"Elixir" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 even ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... was short, white, and bristling. He seemed to have some Jewish blood in him, but he seemed more than all to be perfectly well, perfectly normal, filled to the brim with abounding life. It was like a draught from the Elixir of Life to be in his ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... 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 ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... were the elixir of life, and a day's cooking was no exception to the rule. It began at 7 A.M., and, with a brief intermission between lunch and afternoon tea, continued strenuously till 8.30 P.M. Cooks were broadly classified as "Crook Cooks" and "Unconventional Cooks" by the eating public. Such flattering ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... Tegner here declares that the poet "with heavenly joy embraces life," that "he knows no weak lament" (at its misery), "no dissonance which is not dissolved" (in harmony). His temple stands in light and flame; and at its base a fountain gurgles, a draught from which is an elixir of strength and ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... 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 Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... years, concealed from every one, except Lady Sundon, an incurable disorder, that of hernia. In November (1737) she was attacked with what we should now call English cholera. Dr. Tessier, her house-physician, was called in, and gave her Daffey's elixir, which was not likely to afford any relief to the deep-seated cause of her sufferings. She held a drawing-room that night for the last time, and played at cards, even cheerfully. At length she whispered to Lord Hervey, 'I am not able to entertain people.' 'For heaven's sake, madam,' was ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... commencement of his acquaintance with the famous Arise Evans, a Welsh prophet: whose "Echo from Heaven," &c., 2 parts, 1652, 12mo., is a work noticed by Warburton, and coveted by bibliomaniacs. Yet one more quack-medicine entry: "March 11, 1681. I took early in the morning a good dose of Elixir, and hung three spiders about my neck, and they drove my ague away—Deo gratias!" p. 359. It seems that Ashmole always punctually kept "The Astrologer's Feast;" and that he had such celebrity as ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... ye well, I am not one to follow phantom themes, To waste my time in seeking for the stone, Or chrystalizing carbon to o'erflood The world with riches which would keep it poor; Nor do I seek the elixir that would make Not life alone, but misery immortal; But something far ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the Press who had discussed my personal failings for the benefit of their readers, as several years older than I really am (all due, no doubt, to my premature baldness). So I asked for the secret of the American hair-preserving elixir, and my charming companion assured me that she had really and truly discovered an infallible composition for producing hair! This she promised to send to me, and upon my return to England I received ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... each other; again Miss Severance had the sensation of drowning, of being submerged in some strange elixir. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... 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 ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... treat ourselves as well as we had treated our animals, for we had only a bite of hardtack crumbs, which we washed down with some of the "elixir of life" from our canteens. But we stretched ourselves underneath the friendly trees and, just letting loose of everything, slept until ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... brought to her room every morning by Bronson, contained the elixir which sent her to her day's work with shining eyes and flushed cheeks. Sometimes she read bits of them to Bronson. Sometimes, indeed, there were only a few lines for herself, for Derry was being intensively trained in a Southern camp, working like an ant, with ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... it so but those who possess, or fancy they possess, it. To hear them speak, you would believe that their hearts would be cold if that elixir did not flow about them, that their eyes would be dim if that flame did not refine their vision, that they would be lonely if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some tranquil ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... 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 age. He had admired her ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... this excruciatingly funny narrative can be found the elixir of youth for all man and womankind. The magic of its pages compel the old to become young, the care-worn gay, and carking trouble hides its gloomy head and flies away on the blithesome ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... soul, had he not responded to the influences under which our gay party spent the next few hours. Innumerable snow-flakes had carried down from the air every particle of impurity, and left it sweet and wholesome enough to seem the elixir of immortal youth. It was so tempered also, that it only braced and stimulated. The raw, pinching coldness of the previous day was gone. The sun, undimmed by a cloud, shone genially, and eaves facing the south were dripping, the drops ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... giving movement to the body, were imprisoned undiminished within it, and beating and fluttering impotently to get out, at all the doors and windows. So the medical people gave me opium—a preparation of it, called morphine, and ether—and ever since I have been calling it my amreeta draught, my elixir,—because the tranquillizing power has been wonderful. Such a nervous system I have—so irritable naturally, and so shattered by various causes, that the need has continued in a degree until now, and it would be dangerous to leave off the calming remedy, Mr. Jago says, except very ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... their boats, nor were they longer satisfied to hang back one or more hundred yards as formerly—that elixir had quite captured their hearts, and they scrambled to keep in close proximity to the magical "floating coffin," as they denominated the cedar canoe, as if they could scent future feasts along the line of that ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... brown hair, and for a little his eyes went after her quite as they would have followed the flight of a brilliant bird. Then, as in sheer youth, as one who during a night of refreshing sleep has been steeped body and soul in the elixir that is youth's own, she yielded her young body up to an extravagant dance, whirling away as light as thistledown across the meadow. Hands clapped after her; voices, men's voices, filled her ears with a clamour of praise as extravagant as her own dancing; the guests went ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... of crowd which now gathered to gaze up at her—peasants, horse-fanciers, shop people, clerks on a holiday, with here and there a person of less humble station, but she bent to her work with a will, encouraged by the example of the Circassian lady next to her who was selling in brown bottles an elixir which was a cure for all things except love and the goiter. The sword-swallower next them was already busy, and the Homme Sauvage, a hirsute person, whose unprofessional mien was both kind and peaceable (as Yvonne had discovered unofficially last night), was roaring ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... 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 ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... depths of a gloomy cave." [57] It is the celestial soma or mead which Indra loves to drink; it is the ambrosial nectar of the Olympian gods; it is the charmed water which in the Arabian Nights restores to human shape the victims of wicked sorcerers; and it is the elixir of life which mediaeval philosophers tried to discover, and in quest of which Ponce de Leon traversed the ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... matter with Billy? He felt as strong and young as Nanny herself, and had forgotten his thirst and weariness of a few moments ago. Being only a goat, he did not know that happiness is the greatest elixir of ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... prescription, written and signed in a hand that looks very French, has the heading in Mrs. Stevenson's hand, "Elixir ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... upon labor too stupendous for irreverent contemplation. And from him and his music she gained the medicine her bruised heart and broken nerves most needed. For Ivan, in the growth of his great love for her, unconsciously brewed an elixir of power from which each drank, daily. So, by unavoidable degrees, both were led unconsciously into a land from which few can emerge still solitary. Yet that was what the gods eventually decreed for ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... possibility to discover 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, and chiefly the quaffer of the ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... 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 ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... 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 ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... men little by little, he knows what he is about. One might write a play: an old chemist invents the elixir of life—take fifteen drops and you live for ever; but he breaks the phial from terror, lest such carrion as himself and his wife might live for ever. Tolstoy denies mankind immortality, but my God! how much that is personal there is in it! The day before ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... He soon manifested his familiarity with 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 ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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
... 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 peat-bogs (horse and man, furiously pursuing, in some fight there, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... from the Spirit of the World; and his body is from the earth, extracted from the elements of which all things material are made. This view of man was shared by many other alchemists. The Philosopher's Stone, therefore (or, rather, a solution of it in alcohol) was also regarded as the Elixir of Life; which, thought the alchemists, would not endow man with physical immortality, as is sometimes supposed, but restore him again to the flower of youth, "regenerating" him physiologically. Failing this, of course, they regarded gold in a potable form as the next most powerful medicine—a ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... the neighborhood were interested to hear of it, and doubtless some mother was stimulated to do as much for her children. As for Mrs. Tracy, her sorrow was still keen, but her interest in her living child's growth was becoming the means of softening its sharpest edge. She had discovered an elixir which should renew her ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... the blind laws to which I am the eyes, that blind law which lies nearest the root of life!—Ah, what a dreamer I should have been, had I lived in the time when great dreams were possible! Beyond a doubt I should have sat brooding over the elixir of life, cooking and mixing, heating and cooling, watching for the flash in the goblet. We know so much now, that the range of hope is sadly limited! A thousand dark ways of what seemed blissful possibility are now closed to us, because ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... "Listen! it's in verse!" the audience began to feel the charm of that elevating, healthy work, as if someone had shaken over it, in that rarefied atmosphere, some cool essence, pleasant to inhale, an elixir of life perfumed with the wild ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... its draught of Love's elixir, and she drank it lingeringly, unwilling to lose a drop. And in some curious way the potion wrought a change in her. She adopted a new personality. It was not that of Phil—the Phil she had undertaken to represent, for she would have had recollections of old days to linger over ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... think you had found life's elixir, or the philosopher's stone, whose fabled virtues were buried with the alchemists of old. But who is the fairy, Ralph, and when shall we behold ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... "are you quite sure that this elixir or essence of yours may be depended upon to ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... herself with any grace at all to the 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
... themselves tend to degenerate." Little by little the endowment of vitality bestowed upon our world at the beginning has, like radiant energy, been returned to God who gave it; but, unlike the case of radiant energy, the Creator has not established any regular source of vital supply from without, no elixir of life for organic nature in general. There is no longer within easy reach a tree of life from which we may pluck and eat and live forever. And as the individual grows old and dies, so do species and even whole tribes ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... and other debris, showing that the force had bivouacked there the night before. And here, too, deep down in a rocky dell, he found a well of clear, bright, sweet, cool water! He flung himself down, plunged his face in the delicious liquid, and sucked in large draughts of the life-inspiring elixir. When he could drink no more he filled his water-bottle, and then, removing his pith helmet, he unbound the bandage which he had tied over his head. It had of course stuck, and the attempt to remove it was painful, but by wetting it freely he got it off, ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... all of which the 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 ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... The "Elixir of Life" Is the Desire to "Live" Selfish? Contemplation Chelas and Lay Chelas Ancient Opinions upon Psychic Bodies The Nilgiri Sannyasis Witchcraft on the Nilgiris Shamanism and Witchcraft Amongst the Kolarian Tribes Mahatmas and Chelas ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... simplicity that Cal Galbraith journeyed through the land and fell sick on the Lower River. It was a refreshing advent in the lives of the good Sisters of the Holy Cross, who gave him shelter and medicine; though they little dreamed of the hot elixir infused into his veins by the touch of their soft hands and their gentle ministrations. Cal Galbraith, became troubled with strange thoughts which clamored for attention till he laid eyes on the Mission girl, Madeline. Yet he gave no sign, biding ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... him again. Her sweetness and light seemed to illumine the unbeautiful room. Of a truth he knew, now, what it meant to love and be in love with every faculty of soul and body; knew it for a miracle of renewal, the elixir of life. And—the light of that knowledge revealed how secondary a part of it was the craving with which he had craved possession of Rose. Steeped in poetry as he was, there stole into his mind a fragment of Tagore—'She who had ever remained in the depths ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... 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 ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... tiny song Sings the pen unto it, while Thought's elixir flows along, Diviner than the ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... the same question applies with the same cogency to Coleridge. Coleridge began in rheumatic pains. What then? This is no proof that he did not end in voluptuousness. For our part, we are slow to believe that ever any man did or could learn the somewhat awful truth, that in a certain ruby-colored elixir there lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing this power. True it is that generations have used laudanum as an anodyne (for instance, hospital patients) who have not afterward courted its powers as a voluptuous stimulant; but that, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... or, Merry Remarks upon Exchange-Alley Bubbles. To a new Tune called "The Grand Elixir; ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... "A discovery concerning which," says a learned physician, "it would be difficult to determine, whether it has tended most to diminish the happiness, or shorten the duration of life. In one sense it may be considered the elixir of life, for it speedily ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 404, December 12, 1829 • Various
... in this highly ozoned lake atmosphere, which magically soothes every nerve and refreshes every sense like an elixir, and we are off again on the broad bosom of the Mackinaw strait, threading a verdant labyrinth of emerald islets and following the course of Father Jacques Marquette, who two hundred years before ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... seemed to be an unfenced store yard of some description. He drew his breath in sharply. She had halted—waiting for him to come up with her. She was waiting for him—WAITING for him! It seemed as though he drank of some strange, exhilarating elixir—he reached her side eagerly—and then—and then—her hand had caught his, and she was leading him into the house, into a black passage where he could see nothing, into a room equally black over whose threshold he stumbled, and her voice in a low, conscious way, with a little tremour, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the 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 ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... the house and all its inmates. Having concluded by a sonorous amen, he at last suffered himself to be led upstairs; while my mother, who had slipped in and listened with much edification to his words, hurried away to prepare him a bumper of green usquebaugh with ten drops of Daffy's Elixir therein, which was her sovereign recipe against the effects of a soaking. There was no event in life, from a christening to a marriage, but had some appropriate food or drink in my mother's vocabulary, and ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... attractive to him. Men, you know, set great value on certain things, and I have the misfortune to be of a very cold temperament. I, therefore, determined to adopt a heating diet, in order to remedy this defect, and for two days this elixir has been of great service to me, or, at least, I have thought I felt its good effects." The Duchesse de Brancas took the phial which was upon the toilet, and after having smelt at it, "Fie!" said she, and threw it into the fire. Madame de Pompadour scolded her, and said, "I don't like to be treated ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... scenes that are brought before our mind, both in this poem as well as in "Memnon" (vol. vii. p. 5 seq.), are of course portrayed with poetic feeling as well as scholarly accuracy. The haji who owns the wonderful elixir,—which, by the way, is said to come from India (p. 33),—and who interprets each vision that the poet lives through from the standpoint of the pessimistic sceptic, shows the influence of 'Umar Xayyam. In fact he indulges sometimes ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... such as the story of "Peter Rugg," "Tom Walker and the Devil," "The Golden Tooth," "Captain Kidd," "The Witch Flymaker," and an admirable collection of unearthly German tales, such as "The Devil's Elixir," by Hoffmann (abridged), "Jacob the Bowl," "Rubezahl," "Der Freyschutz," and many more, but all of the unearthly blood-curdling kind. Singly, they were appalling enough to any one in those days when the supernatural still thrilled the strongest minds, but taken altogether for steady reading, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... discovery, years ago, that I am hired not by the job, but by the day. If you, dear friend, will receive this truth into a good and honest heart, and believing, abide in and live by it, you will find it the very elixir of life ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... 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 ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... Lobatsi, simplicity is the chief characteristic of the scenery. As I went by Victoria West (I had spent the night talking politics with the civillest Dutchmen) I came in early morning to the first Karroo I had seen. The air was tonic, like an exhilarating wine with some wonderful elixir in it other than alcohol, and though the country reminded me in places of vast plains in New South Wales, it lacked, or seemed to lack, the perpetual brooding melancholy that invests the great Austral island. As I stood on the platform ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... uncertain, not of life, but of himself. In fact, he was asking, Who am I? And the question had reference to the novel sensations of which he was conscious. What was it coursing through his veins? Wine?—Elixir?—Some new principle which, hidden away amongst the stores of nature, had suddenly evolved for him? The weights of age were gone. In his body—bones, arms, limbs, muscles—he recognized once more the glorious impulses of youth; but his mind—he ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... was left behind them,—two miles,—and now Humphrey looked at Hugo amazed. Among these men-at-arms who treated him with a respect which was like an elixir to him, the boy sat transformed. He held himself proudly, and seemed, as he sat, a part of his horse. His handsome eyes shone, and a genial smile ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... all the rapture of one single glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten to the fruition, when there is changed to here, all is afterwards as it was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate, and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir." It is to this wandering and uneasy spirit of anticipation that roads minister. Every little vista, every little glimpse that we have of what lies before us, gives the impatient imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the body and already plunge into the shadow of the woods, and overlook ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... a moot point whether works on Early Chemistry or Alchemy should be included here or under the heading 'Occult,' seeing that they usually centre about the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher's Stone. Perhaps they would be classed more accurately with Early Scientific. But for the purposes of our list I have reserved that heading for those books which treat of mathematics and physics only. With the early ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... Bradley's intelligent and simple treatment, although astounded that the patient had been under no more radical or systematic cure than travel and exercise. The women especially were amazed that Mainwaring had taken "nothing for it," in their habitual experience of an unfettered pill-and-elixir-consuming democracy. In their knowledge of the thousand "panaceas" that filled the shelves of the general store, this singular abstention of their guest seemed to ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... pbaprvirq bs puvyq, jubf anzr zhfg or Mnpunevnf; or bs thq purer, ur funy qb jry nf guvf qbgu!"[n] Dec. 22nd, I payd Jane 13s. and 4d. for her wagys tyll Michelmas last, for the half yere, so that I owe her yet 6s. 8d. Dec. 28th, I reveled to Roger Coke[o] the gret secret of the elixir of the salt of nprgryf bar hccba ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... the detached portions moved up the valley, others rose slowly above the wooded ridges or trailed their tattered fringes near the tree tops that seemed to have torn their edges. Every bush and leaf was saturated with their life-giving elixir. How the wild sweet carols of the birds ascended from every forest! It seemed as if all Nature was sending up a paean of praise for the beneficent rain, and our thoughts took on that same serenity and calm, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... too short for the work we have to do; and with the constantly accelerating progress of discovery, and the never-ceasing expansion of knowledge, we shall certainly find more and more reason to regret, as time goes on, the brevity of existence. That Science will ever discover the Elixir of the Alchemists' hope is extremely unlikely. The Cosmic Powers will not allow us to cheat them. For every advantage which they yield us the full price must be paid: nothing for nothing is the everlasting law. Perhaps the price of long life will prove to be the price that the ants ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... before. But the odour was, he thought, unmistakable, and so powerful that already he felt as if the liquor were racing through his own veins. He touched it to his lips; it was like a full draught of some marvelous elixir. Sudden confidence sat upon St. George, and thanking his guiding stars for the fortunate chance, he unhesitatingly set the flask to the ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... of poetical Georgics, a trick of sowing wit like clover-grass on barren subjects which would yield nothing before. This is very useful for the times, wherein, some men say, there is no room left for new invention. He will take three grains of wit like the elixir, and projecting it upon the iron age, turn it immediately into gold. All the business of mankind has presently vanished; the whole world has kept holiday; there have been no men but heroes and poets, no women ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... consequence; lengthy law-pleadings, and much parchment and wiggery, in that German Triple-Elixir of Chancery;—little to the joy of Friedrich Wilhelm. Friedrich Wilhelm, from the first, was fairness itself: "Pay me back the money; and let it be, in all points, as you say!" answered Friedrich Wilhelm, from ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... other approached for centuries. In those centuries men were either too priest-ridden to lend an ear to Science, or, like children, followed only the Will-o'-the-Wisp floating above the quagmire which held them fast. They ran after the stone that was to turn all to gold, or the elixir that should conquer death, or the signs in the heavens that should foretell their destinies; and the taint of this may be traced even when the dark period that followed was clearing away. Four hundred years after Roger's death, his illustrious namesake, Francis Bacon, was ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... Drylyn's relations with the Gazelle were colored with sentiment. The sentiment on his part was genuine; so genuine that the shrewd noticing camp joked Drylyn, telling him he had grown to look young again under the elixir of romance. One of the prospectors had remarked fancifully that Drylyn's "rusted mustache had livened up; same ez flow'rs ye've kerried a long ways when yer girl puts 'em in a pitcher o' water." Being the sentiment of a placer miner, the lover's feeling took no offence or wound ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... was the perfect stimulus, an elixir too volatile to be drunk, rather to be breathed. Bedient felt the door of his inner chambers swing open before fragrant winds. The heart of him became greatly alive, and his brain in grand tune. It ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... there soothing-syrup I've artfully smuggled into its bottle. It's strongish stuff, and I've dropped enough in the Babby's gruel to prove a fixer; For this kid's riot you cannot quiet with LAWSON'S Cordial or CAINE'S Elixir. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... snarling at the servants, and occasionally biting their heels, with impunity. By the side of this old lady jingled a bunch of keys, securing in different closets and corner-cupboards all sorts of cordial waters, cherry and raspberry brandy, washes for the complexion, Daffy's elixir, a rich seed-cake, a number of pots of currant jelly and raspberry jam, with a range of gallipots and phials and purges for the use of poorer neighbors. The daily business of this good lady was to scold the maids, collect eggs, feed the turkeys and assist at all lyings-in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... her flesh! I will cook one of her breasts, and swallow it without sauce!" It was a tremendous hate of good constitution—a cardinal hate—a hate of a wasp or an old maid. It was all known hates moulded into one single hate, which boiled itself, concocted itself, and resolved self into an elixir of wicked and diabolical sentiments, warmed at the fire of the most flaming furnaces of hell—it was, in fact, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... compose. Plunge boldly into life—its depths disclose! Each lives it, not to many is it known, 'Twill interest wheresoever seiz'd and shown; Bright pictures, but obscure their meaning: A ray of truth through error gleaming, Thus you the best elixir brew, To charm mankind, and edify them too. Then youth's fair blossoms crowd to view your play, And wait as on an oracle; while they, The tender souls, who love the melting mood, Suck from your work their melancholy food; Now this one, and now that, you deeply ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... night to their mothers as they hurriedly return from the scene of their labour to the dungeon or the den, which is still by courtesy called "home." The expense is not great: laudanum and treacle, administered in the shape of some popular elixir, affords these innocents a brief taste of the sweets of existence, and keeping them quiet, prepares them for the silence of their impending grave. Infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in England, as it is on the banks of ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... to that blessed Utopia where there are neither births, deaths, marriages, divorces, breaches of promise, nor return tickets; only, unfortunately, I was not invited. So I became a posthumous orphan, soothed by Daffy's elixir and the skim-milk of human kindness. The milk was none too sweet, human kindness did not spare the rod, and I firmly believe it was Daffy's elixir that turned my hair red. However, I grew up at length into stand-up collars and tail coats, and at the age of ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... woke with a furry death hug at my 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 of me. I tried to ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... 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
... Protestants, and call upon all men to help them in their efforts to promote learning and religion. They possess great secrets and the world ought to know them. They are perfectly at home in bottling the elixir of life, and have been in possession of the philosopher's stone a long time. Their great object is to benefit their fellow ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... 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 knowledge ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... morning, smelt like morning, there was the distinct, clean, pure, inspiring feel of morning. The skies were an even turquoise with little filmy, fleecy shreds of clouds drifting across; the air was elixir; and the blue waters, capped here and there with white, ran joyously to meet the green sloping shores, where the haze still lingered. Ahead, an island glowed ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... concerns of life and the flesh. Her father, like all the ruling class, regarded Taoism—which had, indeed, degenerated into a mass of nonsense about the transmutation of base metals into gold and the elixir of life—with contempt. But this seemed to her no depreciation of the Greatly Eminent One or his philosophy of the ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... emancipated from over two hundred years of unrequited toil—a race that had always regarded freedom from the necessity for work as an indication of superiority—was not a hopeful task. To them education was the antithesis of work. It was the magic elixir which emancipated all those fortunate enough to drink of it ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... glimpse from month's end to mouth's end, nor any fresh, exhilarating breath from it, but a lazy, languid atmosphere, brooding over the waste of sands; or even if there be a sulky and bitter wind blowing along the promenade, it still brings no salt elixir. I never was more weary of a place in all my life, and never felt such a disinterested pity as for the people who come here for pleasure. Nevertheless, the town has its amusements; in the first place, the daylong and perennial one of donkey-riding ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hands into your pockets and rifle 'em of your honestly earned money; no, I come before you for the good of each one of you, for the easing of suffering mankind—as I might say—the ha-melioration of stricken humanity. In a word, I am here to introduce to you what I call my Elixir Anthropos—Anthropos, ladies and gentlemen, is an old and very ancient Egyptian word meaning man—or woman, for ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... things. The same wind, coming to me across two miles of salt marsh, had in its cool, salty aroma a life-giving principle that set the pulse to bounding and renewed vigor. It had gathered up from the marsh this tonic of the tides, this elixir vitae which all the doctors of the world have sought in vain. Some day some one of them, wiser than the rest, will distil its potency from the cool salt of sea tides, and humanity, poor hitherto, will find itself rich in possibilities of physical immortality. Sea captains have ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... proved by this, that foolish generals, bringing hungry soldiers to blows with full ones, have been defeated, in all ages, by inferior numbers. The Romans lost a great battle in the north of Italy to Hannibal, the Carthaginian, by this neglect alone. Now, this divine elixir gives in one moment force to the limbs and ardour to the spirits; and taken into Hector's body at the nick of time, would, by the aid of Phoebus, Venus, and the blessed saints, have most likely procured the Greeks a defeat. For note how faint and ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the most so. There is no scent in it 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 come. The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... past in all patients with the general lowering of nervous force and vitality so common in this disease I have habitually used the testicular elixir of Brown-Sequard. The ridiculous length to which organic therapeutics have been carried, the extravagant advertising claims, and an absurd expectation of impossible results have combined to make the profession ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... that which warms the pinched stomach. With it may be bought an elixir, so strong and magical, it may breed defiance even of Nanette. Sir Fool, I have concluded to accept life ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Narcissus they came like a love arisen from the dead. Long before, he had 'supped full' of all the necromantic excitements that poet or romancer could give. Guy Mannering had introduced him to Lilly; Lytton and Hawthorne had sent him searching in many a musty folio for Elixir Vitas and the Stone. Like Scythrop, in 'Nightmare Abbey,' he had for a long period slept with horrid mysteries beneath his pillow. But suddenly his interest had faded: these phantoms fled before a rationalistic cock-crow, and Eugenius ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... Arabian physicians that it took root. Those learned men, through whom was transmitted so much that was useful in astronomy, in mathematics, and in medicine, were deeply tinctured with the belief in an universal elixir, whose properties gave the power of multiplying gold, of prolonging life indefinitely, and of making youth perpetual. The discoveries which they made of the successful application of mercury in many diseases, led them to suppose that this agent contained within itself the germ of all curative influences, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... shadowy, highly vaulted cloisters, and its old-world garden, might soothe the restlessness which had devoured his being since his absence from Wilhelmine. In Maulbronn's garden stands the haunted tower where legend says that Doctor Faustus, the frenzied searcher for the elixir of eternal life, bartered his soul to Satan in return for a span of youth and love. The Faust tower faces the great cloister, and they say the Doctor, when sealing his pact with the devil, was ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... 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 ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... My hat was gone, my hair was flying in the wind, and all the first fright was lost in the feeling of exhilaration over the fact that I was the one who was controlling that great iron monster as she tore along the track. I—I was doing it all by myself. It was like the elixir of life to an invalid. My fireman came ever to me at one time and said in my ear that I'd better call for brakes or the first thing we knew we would land in the river. Brakes! Not on your life. I didn't want any brakes, because if she ever stopped I wasn't ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... ask 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 ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... said the hairdresser, "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 ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... second morning. Addison fitted up a little "water room" in the farmhouse L, and we kept water there in large bottles, cooled, for drinking. The water seemed to do us good, for we were all unusually healthy that summer. "Here's the true elixir of health," the old Squire often said as he drew a glass of it and sat down in the pleasant, cool "water room" ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... has something that ought to be held sacred, for there is in all religions a secret yearning after the unknown God. This thought of God "is an elixir made to destroy death in the world, an unfailing treasure to relieve the poverty of mankind, a balm to allay his sickness, a tree under which may rest all creatures wearied with wanderings over life's pathways. It is a bridge for passing over hard ways, open ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... assembled for a drinking-bout. He is 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... an elixir fine Exhilarates like sparkling wine; Where mere existence brings a joy Life's ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... as poesy; and many a reader may prefer these first flights before Daudet set his Pegasus to toil in the mill of realism. The "Pope's Mule," for instance, is not this a marvel of blended humor and fantasy? And the "Elixir of Father Gaucher," what could be more naively ironic? Like a true Southerner, Daudet delights in girding at the Church; and these tales bristle with jibes at ecclesiastical dignitaries; but his stroke is never malignant ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... inherit! Oh, the alchemy which doth change Dross of body and dregs of spirit Into sanctities rare and strange! My flesh is feeble, and dry, and old, My darling's beautiful hair is gray; But our elixir and precious gold Laugh at the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... are coming, the weak and the weary, From near and from far, the strong and the brave, All ready to drink of the life giving breezes, The only Elixir that truly ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... the interesting things that happened last week," sighed Frances, gathering her French grammar and other school books. "Rain or no rain, there will be school, and English rain seems somehow wetter than American. You'd better eat that jelly, Win. According to Nurse, it is the elixir of life and warranted to cure every ill ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... to another. It is the transfusion of brain! Some other man's head got on to my shoulders, and my brain is all wrong. Now with your red blood charged in my veins, and your young active brain absorbed into my own uncertain head, I shall find the elixir of life, and you will not have ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... city to strangers they managed to get admittance by announcing themselves as "European wizards and Waganga of peculiar power over the moon, the stars, the wind and the rain." They found the sultan of the place, an old man named Kimwere, sick, emaciated and leprous. He required, he said, an elixir which would restore him to health, strength, and youth. This, however, despite his very respectable knowledge of medicine, Burton was not able to compound, so after staying two days he took his leave. "It ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... rose men bold enough to break away from theological methods and strong enough to resist ecclesiastical bribes and threats. As alchemy in its first form, seeking for the philosopher's stone and the transmutation of metals, had given way to alchemy in its second form, seeking for the elixir of life and remedies more or less magical for disease, so now the latter yielded to the search for truth as truth. More and more the "solemnly constituted impostors" were resisted in every field. A great line of physicists and chemists began ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... when we left Burnet, and so tired when we got to Chicago; but after that he improved with every mile, and when we reached Denver this morning he seemed fresher than when we started. I do think Colorado air the true elixir of life." ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... or Elixir of Vitriol, is the most agreeable form of Sulphuric Acid for administration, and may be given in doses of from five to fifteen drops, largely diluted ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... several changes in Colours by Digestion, exemplify'd by an Amalgam of Gold and Mercury and by Spirit of Harts-horn. And (to such as believe it) by the changes of the Elixir. ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... an Indian tongue unknown to the proprietor. The 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
... in the stomach like the large navel are always insisted upon. Says the Katha (ii. 525) "And he looked on that torrent river of the elixir of beauty, adorned with a waist made charming by those wave-like ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton |
