinking over the future. I am not praising his face for its beauty; there is little enough of that, as women might judge. And ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... thought is brought into contact with, and permitted critically to test mythology, it dethrones the false gods. The age of spontaneous religious sentiment must necessarily be succeeded by the age of reflective thought. Popular theological faiths must be placed in the hot crucible of dialectic analysis, that the false and the frivolous may be separated from the pure and the true. The reason of man demands to be satisfied, as well as the heart. Faith in God must have a logical basis, it must be grounded on demonstration and proof. Or, at ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... recline; Those lofty cliffs a hundred streams unfold, [76] At once to pillars turned that flame with gold: 280 Behind his sail the peasant shrinks, to shun The west, [77] that burns like one dilated sun, A crucible of mighty compass, felt By mountains, glowing till ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... we are now put in the crucible In which every worthless metal is tried, In which gold is cleansed from every tarnish; The Scripture is true in everything it says; It says we must suffer before we can be cured; It is through repentance we shall ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... unless the ruling power recognizes the wrong, it is useless to hope for a correction of it. Principles may be right, but they are not established within an hour. The masses are slow to reason, and each principle, to acquire moral force, must come to us from the fire of the crucible; the fire may inflict unjust punishment, but then it purifies and renders stronger the principle, not in itself, but in the eyes of those who arrogate judgment to themselves. When the war of the Revolution ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... a telescope, through whose increasing field new worlds float daily by; the mind of that geologist is a divining-rod, forever bending toward the waters of chaos, and pointing out new places where a shaft can be sunk into periods of almost infinite antiquity; the mind of that chemist is a subtile crucible, in which aboriginal secrets lie disclosed, and within whose depths the true philosopher's stone will be found; the mind of that mathematician is a maze of ethereal stair-ways, rising higher and higher ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... you should have done, but 'of Horu the Man.' So when I came to be buried, Pharaoh, knowing all, took the image from my wrappings and hurled it away. I remember, too, the casting of that image, and how you threw a gold chain I had given you into the crucible with the bronze, saying that gold alone was fit to fashion me. And this signet that I bear—it was you who cut it. Take it, take it, Horu, and in its place give me back that which is on your hand, the Bes ring that I also wore. Take it and wear it ever till ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... this I may mention the experiment which I saw on the quick fusion of metals exhibited at the Royal Institution by Sir William Roberts-Austen (1901), where, owing to the glare and the dense fumes, it was impossible to see what happened in the crucible. But I was able to see every detail on closing the eyes. The effects of the smoke, being of less luminescence, cleared away first, and left the after-image of the molten metal ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... just consenting when the Peterkin family burst in. You can imagine how mad the chemist was! He came near throwing his crucible—that was the name of his melting-pot—at their heads. But he didn't. He listened as calmly as he could to the story of how Mrs. Peterkin had put ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... solutions of silver, {650} whether used for albumenising or otherwise, being reduced to a state of chloride by the addition of common salt so long as any precipitate is formed: fine silver may then be readily obtained by heating a crucible, the chloride consisting of three-fourths of pure metal. It is a false economy to use dirty or doubtful solutions, and by adopting the above course the pecuniary loss is very trifling. Our ordinary stoves will not always give a sufficient heat, but any working jeweller or ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... partake of this quality. They do not reflect on themselves, are not surprised at themselves, but come as a matter of course. Years after, when the early heat of the new life has grown cold, the historians and biographers arrive to examine it in the crucible of their painful analysis, and to tell us how wonderful ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... nitro-glycerine and 25 per cent. of kieselguhr. The guhr as imported (Messrs A. Haake & Co. are the chief importers) contains from 20 to 30 per cent. of water and organic matter. The water may be very easily estimated by drying a weighed quantity in a platinum crucible at 100 deg. C. for some time and re-weighing, and the organic matter by igniting the residue strongly over a Bunsen burner. Before the guhr can be used for making dynamite it must be calcined, in order not only to get rid of moisture, but also ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... he has done every Thing, according to my Direction, before the Crucible is stirr'd, I come and look about, to see if nothing has been omitted, and then I say, that there seems to want a Coal or two at the Top, and pretending to take one out of the Coal-Heap, I privately lay on one of my own, or have ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... would be to submit their necks to as detestable a tyranny as ever existed on the face. of the earth. They will not sit quietly by to see their liberties, red and radiant with the blood of a million of their sons, silently melted away in the judicial crucible of a stolid and tyrannical judge of their Federal Court." This is forcible, certainly; but it ought to be speedily decided, at least, whether there is such a legal principle as ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... a huddled heap to the floor, weak, hysterical—a half- crazed soul in the white-hot crucible of suffering. Blake leaned over him, gently, and lifting him, helped him to the great chair. There was a great, unselfish gladness in his heart. But that gladness had changed swiftly to horror. He stood back aghast. For there had entered the room ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... broken into short lengths, melted in fire-clay crucibles at an intense white heat, cast carefully into iron molds, and the resulting ingot forged into bars under a crude trip hammer. This melting practice is still in use for crucible steel, and will be described ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... bitter blow, doctor, but nil desperandum was my motto, so I went to work at my crucible again, with redoubled energy, and made an ingot nearly every second day. I determined this time to put them in some secure place myself; but the very first day I set my apparatus in order for the projection, the girl Marion—that is my daughter's name—came weeping to ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... interpretation of educational phenomena. But I also recognize that the science of psychology is a very young science, and that its data are not yet so well organized that it is safe to draw from them anything more than tentative hypotheses which must meet their final test in the crucible of practice. Some day, if we work hard enough, psychology will become a predictive science, just as mathematics and physics and chemistry and, to a certain extent, biology, are predictive sciences to-day. Meantime psychology is of inestimable value ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... feeling that once more I was entitled to a place among men. The risk that had been incurred by the drovers acted like a physical stimulant, the outdoor life had hardened me like iron, and I came out of the crucible bright with the hope of youth and buoyant with ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... Absolute, we have Balthazar Claes, a man of wealth and leisure, living in the ancient town of Douai, and married to a wife who adores him and who has borne him children. Claes' hobby is scientific research; his aim, the discovery of the origin of things which he believes can be given him by his crucible. In his family mansion, of antique Flemish style, which is admirably described by the novelist at great length, he pursues his tireless experiments; and, with less justification than Bernard Palissy, encroaches by degrees on the capital of his fortune, which melts away ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... an odd girl, Caroline. You experiment with men's hearts like an old alchemist, who puts all sorts of substances into his crucible in the hope of finding something that ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... Possibly, in the attempts at that transmutation of metals, which I think your own great chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, allowed might be possible, but held not to be worth the cost of the process—possibly, in those attempts, some scanty grains of this substance were found by the alchemists, in the crucible, with grains of the metal as niggardly yielded by pitiful mimicry of Nature's stupendous laboratory; and from such grains enough of the essence might, perhaps, have been drawn forth, to add a few years of existence to ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... in the open ayre not in an house; sett it on fire and lett it burne out and extinguish of itself; when it is cold take out the toades; and in an Iron morter pound them very well; and searce them; then in a Crucible calcine them; So againe; pound them & searce them again. The first time they will be a brown powder, the next time blacke. Of this you may give a dragme in a Vehiculum or drinke Inwardly in any Infection taken: and ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... for a new edition of his already published work, adding some hitherto unpublished poems which even in the unsympathetic atmosphere of Number 28 South Barracks had been undergoing a refining process in the seething crucible of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... consider accidents, my son, are the machinations of our invisible enemies. The treasures and golden secrets of nature are surrounded by spirits hostile to man. The air about us teems with them. They lurk in the fire of the furnace, in the bottom of the crucible, and the alembic, and are ever on the alert to take advantage of those moments when our minds are wandering from intense meditation on the great truth that we are seeking. We must only strive the more to purify ourselves from, those gross and earthly ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... sadness, Coleridge's—and perhaps all poets'—essential philosophy of poetry. It was natural that the metaphysics in which he had been immersed should color his thought; but literature affords few if any instances of metaphysics so transformed into poetry in the crucible of feeling as is afforded by stanza V. ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the sulphure and render it sweete. He did it by burning the coals in such earthen pots as the glasse-men mealt their mettal, so firing them without consuming them, using a barr of yron in each crucible or pot, which barr has a hook at one end, that so the coales being mealted in a furnace wth other crude sea-coales under them, may be drawn out of the potts sticking to the yron, whence they are beaten off ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... problems of the age in which we now live cannot be solved by masculine brain and brawn alone. The problems of the city and the nation and the great fundamental social questions that involve the foundations of modern life will find no solution until the heart and brain of woman are poured into the crucible of ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... the cloud of memories, born of the incidents which have marked our past acquaintance, form a telescopic vista. Through this vista, examined in the crucible of much correspondence, the intimate association and the mutual friendship of many months duration, I perceive that I have discovered and have learned to appreciate the sterling worth of your character. Through this avenue I become conscious ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... Columbus on the President's Proclamation.... But was not such an event worthy the awakening of every power—the congratulation of every faculty? What hath God wrought! We may well exclaim how event after event has paved the way for freedom. In the crucible of disaster and defeat God has stirred the nation, and permitted no permanent victory to crown her banners while she kept her hand upon the trembling slave and held him back from freedom. And even now the scale may still seem to oscillate between the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... course, maintain these continuously for "ages," therefore the chemist must manufacture the jewels in such manner that he may soon see the results of his labours, and though real diamonds may be made, and with comparative ease, from boron in the amorphous or pure state along with aluminium, fused in a crucible at a high temperature, these diamonds are but microscopic, nor can a number of them be fused, or in any other way converted into a large single stone, so that imitation stones, to be of any service must be made of a good clear glass. The glass ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... horses, where are they? What became of the cows in the field, the old gold and silver vessels in cupboards and chests, and even the house and home itself? It was easy to melt all these away in the gold-making crucible, and yet obtain no gold. And so it was. Empty are the barns and store-rooms, the cellars and cupboards; the servants decreased in number, and the mice multiplied. First one window became broken, and then another, so that ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... cast-steel of a first-rate quality even at this day is of a most elaborate and delicate character, requiring to be carefully watched in its various stages. He had not only to discover the fuel and flux suitable for his purpose, but to build such a furnace and make such a crucible as should sustain a heat more intense than any then known in metallurgy. Ingot-moulds had not yet been cast, nor were there hoops and wedges made that would hold them together, nor, in short, were any of those materials at his disposal which are ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... that is real and eternal, and for all that produces anything that is lasting, the doubts and petty annoyances of life become dissolved in the light of a better understanding, which has been refined in the crucible of charity and love; and they fade away into the nothingness from whence they came, never having had any existence in fact, being only the inventions of ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... anodyne of rest that cures all cares; Wherein soft wind and sun and sound are blent With fragrance—as in some old instrument Sweet chords;—calm things, that Nature's magic spell Distills from Heaven's azure crucible, And pours on Earth to make the sick mind well. There lies the path, they say— Come away! ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... I had recourse to the lining of a tea-chest, which lead contains no silver—John Chinaman takes good care of that. My mortar was a jam tin, without top or bottom, placed on an anvil; the pestle a short steel drill. The blacksmith at Mundi Mundi Station made me a small wrought iron crucible, also a pair of bent tongs from a piece of fencing-wire. The manager gave me a small common red flower pot for a muffle, and with the smith's forge (the fire built round with a few blocks of talcose schist) for a furnace, my plant was complete. I ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... him critical, and the constant flow of foreigners brought him new ideas to test by the light of his own experience, and so Paris became, as it were, a crucible in which theories of life were tested and rendered ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... for your opinion," I answered, "but I find it impossible to pass the ideas of another through the crucible of my mind and do them justice. Somehow or other, when I am expecting a stream of gold, it turns out a caput mortuum of lead. No, my better course is to coin my copper in my own way. But, tell me frankly, what ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... too often brought to the test of enquiries which only reach to matter—put into the crucible, though the magnetic and electric fluid escapes from ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... in his sharp, dogmatic way, "either breaks or makes. You go into the crucible a mere ore, a possibility. You come out slag or steel." He was standing now, looking down at her with quizzical eyes. "You're about due to leave the pot," ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... saw the city only as a vast crucible, into which he had flung his all, and out of which had come only defeat and failure. But the city was not a crucible. The melting pot of a nation is not a thing of cities, but of ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the study of alchemy. At one time, while he was intent upon his operations, a gentleman entered his laboratory, and kindly offered to assist him. In a few moments, a large mass of the purest gold was brought forth from the crucible. The gentleman then took his hat, and went out: before leaving the apartment, however, he wrote a recipe for making the precious article. The grateful and admiring mortal continued his operations, according to the directions of his visitor; but the charm was lost: ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... a Buffalo Bill buck-jumper, When you have a "regular stumper" (Such as "silver") do not care about Perfect rhyming; "there or thereabout" Is the Muse's maxim now. You may get (bards have, I trow) Rhyme's last minimum irreducible, From dye-vat, retort, or crucible. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... "Well then," says the thief, "if you will not buy them, will you melt them down for me?" "Melt them down!" answers the silver smith, "that is quite another matter." He takes the chalices and the crucifix with a pair of tongs; the silver, thus in bond, is dropped into the crucible, melted, and delivered to the thief, who lays down five pistoles and decamps with his booty. The young servant stares at this strange scene. But the master very gravely resumes his lecture. "My son," ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... vogue for science-fantasy altered to super science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas, The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock. Finally, when only psychological studies ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... now be admitted, and only the unexpected genius and success of Abdurrahman has made the contrary policy that was pursued appear the acme of sound sense and high statesmanship. When Lord Ripon reached Bombay at the end of May, the fate of Afghanistan was still in the crucible. Even Abdurrahman, who had received kind treatment in the persons of his imprisoned family at Candahar from the English, was not regarded as a factor of any great importance; while Ayoob, the least known of all the chiefs, was deemed harmless only a few weeks before ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... of sorrow or of gladness. It was nothing, then, that they had passed toilsome days and sleepless nights together, with death staring them in the face? It was to bring them to this abominable thing, to this senseless, atrocious fratricide, that their hearts had been fused in the crucible of those weeks of suffering endured in common? No, no, it could not be; he turned in horror from ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... nation. Such a vast work as this could scarcely be carried on without some commotion; the chemist must look for explosions when he produces a strange new compound from diverse elements; and it was, therefore, no wonder that the crucible in the valley of the Oro was often the scene of much boiling and seething. Then the tavern came, with its brain-destroying fire, and sometimes after harvest, when the Fighting MacDonalds and the belligerent Murphys met before it, the noise of the fray might be heard ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... where Canada's first line of defence runs from the North Sea through Belgium into France your boy, Mr. Business Man, and your boy, Mr. Farmer, stand shoulder to shoulder. Think you that in the crucible which bares the very souls of men those boys have any thought of class criticism or of selfish grabbings? In those trenches you will find more practical Christianity, more unselfishness, more true brotherhood than can be realized at this distance. The spirit of sacrifice, the help-one-another idea, ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... first made in 1770 by Huntsman, who for the first time melted the "blistered" steel, which until that time had been the tool steel of commerce, in a crucible. Since that time the process of melting wrought iron has become practical and cheap, and results in crystalline, instead of a laminated structure for all steels. The definition of steel now is that it is a compound ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... of right, so, in the worst religion, the extravagant dogma always in some fashion proclaims a supreme architect.—Religions and communities, accordingly, disintegrated under the investigating process, disclose at the bottom of the crucible, some residue of truth, others a residue of justice, a small but precious balance, a sort of gold ingot of preserved tradition, purified by Reason, and which little by little, freed from its alloys, elaborated and devoted to all usage, must solely provide the substance of religion and all ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So. Carpenter ( resuming his work). Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... And the next day Fra Paolo is commanded before the Signoria to meet the Provveditor of the Mint—being the only man who hath dared speak his mind before the Signoria had proved the worthlessness of Bragadin's promise. And our fine gold-maker exchangeth his palace for a prison; for the test of the crucible is all too easy for Fra Paolo, who speaketh naught that he ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... pathetic children, and the unambitious men. Everything was run down and apparently doomed, until one day the endless chain which encompasses the world, in its turning dropped the Golden Bead of Love into St. Ange! Down deep it sank to the bottom of the crucible. Jude Lauzoon was blinded by it and stung to life; Joyce Birkdale through its power came into the heritage of her soul. Jock Filmer by its magic force was shorn of his poor shield and left naked and unprotected for Fate's crudest darts. John Gaston, working out his salvation in his shack hidden ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... annihilated is only the converse of the proposition that matter cannot be created, which ought always to be modified by adding, by physical or chemical processes at present known. A chemist may work with a few grains of a substance in a beaker, or test-tube, or crucible, and after several solutions, precipitations, fusions and dryings, may find by final weighing that he has not lost any appreciable amount, but how much is an appreciable amount? A fragment of matter the ten-thousandth of an inch in ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... graphite and not diamonds being the product obtained. The French chemist Moissan, in his extended study of chemistry at high temperatures, finally succeeded (1893) in making some small ones. He accomplished this by dissolving carbon in boiling iron and plunging the crucible containing the mixture into water, as shown in Fig. 58. Under these conditions the carbon crystallized in the iron in the form of the diamond. The diamonds were then obtained by dissolving away the ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... the company embark their reputation in every silver vessel that leaves the factory, and are always responsible for its purity, each dollar is wrenched asunder and its goodness positively ascertained before it is thrown into the crucible. The subsequent operations, by which these spoiled dollars are converted into objects of brilliant and enduring beauty, can better be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... injurious to the health of the people of the Sydney Cove. It was supposed to contain arsenic, which was highly probable from an experiment that was made with the metallic particles, which were taken to be tin. A large fume of what bore many marks of arsenic arose from the crucible during the time of smelting it. Water was very scarce while these people were upon the island; but, owing to some unusual falls of rain, several little runs and swamps were found by Mr. Bass; and a low piece of ground ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... Martin Dyke—and lingering there. She was solicitous, not to say skeptical, regarding Mr. Dyke's reason. Came also Martin Dyke to converse intelligently upon labor, free verse, ouija, the football outlook, O. Henry, Crucible Steel, and Mr. Leffingwell. He was both solicitous and skeptical regarding Mr. Leffingwell's existence. Now when two young persons come separately to an old person to discuss each other's affairs, it is a bad sign. Or perhaps a good sign. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... dark, English crucible of seven hundred years of famine, fire and sword, the children of Ireland have been tested to an intensity unknown to the annals of any other people. From the days of the second Henry down to those of the last of the Georges, every device that human ingenuity could encompass or ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... mixing the ore with charcoal in a clay crucible, which is embedded in a pile of charcoal. The charcoal being ignited is blown to a white heat by the aid of four piston-bellows. Each of the bellows consists of a wooden cylinder (generally made from the stem of a wild sago palm) about four feet in length ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... drink, and probably knew nothing of the latter's own feelings towards undue indulgence. "Habitual intoxication," wrote Jerrold himself, "is the epitome of every crime;" and elsewhere, "The bottle is the devil's crucible." Yet it must be admitted that he was not averse to what in his day was called "true conviviality," which, as I have heard it remarked, never yet made a man a drunkard, though it may sometimes have made him drunk. "If Bacchus often leads men into quagmires ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... For every Nebraska man who had suffered defeat, two anti-Nebraska candidates were defeated by the same causes. "The fact is, and the gentleman knows it, that in the free States there has been an alliance, I will not say whether holy or unholy, at the recent elections. In that alliance they had a crucible into which they poured Abolitionism, Maine liquor-lawism, and what there was left of Northern Whigism, and then the Protestant feeling against the Catholic, and the native feeling against the foreigner. All ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... and principles had to run through his crucible and be tested by the fires of his analytic mind; and hence, when he did speak, his utterances rang out gold-like, quick, keen and current upon the counters of the understanding. He reasoned logically, through analogy and comparison. All opponents ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... as fast as his tired feet could carry him. There he blew the bellows so violently that the housekeeper looked at him with silent indignation. When all was prepared he poured the liquid into a crucible, set it among the glowing and sparkling coals and murmured strange words and spells over the seething fluid until it boiled up and the hissing bubbles ran over the rim of the crucible. Then he stood the hot vessel in cold water, pronounced one more incantation over it, held ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to be attained, because it is a thing belonging to Heaven. All this apropos of that good, weak, feverish, fine spirit, —— ——. We have traits in common; we have almost the same strength and weakness intermingled; and if I had not come through a very hot crucible, I should be just as feverish. My sufferings have been healthier than his; mine have been always a choice, where a man could be manly; his have been so too, if he knew it, but were not so upon the face; hence a morbid strain, which his wounded vanity has helped ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one standard by which an individual can succeed: there is but one for a race. This country expects that every race shall measure itself by the American standard. During the next half-century, and more, the Negro must continue passing through the severe American crucible. He is to be tested in his patience, his forbearance, his perseverance, his power to endure wrong,—to withstand temptations, to economise, to acquire and use skill,—his ability to compete, to succeed in commerce, to disregard the superficial ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington |
