"Transmute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who, if she were discovered, would transmute us all into stone," said the novelist, bowing gravely. "If she existed at all," he added deliberately, "it was my business to find her, and she has cost me many a vain pilgrimage. Like Rudel of Tripoli, I have crossed seas and penetrated deserts to seek ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... portion of his life. Thus he never grew rich. His thrifty townsmen used to tell him, that, in any other man's hands, Dr. Swinnerton's Brazen Serpent (meaning, I presume, the inherited credit and good-will of that old worthy's trade) would need but ten years' time to transmute its brass into gold. In Dr. Dolliver's keeping, as we have seen, the inauspicious symbol lost the greater part of what superficial gilding it originally had. Matters had not mended with him in more advanced life, after he had deposited a further ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of political emancipation becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political State by criticizing the political State in its secular construction, apart from the religious weaknesses. We transmute the contradiction of the State with a specific religion, like Judaism, into the contradiction of the State with specific secular elements, and the contradiction of the State with religion generally into the contradiction of the State with its ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... equally impossible to get it any where else; and as for the only two natural productions of the country, vegetables and eggs, I need no extraordinary penetration, to be certain, that your cook cannot transmute the latter into an omelette aux huitres, on the former into legumes a ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... friendship and only eternal things are given away. So, what matters it whether we travel east or west as long as our souls retain the freshness and fragrance of the early morning's hours? We can be our own alchemists, and through the gray vapors of our poor lives transmute them into golden flowers of character that shall gleam and sparkle as the evening of our closing days draw near, like coruscating stars in the violet ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... struggles of fierce power; love, hate, grief, frenzy; in a word, all the worn-out heart of the old earth had been revealed to him under a new form. His portfolio was filled with graphic illustrations of the volume of his memory, which genius would transmute into its own substance, and imbue with immortality. He felt that the deep wisdom in his art, which he had sought so far, ...
— The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the dreams and ambitions had died, too, never to come again. And as it is in the nature of things that no one is less lenient towards romantic longings than he who has suffered disappointment in them, who has failed to transmute them into reality, so, in this case, the son's first tentative leanings to a wider life, met with a more deeply-rooted, though less decisive, opposition, on the part of the father than of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... be willing to share his burden? Would you take upon your shoulders his sin? He may have committed the one unpardonable sin, for he discovered the true philosopher's stone, that can transmute metals, make mountains nod, the stars to stop, and command the throne of Jehovah—oh, what blasphemy has been his in his daring music! If he could persuade one other soul besides mine to help him, he might be released from his woe. Will you ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... coolness is akin to you. I think if I could subsist on you or the like of you, I should never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never be feverish or despondent. So far as I could absorb or transmute your quality I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmth and ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... own parts, and by a continual bibbing of strong and high tasted liquors,"[16]—and last, but not least assuredly, of one who was by turns a fanatical preacher and an obscure practitioner of physic, and who passed his old age at Clitheroe in Lancashire in attempting to transmute metals and discover the philosopher's stone.[17] So strange a band of Apostles of reason may occasion a smile; it deserves, at all events, a little more particular consideration before we address ourselves to the short narration which may be ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... guide-books. He and Isabel enjoyed the lurid picture with all the zest of sentimentalists dwelling upon the troubles of other times from the shelter of the safe and peaceful present. They were both poets in their quality of bridal couple, and so long as their own nerves were unshaken they could transmute all facts to entertaining fables. They pleasantly exercised their sympathies upon those who every year perish at Niagara in the tradition of its awful power; only they refused their cheap and selfish compassion to the Hermit of Goat Island, who dwelt so many years in its conspicuous seclusion, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... like the red sap of the rose. The important point is that we should not look coldly and without feeling upon these thoughts which serve to build up such a symbolical concept. After dwelling for a time upon the above mentioned thoughts and feelings, let us try to transmute them into the following symbolical concept. Let us imagine a black cross. Let this be the symbol for the destroyed lower element of our desires and passions and there where the beams of the cross intersect, let us imagine ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... streams diffusive ACIDS flow, Or wing'd with fire o'er Earth's fair bosom blow; Transmute to glittering Flints her chalky lands, Or sink on Ocean's bed in countless Sands. Hence silvery Selenite her chrystal moulds, 220 And soft Asbestus smooths his silky folds; His cubic forms phosphoric Fluor prints, Or rays in spheres his amethystine tints. Soft cobweb clouds ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... the life-giving heat is the stuff of living hearts. And the hopes of mankind cannot be kept alive by words merely, by constitutions and doctrines of right and codes of liberty. The object of democracy is to transmute these into the life and action of society, the self-denial and self-sacrifice of heroic men and women willing to make their lives an embodiment of right and service and enlightened purpose. The commands ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... last pit (Cantos xxix. and xxx.) are found those who have been guilty of personation with criminal intent, or of bearing false witness, or of debasing the coinage or pretending to transmute metals. These suffer from leprosy, dropsy, raving madness, and other diseases. Before leaving the pit, a quarrel between two of the sinners attracts Dante's attention more than Virgil thinks seemly; and a sharp reprimand follows. ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... chemical laws. The development of civilization in the subjective world, in the sphere of behavior, conduct and morality, has been precisely the gradual accumulation and popularization of methods which teach people how to direct, transform and transmute the driving power ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... iron float by the same law by which it sinks. It is the discovery that what we call the mortal part of us is capable of being brought under a higher application of the Universal Law of Life, which will transmute it into an immortal principle. When we see what we call the mortal part of us in this light we can employ the very principle on which the negative race-thought is founded as a weapon for the destruction of that thought in our ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... aware that many persons imagine that if any thing sweet is fed to bees, they will quickly transmute it into the purest nectar. There is, however, no more truth in such a conceit, than there would be in that of a man who supposed that he had found the veritable philosopher's stone; and that he was able to change all our copper and silver coins into ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... should live, think they, of what remarkable talents will it not be the possessor! By degrees, the extreme quickness of intellect becomes less remarkable; but the body begins to increase in robustness; and a year will sometimes suffice to transmute the little fairy, so quick, so clever, but so fragile, into a very commonplace, merry, rosy, romping child. I may add that it is well to bear in mind the converse of this; to remember that body and mind rarely grow in equal ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... was issued she might have heard the whispered words in her every hut, "Open, Sesame;" but, so far as her humble domicile and her degraded person were concerned, there was no invisible but gracious Genii who, on the instant, could transmute the rudeness of her hut into instant elegance, and change the crude surroundings of her home into ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... never could long persuade herself that fine things missed were as beautiful as fine things achieved. Once Rowland passed an angry day. He had dreamed—it was the most insubstantial of dreams—that she had given him the right to believe that she looked to him to transmute her discontent. And yet here she was throwing herself back into Roderick's arms at his lightest overture, and playing with his own half fearful, half shameful hopes! Rowland declared to himself that his position was essentially detestable, and that all the philosophy he ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... practically through the five points or rules of the Master, and by the use of one part to a thousand, transmute and ennoble metals. You may then in reality say that your age ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... arrived at a point where it was necessary to transmute thought into action, Mr Cargrim assumed his best clerical uniform, his tallest and whitest jam-pot collar, and drew on a pair of delicate lavender gloves. Spotless and neat and eminently sanctimonious, the chaplain took his demure way towards Mrs ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... Joseph Dewey, of Connecticut, represented to the Legislature that Higley had, "with great pains and cost, found out and obtained a curious art by which to convert, change, or transmute, common iron into good steel sufficient for any use, and was the first that ever performed such an operation in America." A certificate, signed by Timothy Phelps and John Drake, blacksmiths, states that, in June, 1725, Mr. Higley obtained from ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... vehicles for the purveying of amusement on the stage, have not taken rank by their art or by their reading of life with "The Building Fund "? It may be that it was the one theme susceptible of dramatic presentation that he had brooded over long enough to transmute into terms of drama, and that the later plays, full of successful stage tricks though they are, did not come out of his knowledge of Irish life. Knowledge of Ireland he ought to have, for he is said to have lived ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... here the glory of man as a creator of conditions and opportunities, will be first measured and fully appreciated, for it is the woman only who can penetrate his works, draw thence their full significance and value, transmute their evils to goods, and incorporate their best spirit in humanity. It is a great thing to create that which helps any human soul to be diviner than without such help it would be. It is greater to develop conditions ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... arose that metals, like human beings, had body and soul, the soul being regarded as a finer form of corporeality. They said that the soul or primitive stuff (prima materia) was common to all metals, and in order to transmute one metal into another they had to produce a tincture of its soul. In Egypt lead, under the name Osiris, was thought to be the primitive base of metals; later when the still more plastic quicksilver (mercury) was discovered, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind's approximation to God." Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... and radiance. "Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives." If biography teaches any lesson, it is that the events which occur in life are of far less consequence than the spirit in which they are received. It is the attitude of mental receptivity which is the alchemy to transmute events and circumstances into experience, and it is experience alone which determines both the quality and the trend of life. It is in activity; in doing and giving and loving, that the joy of life ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world—in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... down the curtain, partly to give the exhibitors some little rest, partly to make an alteration in the exhibition. The artist had proposed to himself to transmute the first scene of night and lowliness into a picture of splendor and glory; and for this purpose had prepared a blaze of light to fall in from every side, which this ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and rich nature which could thus draw sunshine out of its trials!—which, by aid of the true philosopher's stone of cheerfulness and courage, could transmute the heavy ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... can with Logic absolute The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute: The Sovereign Alchemist that in a trice Life's leaden metal into Gold transmute: ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Wilson, on the occasion referred to, had remarked of him most truly,—"He has not been deterred by the aspect of vice and wickedness, and misery and guilt, from seeking a spirit of good in things evil, but has endeavoured by the might of genius to transmute what was base into what is precious as the beaten gold;" observing, indeed, yet further—"He has mingled in the common walks of life; he has made himself familiar with the lower orders of society." As ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... that it is extremely difficult to disentangle from our impressions of sight, of sound, of touch, of taste, and of smell, those interwoven threads of reason, imagination and so forth which so profoundly modify and transmute, even in the art of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling, the various manifestations of "the objective mystery" which we apprehend in ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... shortly after I left on Saturday; a Gujar told the shikari, and the shikari told me, so it must be true.) When we had gathered as many flowers as we could carry, we strolled back to the camp to watch the sunset transmute the snowy crest of Haramok ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... beginning to discover that, but they are men groping in the dark, who can feel but not see and understand. Throughout what all nations have agreed to call the dark ages there have been men called alchemists, whom other men have mocked because they sought to transmute baser metals into gold. Do you think they sought what was impossible? Nothing is impossible! They dimly discerned the possibility. And it may be that their ears had caught the legend of what has been known in ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... fair—it has never been fair—never will be, never can be. And I warn you not to give this man the freshness of your youth, the happy years of your life, your innocence, the devotion which he will transmute into passion with his accursed magic! I warn you not to forsake the tranquillity of ignorance, the blessed immunity from that devil's paradise that ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... the wants of the emigrating myriads to the coast of Africa: we have ships enough, and, notwithstanding the hardness of the times, money enough. O, the surpassing utility of the arithmetic! it is more potent than the stone of the philosopher, which, when discovered, is to transmute, at a touch, ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... terror ran through him as he recollected the whole scene: for surely he knew all the faces of the six men who had gone through the gate. The devil indeed must have given the mysterious Englishman power to transmute himself and his gang wholly into ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the ewer) This is to be a king! to touch pure gold! Would that by touching thee, Zopyrion, [56] I could transmute thee to a golden man; A crowd of golden slaves to wait ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... and which, according as we interpret it, must materially influence our judgment at once on his character and his genius. The passage is as follows: "And thus began that tendency of which, all my life through, I was never able to break myself; the tendency to transmute into a picture or a poem whatever gave me either pleasure or pain, or otherwise preoccupied me, and thus to arrive at a judgment regarding it, with the object at once of rectifying my ideas of things external to me and of calming my own feelings. ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... throws light on the view of Greek mythology taken in the Mysteries. The world of the gods is born in the soul. Man looks upon what he creates in images as his gods (cf. p. 33). But he must force his way through to another conception. He must transmute into divine images the divine force which is active within him before the creation of those images. Behind the divine appears the mother of the divine, which is nothing else than the original force of the human soul. Thus side by side with the ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... in a most sublime sense to see God face to face; which, alas! it seems too true, that no man can do and 'live', i.e. a 'human' life. It would become incompatible with his organization, or rather it would 'transmute' it, and the process of that transmutation to the senses of other men would be called 'death'.—Even as to caterpillars; in all probability the caterpillar dies, and he either does not see, which is most probable, or at all events he does not see the connection between the ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... hear our common purposes as communities or as a nation stated in different terms than those suggested in the paragraphs above. For example, Franklin K. Lane, the Secretary of the Interior during the war, said, "Our national purpose is to transmute days of dreary work into happier lives—for ourselves first and for all others in their time." Again, President Wilson said that our purpose in entering the world war was to help "make the world safe for democracy." ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... mistakes may be made. Their genuine use is to excite our own minds to master the principles which their authors have set forth in them. Fresh honesty of personal thought, aspiration, and patience, is the spiritual talisman wherewith alone we can vivify truisms into truths, and transmute noble maxims into flesh and blood, nay, into immortal mind. The master-thinkers aid us to do this by the quickening power of their suggestions,—the great critic not only giving his readers direction, but also ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... suffered from lack of interest in life. Many a vivid moment dwelt in her memory; joys and sorrows, personal or of larger scope, affected her the more deeply because of that ruling intelligence which enabled her to transmute them into principles. No longer anticipating or desiring any great change in her own environment, in the modes and motives of her activity, she found it a sufficient happiness to watch, and when possible to direct, the tendency of younger lives. So kindly had nature ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... nerves into something of their old quickness and sensibility. And so he can enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable, into withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the admirable brevity and simplicity of such little glimpses of country and country ways as flash upon him through the windows of the train; little glimpses that have ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... precious manuscript was in an ivory casket, the key of which she kept religiously; indeed her laboratory was a closed room to all but myself. I saw a small cask full of 'platina del Pinto', which she told me she could transmute into gold when she pleased. It had been given her by M. Vood himself in 1743. She shewed me the same metal in four phials. In the first three the platinum remained intact in sulphuric, nitric, and muriatic acid, but ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... reasons for pursuing Welbeck with peculiar animosity. The latter was the uncle of him whose fate had been related by Mervyn, and was one of those who employed money, not as the medium of traffic, but as in itself a commodity. He had neither wines nor cloths, to transmute into silver. He thought it a tedious process to exchange to-day one hundred dollars for a cask or bale, and to-morrow exchange the bale or cask for one hundred and ten dollars. It was better to give ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... seem to transmute Socrates into a mythus, considering the broad daylight which then rested upon Athenian history, and the inextricable way in which Socrates is entangled in that history (although we have all seen many a Scriptural personage so transmuted under far less colourable pretenses ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... The soul is not a finished product. In patience it is to be acquired.[23] By trial and temptation, by toil and expenditure, through all the hardships and hazards of daily life its value is determined and its destiny shaped. And according to the measure in which we use these experiences, and transmute them by obedience to the will of God into means of good, do we grow in Christian character and approximate to the full ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... some persons might call his ill fortune, in one way, into gain in another. He was one of those happily constituted, thrifty philosophers who hold that even misfortune should not be wasted, and that no evil is so great but the alchemy of common sense can transmute some part of it into good. So he coined the smiles which the king shed upon his wife—he being powerless to prevent, for Edward smiled where he listed, and listed nearly everywhere—into nobles, crowns and pounds sterling, and left ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... magically locked up for ages in that black stone, to become, when it is burnt at last, light and carbonic acid as it was at first. For though you must not breathe your breath again, you may at least eat your breath, if you will allow the sun to transmute it for you into vegetables; or you may enjoy its fragrance and its colour in the shape of a lily or a rose. When you walk in a sunlit garden, every word you speak, every breath you breathe, is feeding the plants and flowers around. ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Saviour of men, and he takes up the world-work for which all this has been the preparation. Into him must pour all the forces that make against man, in order that in him they may be changed into forces that help. Thus he becomes one of the Peace-centres of the world, which transmute the forces of combat that would otherwise crush man. For the Christs of the world are these Peace-centres into which pour all warring forces, to be changed within them and then poured out as forces that work ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... this love, Loss doth transmute itself to gain; Faith veils earth's sorrow in its light, And straightway lives above ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... I suspect to be not merely the matrix of the ore, but also the very crude form and materia prima of all metals—you mark me?—If my recipes, which I had from Doctor Dee, succeed only half so well as I expect, then I refine out the luna, the silver, lay it by, and transmute the remaining ores into sol, gold. Whereupon Peru and Mexico become superfluities, and England the mistress of the globe. Strange, no doubt; distant, no doubt: but possible, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... reluctant and unwelcome space of leisure, that I ever had the opportunity of considering the possibility of writing this book. I am too old to be a combatant, and too much of a specialist in literature to transmute my activities. I lately found myself with my professional occupations suddenly suspended, and moreover, like many men who have followed a wholly peaceful profession, plunged in a dark bewilderment as to the onset of the forces governing the social ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... has a strange affinity for the opposite of saintship. Sanctity is not aloofness. 'There were saints in Caesar's household'—a very unlikely place; they were flowers on a dunghill, and perhaps their blossoms were all the brighter because of what they grew on, and which they could transmute from corruption into beauty. So sanctity is no blue ribbon of the Christian profession, to be given to a few select (and mostly ascetic) specimens of consecration, but it is the designation of each of us, if we are disciples who are more than disciples, that is, 'believers.' And ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... danger, indeed, was of a more subtle and incalculable kind, and within the Commonwealth itself. We have seen how naturally the baulked Cromwellianism of the epoch of the dissolution of Richard's Parliament and the overthrow of his Protectorate tended to transmute itself into Stuartism, and how much of the strength of Sir George Booth's insurrection consisted of new Royalism so produced. What we have now to add is that every baulked or defeated cause in succession within the Commonwealth yielded in the same way potential ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... had been markedly afraid of intermeddling. But apparently she had only reserved herself for this occasion, since she now had a dangerous quickness in her eye and an air of irritation which even her admirable ease was not able to transmute. She had suffered a disappointment which excited Isabel's surprise—our heroine having no knowledge of her zealous interest in Pansy's marriage; and she betrayed it in a manner which quickened Mrs. Osmond's alarm. More clearly than ever before Isabel heard a cold, mocking voice proceed from she ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... first detachment of the savage hordes of General Chang Hsun added Byzantine touches to a picture already lurid with a sickened ruler and the Mephistophelian figure of that ruler's ame damnee, the Secretary Liang Shih-yi, vainly striving to transmute paper into silver, and find the wherewithal to prevent a sack of the capital. It was said at the time that Liang Shih-yi had won over his master to trying one last throw of the dice. The troops of the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... watch a sunrise than to listen to a symphony. Go not to others for advice, but take counsel from the passing breezes, which relate the history of the world to those who listen." Thus we see that Debussy submits himself to the spells of Nature and tries to transmute them into sound. The only analogies to use in a verbal description of his music must be drawn from nature, for in each are the same shadowy pictures, the same melting outlines.[295] Debussy has a close affinity with that school of painters known as impressionists ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and factories with men, women and children, and I transmute the base metal of their bones into the noble coin of the realm; my coffers grow fat, my slaves grow lean, but I acquire the reputation of a public benefactor, a public-spirited citizen, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... of old felt that they lacked but one element; if they could obtain that one, they believed they could transmute the baser metals into pure gold. It is so in character. There are individuals with rare mental gifts, and delicate spiritual discernment who fail utterly in life because they lack the one element,—self- reliance. ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... eyes would turn from blue velvet to blue steel, and strength would flow into her from some divine, benignant source and transmute her into father as well ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... strong-growing vegetables may be seen at their best during the first season; but the more delicate vegetables thrive better with successive years of cultivation. No matter how abundantly the ground may be enriched at first, time and chemical action are required to transmute the fertilizers into the best forms of plant-food, and make them a part of the very soil itself. Plowing or spading, especially if done in late autumn, exposes the mould to the beneficial action of the air and frost, and the garden gradually takes on the refined, mellow, fertile character ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... suffice to transform it to ashes, yet you need only carry it to the nearest banker's to see it changed into a heap of gold, or glitter as a parure of the costliest diamonds. If you desire it, these papers will transmute themselves into a magnificent castle, into liveried servants, into superb carriages. Oh, I already see you standing as the proud mistress of a stately castle, in your ancestral hall, with vassals bowing before you, and counts and princes suing ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... what more subtile, slow degrees Thus may the mind transmute its all, That calmly it should dwell on these, As on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... enemies, do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you: thou shalt thereby be heaping coals of fire upon their heads." Ay, thou shalt melt them: before this force they cannot stand. Thou shalt melt them, and transmute them ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... things without, forgotten and undreamed-of correspondences were being renewed; and she was aware of it in an incurious way, and her soul was troubled, but she was not equal to the mental exultation necessary to transmute and understand. So she plodded wearily on at the heels of her lord, content to wait for that which she knew, somewhere, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... Though he had commissioned three adepts to make the precious metals, and had not received any returns, his credulity remained unshaken, and he issued a pompous grant in favour of three other alchemists, who boasted that they could not only transmute metals, but could impart perpetual youth, with unimpaired powers both of mind and body, by means of a specific called the Mother and Queen of Medicines, the Celestial Glory, the Quintessence or Elixir of Life. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... banquet, to enter upon untroubled rest. Nor is his death outside of law. From all eternity life and death have been at war with each other. No day and no night passes when the first cry of a child tossed up on the shores of light is not mingled with the wailings of mourners. Let me tell you how you may transmute your sorrow. A battle rages in the plain. The earth is shaken with the violent charges of the cavalry and with the tramping feet of men. Cruel weapons gleam in the sun. But to one afar off upon a hill the army is but a bright spot in the valley, adding ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... one or two at once. "Now, Williams, you are on your mettle, old boy; stand true to your colours, and transmute the sentence into ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... outside it. By none other road than that of self-control and self-denial can men and women now set going the causes which will build for them brains and bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life. They have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from passion into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical capacity shall subserve ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... need of fewer words of displacency and more of approbation; if, finally, it were to be brought to pass that for the public nothing but amiable diversion should flow simultaneously from platform, stage, and press, then for the public would the millennium be come. A religious philosopher can transmute Adam's fall into a blessing, and we can recognize the wisdom of that dispensation which put enmity between the seed of Jubal, who was the "father of all such as handle the harp and pipe," and the seed of Saul, who, I take it, is the first critic of record ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... for their unsuccessful brethren—for those who had the bad luck to be born before their time, as well as those who would apparently have done better by declining to be born at all. The world overflows with writers who would fain transmute their thoughts into bread, and lacking the opportunity, have a slim chance for any bread at all, even the coarsest. No other class has less worldly wisdom, less practical thrift; no other suffers more keenly from "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," than unlucky authors. If anything ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... selecting marble for the Pope's tomb.[309] There his brain, always teeming with gigantic conceptions, suggested to him a new fancy. Could not the headland jutting out beyond Sarzana into the Tyrrhene Sea be carved by his workmen into a Pharos? To transmute a mountain into a statue, holding a city in either hand, had been the dream of a Greek artist. Michael Angelo revived the bold thought; but to execute it would have been almost beyond his power. Meanwhile, in November 1505, the marble was shipped, and the quays ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... She accepted all with good-humour and, really, complete good breeding. She invited nothing, provoked nothing, but resented nothing. It seemed to me as if all these things were indeed nothing to her; that she hardly knew that they were done; as if her soul could render them at their proper worth, transmute them, sherd them off, discard them. It was, then, her surface which took them; what her soul received was a distillation, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... tested gold made by alchemists, and found that it will not withstand six or seven exposures to fire. But scepticism of this kind was not universal. Roger Bacon—or more probably some one who usurped his name—declared that with a certain amount of the philosopher's stone he could transmute a million times as much base metal into gold, and on Raimon Lull was fathered the boast, "Mare tingerem si mercurius esset.'' Numerous less distinguished adepts also practised the art, and sometimes were so successful in their deceptions that they gained the ear ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... could not help concluding that so much subtlety united to a too vivid imagination would in all likelihood have been rewarded with a pair of Sandwich-boards or a super's banner. Absorbed in this train of thought, and admiring the perverse dexterity which could transmute the face of a sickly woman and a case of brain disease into the crude elements of romance, Salisbury strayed on through the dimly lighted streets, not noticing the gusty wind which drove sharply round ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... been suddenly thrown off and expectations are lofty; the apprehensiveness to a touch unkindly or irreverent, where sympathy is at once exacted as a tribute and welcomed as a gift; the power of injustice and inordinate calamity to transmute, to invigorate, and to govern—to sweep away the barriers of opinion—to reduce under submission passions purely evil—to exalt the nature of indifferent qualities, and to render them fit companions for ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... innocent mother, Acilia, of complicity in the plot.[257] His conduct does not admit of excuse. But it is not for the plain, matter-of-fact man to pass judgement lightly on the weakness of a highly-strung, nervous, artistic temperament; the artist's imagination may transmute pain such as others might hope to bear, to anguish such as they cannot even imagine. There lies the palliation, if palliation it be, of Lucan's crime. But it availed him nothing: the reprieve was never won; he was condemned ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... leaves of the old comic journals of the period from 1830 to 1855—are neither rare nor expensive; but I happened to have lighted on a particularly copious collection, and I made the most of my small good-fortune, in order to transmute it, if possible, into a sort of compensation for my having missed unavoidably, a few months before, the curious exhibition "de la Caricature Moderne" held for several weeks just at hand, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... the right delineation of character orders it so: words, that are nothing but vulgar as used by vulgar minds, are somehow in his use washed clean of their vulgarity; for there was a cunning alchemy in his touch that could instantly transmute the basest materials into "something rich and strange." In this respect, Mr. White justly applies to him what Laertes ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... is the air of all; but, diversified in all. In some, benevolent; in some, ambiguous; in two or three, to a close scrutiny, all but incipiently malign, the variation of less than a hair's breadth in the linear shadings round the mouth sufficing to all this. Now, Excellenza, transmute that general gravity into joyousness, and subject it to twelve of those variations I have described, and tell me, will you not have my hours here, and Una one of ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Bonaparte towered only a little over the ablest men around him. Yet that little was everything, and he overran Europe. A man who surpassed Napoleon, as Napoleon surpassed Murat, in the mental qualities which transmute thought into fact, would have made himself master of the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various |
