"Alchemist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for her hidden mysteries, but a wicked old spendthrift, greedy like a miser for the Philosopher's Stone. Everybody in Douai, from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie to the people, knew all about old Claes, "the alchemist." His home was called the "Devil's House." People pointed at him, shouted after him in the street. Lemulquinier said that these were murmurs ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... and back, into the hole from which they had emerged, and watched his companion stand holding the torch, which lit his features with a deep red light until he looked as if he might be the very alchemist of gold—red gold—and turning all he looked upon into the metal which closes around men's hearts. The red light flashed on the white ribbon of water, and this way and that, as he waved it around, on the sides of the ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... flutter of mortality, to lose some peculiarity of the skeleton, some jag of the vast crooked scythe of the spectre. The most ingenious of poets, the most subtle of divines, whose life had been spent in examining Man in the crucible of his own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to preserve to the very last his powers of unflinching spiritual observation. The Dean of St. Paul's, whose reputation for learned sanctity had scarcely sufficed to shelter him from scandal on the ground of his ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... in Bath, when that city was at the height of its fame, Herschel would rush home, and without even delaying to take off his lace ruffles, he would plunge into his manual labours of grinding specula and polishing lenses. No alchemist of old was ever more deeply absorbed in a project for turning lead into gold than was Herschel in his determination to have a telescope. He transformed his home into a laboratory; of his drawing-room he made a carpenter's shop. Turning lathes were the furniture ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... a man of theory, Raymond Lulli (1235-1315), of Majorca, the famous Alchemist, who is credited with the first suggestion of the idea of seeking a way to India by rounding Africa on the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... city which I have just left, the ruler of the Nation's money, the President of the Consolidated Banker's Exchange, died in a pot of molten lead which he had been brought to hope would be turned into gold under the touch of an alchemist. The lust of gold that in life had been his only incentive, proved ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... continued her practice, and earned money for further study by writing waltzes and other popular dance music. She became proficient in making orchestral arrangements, and has been eminently successful as a leader of many large New York organizations. Among her operettas are "The Alchemist," also a version of the old French romance, "Fleurette," and an adaptation from Tennyson, called "Day Dreams." She is also the author of ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... Italian school. Bononcini's career in England came to an end very suddenly. It was discovered that a madrigal brought out by him was pirated from another Italian composer; whereupon Bononcini left England, humiliated to the dust, and finally died obscure and alone, the victim of a charlatan alchemist, who succeeded in obtaining ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... towards him. His heart is a lump of congealed snow: Prometheus was asleep while it was making. He differeth altogether from God; for with him the best pieces are still marked out for damnation, and, without hope of recovery, shall be cast down into hell. He is partly an alchemist; for he extracteth his own apparel out of other men's clothes; and when occasion serveth, making a broker's shop his alembic, can turn your silks into gold, and having furnished his necessities, after a month or two, if he be urged unto it, reduce them again to their proper subsistence. He is in ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... tranquillity, internal and external, and our annalists find leisure to advert to various circumstances of domestic history. They mention a corporation formed for the transmutation of iron into copper by the method of one Medley an alchemist, of which the learned but credulous sir Thomas Smith, secretary of state, was a principal promoter, and in which both Leicester and Burleigh embarked some capital. The master of the Mint ventured to express a doubt of the success ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... exquisite, would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never know, and even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, the one watching with heavy eyes the other's moment of content. I had heaped about me the gold born in the crucibles of others; but the supreme dream of the alchemist, the transmutation of the weary heart into a weariless spirit, was as far from me as, I doubted not, it had been from him also. I turned to my last purchase, a set of alchemical apparatus which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had assured me, once belonged to Raymond Lully, and as I joined the ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... being pushed for money, turned alchemist and tried to manufacture gold, but when Rubens was approached by a visionary who wanted him to lend him money by which he might pursue such a work, promising Rubens a fortune when he should have discovered how to make his gold, the artist laughed ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... young to be allowed by Mother Earth to sit up late, all alone in the sky. This was not the "pale moonlight" Sir Walter wrote of, and looked to for inspiration in his "Lay of the Last Minstrel," but a light of silvered rose which seemed made for love and joy. I thought, if an alchemist or magician should pour melted gold and silver together in a rose-coloured glass, and hold it up to the sun, it would give out a light like this. It might have been an elixir of life, for it gave back the Abbey's youth, and more ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Diana Primrose' wrote A Chain of Pearl, which is a panegyric on the 'peerless graces' of Gloriana. Mary Morpeth, the friend and admirer of Drummond of Hawthornden; Lady Mary Wroth, to whom Ben Jonson dedicated The Alchemist; and the Princess Elizabeth, the sister of Charles ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... faith, when Thou my dust shalt bring To dust, remember well, Great Alchemist, Yearly to change my wintry earth to spring, That I with Beauty ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... prose is the form, above all others, they prefer; handled by an alchemist of genius, it should contain in a state of meat the entire strength of the novel, the long analysis and the superfluous description of which it suppresses...the adjective placed in such an ingenious ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... old writers that Adam was the first alchemist, and we are told by one of the initiated that Adam was created on the sixth day, being the 15th of March, of the first year of the world; certainly alchemy had a long life, for chemistry did not begin until about the middle of the ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... hermitage a school. The feudal ages were a wonderful seed-time in a world all gaunt with ruins. Horrors were there mingled with delicacies and confusion with idyllic peace. It was here a poet's childhood passed amid the crash of war, there an alchemist's old age flickering away amid cobwebs and gibberish. Something jocund and mischievous peeped out even in the cloister; gargoyles leered from the belfry, while ivy and holly grew about the cross. The Middle Ages were the true renaissance. Their Christianity was the theme, the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... of history, I can hardly imagine a better subject for romance at the present moment than the fortunes of WILLIAM OF ORANGE, and if Miss MARJORIE BOWEN'S Prince and Heretic (METHUEN) shows some traces of having been rather hastily finished it is easy to pardon this defect. The alchemist's assistant, part seer and part quack, whom she introduces into the earlier part of the story foretells the violent deaths of the young princes of the house of Nassau and the ravaging and looting of the Netherlands by ALVA, Defender of the Catholic Faith and servant of the House ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... he eagerly studied the history and antiquity to be found in the monasteries and in the remains of the mediaeval period. He also made a study of the Italian people. In 1835 he published a drama called Paracelsus, founded upon the history of that celebrated alchemist and physician, and delineating the conditions of philosophy in the fifteenth century. It is novel, antique, and metaphysical: it exhibits the varied emotions of human sympathy; but it is eccentric and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... first collected by a German, named Stauf, in 1741. Of course there was no question of gas-making then, and the German, who was more of an alchemist than a chemist, was looking for other things than ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... Caroline. You experiment with men's hearts like an old alchemist, who puts all sorts of substances into his crucible in the hope of finding something that will ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... felt it before him, and his father's father, even back to Adam, who walked thus with God! There is a tincture of iron that seeps into a boys blood with the ozone of the earth, that can come to him by no other way. Let him run if he will; Heavens air is a better elixir than any that the alchemist can mix. What if he roams the woods and lives for hours in the water? What if he prefers the barn to the parlor? What if he fights? Does he not take the risk of the scratched face and the bruises? Should he ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... Nights out of dull foggy London Days; with your beautiful female imagination, shape burnished copper Castles out of London Fog! It is very beautiful of you;—nay, it is not foolish either, it is wise. I have a guess what of truth there may be in that; and you the fair Alchemist, are you not all the richer and better that you know the essential gold, and will not have it called pewter or spelter, though in the shops it is only such? I honor such Alchemy, and love it; and have myself done something in that kind. Long ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Paracelsus is divided into five parts, each of which describes an important period in the experience of Paracelsus, the celebrated German-Swiss physician, alchemist, and philosopher of the sixteenth century. Book I tells of the eagerness and pride with which he set out in his youth to compass all knowledge; he believed himself commissioned of God to learn Truth and ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... and difficulties, those who still after all that can compass the singing of a beautiful song, those, mark me, are entitled masters!" Aye, first, as a modern poet has said, warm natural drops of blood; later, the alchemist's laborious spheres of chemic gold. In youth, all-sufficient inspiration,—later, labour and rule, with meritorious concentration substituting for impetus and fire the beauty of careful form, and making ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... share of that peculiar homage which ignorance paid to knowledge. There were, here and there, individuals, the record of whose eccentricity opens up for us vistas into the marvellous domain of magic and mystery which cast its glamour of romance over the old world of the alchemist in pursuit of the philosopher's stone. One of the most remarkable of latter-day disciples of Peter Woulfe, of whom some interesting particulars are given in Timbs' Modern Eccentrics, has a peculiar claim to notice here, if only for having for many years pursued his studies and experiments ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... pulp her pearly seed; Hang round the Orange all her silver bells, And guard her fragrance with Hesperian spells; Bud after bud her polish'd leaves unfold, 550 And load her branches with successive gold. So the learn'd Alchemist exulting sees Rise in his bright matrass DIANA'S trees; Drop after drop, with just delay he pours The red-fumed acid on Potosi's ores; 555 With sudden flash the fierce bullitions rise, And wide in air the gas phlogistic flies; Slow shoot, at length, in many a brilliant mass Metallic ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... hears of an ALCHEMIST, who lives at the village of Lilley, midway between Luton and Hitchen. The whole of his interview with this eccentric personage, will doubtless be interesting to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... the dial, and, bending, pressed his lips against the carven words that, so often as they had stood there together, she had traced with her finger. "Love! thou mighty alchemist!" he breathed. "Life! that may now be gold, now iron, but never again dull lead! Death"—He paused; then, "There shall be no death," he said, and left the withered garden for ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... once filled his pockets, and recovered sight only by throwing away the plunder. A brother of the Ada chief offered to show this magic-fenced placer to the late Mr. Nicol Irvine, moyennant the trifle of 50l. The transaction reminded me of the Hindu alchemist who asks you ten rupees to make a ton ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... hung the brooding mist We saw it rolling, fold on fold, [98] And marked the great Sun alchemist Turn all its leaden edge to gold, Look well, look well, oh lady mine, The gray below, the gold above, For so the grayest life may shine All golden in the light ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be the value of the recipes of Theophilus, couched in the symbolical language of the alchemist, his evidence is as clear as it is conclusive, as far as regards the general processes adopted in his own time. The treatise of Peter de St. Audemar, contained in a volume transcribed by Jehan le Begue in 1431, bears internal evidence of being nearly ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... not by his personal interest but by a taste for experiment. God has reserved the act of creation for Himself, but has suffered destruction to be within the scope of man: man therefore supposes that in destroying life he is God's equal. Such was the nature of Exili's pride: he was the dark, pale alchemist of death: others might seek the mighty secret of life, but he had ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... anecdotes strung together by the accident that they all happen to the same person. 'Tom Jones,' on the contrary, has a carefully constructed plot, if not, as Coleridge asserts, one of the three best plots in existence (its rivals being 'Oedipus Tyrannus' and 'The Alchemist'). Its excellence depends upon the skill with which it is made subservient to the development of character and the thoroughness with which the working motives of the persons involved have been thought out. Fielding claims—even ostentatiously—that he is writing a history, not a romance; ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the course of the Arno, and in the following year he lost his father. In 1505 he modelled the group which we now see over the northern door of the San Giovanni, at Florence. In 1514 he was invited to Rome by Leo X., but more in his character of philosopher, mechanic, and alchemist, than as a painter. Here Raphael was at the height of his fame, and engaged in his greatest works, the frescos of the Vatican. The younger artist was introduced to the elder; and two pictures which Leonardo painted while at Rome—the "Madonna of St. Onofrio," and the "Holy Family," ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... where it is added that "Plattes published several other works chiefly relating to Husbandry, and is said to have dropped down dead in the London streets for want of food." Among other things, he was an Alchemist; and in Wood's Athenae by Bliss (I. 640-1) there is a curious extract from his Mineralogical book, giving an account of a process of his for making pure gold artificially, though, as he says, not ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... Sunningwell, where we again heard of Roger Bacon, for he occasionally used the church tower there for his astronomical and astrological observations. He must have been an enormously clever man, and on that account was known as an alchemist and a sorcerer; he was credited with the invention of gunpowder, and the air-pump, and with being acquainted with the principle of the telescope. In the time of Queen Mary, Dr. Jewel was the rector of Sunningwell, but had to vacate it to escape persecution; while in the time of the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... taken to drinking to dull the monotony. The crew think you are an alchemist and are making diamonds. Their interest in this fact seemed to me excessive, so I killed one of ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... soften and temper the disposition, but the original material remains the same. The father who attempts to force his son into a mode of life for which Nature did not intend him, or the mother who quarrels with her daughter's friends, commits an error similar to that of Hawthorne's alchemist, who endeavors to remove the birthmark from the otherwise beautiful face of his wife, but only succeeds in effecting this together with her death. The tragical termination of the alchemist's experiments, the pathetic yielding up of life by his sweet "Clytie," is described ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... is very pretty," said the young man, glancing at it a moment. "Those little blue tongues, dancing on top of the crimson embers, are extremely picturesque. They are like a fire in an alchemist's laboratory." ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... and so Oisin battles with Fomor and releases the power— a princess in the story. This fight with the demon must be fought by everyone who would enter the land of the Gods, whether in conscious occult adventure or half-consciously after death, when the strange alchemist Nature separates the subtile from the gross in the soul in this region which Oisin passes through. Tir-na-noge, the land of Niam, is that region the soul lives in when its grosser energies and desires have been subdued, dominated and brought ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... Jonson. The Alchemist in Cambridge Poets Series; also in Thayer, Best Elizabethan Plays (Ginn and Company), which includes in one volume plays by Marlowe, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... matted hair. He drew himself up to his full height and held up his precious treasure, in the fragile glass: "Found! won! gold!" he cried, stretching up his hand with the glass which glittered in the sunbeams: his hand shook, and the alchemist's glass fell to the ground shivered into a thousand atoms. The last bubble of his welfare was shattered too. Whew! whew! fare away! and away I rushed ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... his youngest daughter to marry: but she wishes only her rescuer. She paints a necklace in every respect like the one which she gave Juan, and says that she will marry only when a person is found who can make a necklace exactly like the picture. The king sends the painting to an alchemist in the city, and orders him, under penalty of death if he falls, to produce the necklace in two months. He is unable to do so, and becomes downcast. Juan, who has been in service as a porter, and is the one who carried the command of the king to the alchemist, ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... always the pioneer. From the astrologer came the astronomer, from the alchemist the chemist, from the mesmerist the experimental psychologist. The quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow. Even such subtle and elusive things as dreams will in time be reduced to system and order. When that time comes the researches ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... matter?" he answered. "Don't you see what I am?—a poor devil; a sort of philosopher or alchemist, who receives spare thanks for great favours he confers on his friends; one who has no enjoyment in this world, except a little experimentializing:—but sign, I pray—ay, just there ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... I had been in love with when I was a young man, but she died long ago. She wanted me to kiss her. Oh no, I would not do that.' 'Why not?' I said. 'Oh, she might have got power over me.' 'Has your alchemical research had any success?' I said. 'Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour,' (The alchemist may have been Elephas Levi, who visited England in the sixties, & would have said anything) 'but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails fall out and your hair falls off. I ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... of Mr. Watts. We think that his very earliest pictures show, occasionally, the hand of a painter; but for the last thirty years Mr. Watts seems to have been undergoing transformation, and we see him now as a sort of cross between an alchemist of old time and a book collector—his left hand fumbling among the reds and blues of the old masters, his right turning the pages of a dusty folio in search of texts for illustration; a sort of a modern Veronese in treacle and gingerbread. To judge him by what he exhibits this year ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... and set on a bracket on the wall gave out a faint flickering light, which barely rendered darkness visible, and from its position threw parts of the chamber into deepest gloom. It looked not unlike what we suppose would be the laboratory of an alchemist of the olden time, and McCoy himself, with his eager yet frowning visage, a native-made hat slouched over his brows, and a piece of native cloth thrown over his shoulders like a plaid, was no bad representative of an old doctor toiling for the secrets that turn base metal into gold, and old ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the vulgar? Or think by pots and pans and mixing vile substances to make this, which by nature is this, into that which by nature it is not! I, a scholar? A scholar? No, I tell you, there was never alchemist yet could transmute but one thing—poor ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... the formula on which his power was based," said the alchemist thoughtfully. "No man—be he duke, prince or kaiser—can pose as the master of humanity. Men are not puppets; they are free souls in a free world. You cannot make even a puppet-player move contrary ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... an exaggeration," replied Rodin, with feverish impatience; "all these passions are at work, but the moment is critical. As the alchemist bends over the crucible, which may give him either treasures or sudden death—I alone at ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... which these analogies are the smallest types. But the idea of numerical analogy is not new to our age, now that the atomic theory is established, and people are turned back to the days when the much bescouted alchemist pored with rheumy eyes over the crucible, about to be the tomb of elective affinity, and whence a golden angel was to develop from a leaden saint: when they are reminded of the Pythagorean numbers, and the arithmetic of the realists of old, they may very well imagine that the vain world, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in practical life, had taken to Alchemy; and was busy with crucibles and speculations, to a degree that seemed questionable. Father Friedrich, therefore, had to interfere, and deal with this "Johann the Alchemist" (JOHANNES ALCHEMISTA, so the Books still name him); who loyally renounced the Electorship, at his Father's bidding, in favor of Friedrich; accepted Baireuth (better half of the Culmbach Territory) for apanage; and there peacefully distilled ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... nations, and grouped as if they were guns or sabres. My favorite pipe I never fill except on birthdays or festivals. A Frenchman who brought this from Canada swore that it was an Iroquois pipe of peace. Certain people take me for an alchemist, and my pipes for retorts with chimneys; but they do me wrong. Not only do I draw smoke but food from my distilling apparatus. I should be hailed rather as a philosopher, for while I watch the floating smoke ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... popular voices of the day to the comments of those capable of appraising genius, "What a master of composition Fielding was!" exclaimed Coleridge, "Upon my word I think 'Oedipus Tyrannus,' the 'Alchemist,' and 'Tom Jones' the three most perfect plots ever planned." To Sir Walter Scott Tom Jones was "truth and human nature itself." Gibbon described the book as "the first of ancient or modern romances"; and, as we have seen, declared that its pages would outlive the Imperial ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... get thee gone, 'squire Limberhamo, for the easiest fool I ever knew, next my naunt of fairies in the Alchemist[4]. I have escaped, thanks to my mistress's lingua Franca: I'll steal to my chamber, shift my perriwig and clothes; and then, with the help of resty Gervase, concert the business of the next campaign. My father sticks in my stomach still; but I am resolved ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... as we must do, that Tycho was not only a professed alchemist, but that he was practically occupied with its pursuits, and continually misled by its delusions, it may not be uninteresting to the reader to consider how far a belief in alchemy, and a practice of its arts, have a ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... Brace-Bridge Hall will recollect a pleasing and popular exposition of the alternately splendid and benevolent, and always passionate reveries of the Alchemist, in the affecting story of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... is always: in attempting to dislodge a single voussoir from the arch of truth, the temple itself is shaken, so cunningly are the stones fitted together. All roads lead to Rome, and every symbol is a key to the Great Mystery: for example, read in the light of these correspondences, the alchemist's transmutation of base metals into gold, is seen to be the sublimation of man's lower nature into "that highest ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... of The Road to Damascus is dominated by the scenes of the great alchemist banquet which, in all its fantastic oddity, is one of the most suggestive ever created on the ancient theme of the fickleness of fortune. It was suggested above that there were two factors beyond all others ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... (uncoined gold). Associated words: alchemist, alchemy, auriferous, alloy, assay, assayer, assaying, filigree, aurated, auric, aureate, aurific, aurigraphy, aurivorous, aurocephalous, platinum, aurous, billet, carat, chlorination, chrysography, cupel, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... remarkable thing about my venerable parishioner remains to be mentioned. Dr. Whittredge was an alchemist. He had a furnace, in a little building separate from his house, where he kept a fire for forty years, till he was more than eighty, visiting it every night, of summer and winter alike, to be sure ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... fifty guineas! He built an elegant villa, but, as he was always inculcating economy, he dates from "The Hovel." He detected the fallacy of the South Sea scheme, while he himself invented projects, neither inferior in magnificence nor in misery. He even turned alchemist, and wanted to coin gold, merely to distribute it. The most striking incident in the life of this man of volition, was his sudden marriage with a young lady who attended his first wife's funeral—struck by her angelical beauty, if we trust to his raptures. Yet ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... were issued to women already condemned,[26] while some attempt was made to curb popular excitement. The attitude of the queen towards the celebrated John Dee was an instance in point. Dee was an eminent alchemist, astrologer, and spiritualist of his time. He has left a diary which shows us his half mystic, half scientific pursuits. In the earlier part of Mary's reign he had been accused of attempting poison or ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... Snake were not the only wonderful things about Field Place. There was a big garret which was never used, with beneath it a secret room, the only entrance to which was through a plank in the garret floor. This, according to the big brother, was the dwelling-place of an alchemist "old and grey with a long beard." Here with his lamp and magic books he wrought his wonders, and "Some day" the eager children were promised a visit to him. Meanwhile Bysshe himself played the alchemist, and with his sisters dressed ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... of the playwright. In a word, he may irradiate his theme with the light that never was on sea or land, nor will he thereby sacrifice aught of essential truth: but his comrade must see to it that he is content with the wide liberal air of the common day. The poetic alchemist may turn a sword into pure gold: the playwright will concern himself with the due usage of the weapon as we know it, and attribute to it no transcendent value, no miraculous properties. What is permissible ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... think yourself an alchemist, and try to discover a process to turn other things into gold, you will entertain far-reaching and interesting projects, but you will fail to reach the apex of your ambition. Wealth will prove a myth, and the woman you love will hold a false position ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... for lazy master cared, And served each one with what was e'er prepared By him, who in a sombre vault below, Peppered the royal pig with peoples' woe, And grimly glad went laboring till late— The morose alchemist we know as Fate! That ev'ry guest might learn to suit his taste, Behind had Conscience, real or mock'ry, placed; Conscience a guide who every evil spies, But royal nurses early pluck out both ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... I rather like. It is, after all, first cousin to gossip, which no one can deny to be amusing. For instance, if I were to tell you that the Princess and the Baron rode out together daily to inspect the cannon, it is either a piece of politics or scandal, as I turn my phrase. I am the alchemist that makes the transmutation. They have been everywhere together since you left,' she continued, brightening as she saw Otto darken; 'that is a poor snippet of malicious gossip - and they were everywhere cheered - and with that addition ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the world's applause. The victor when returning from the field Is crowned with laurel, and his shining way Is full of shouts and roses. If he fall, His nation builds his monument of glory. But mark the alchemist who walks the streets, His look is down, his step infirm, his hair And cheeks are burned to ashes by his thought; The volumes he consumes, consume in turn; They are but fuel to his fiery brain, Which being fed requires the more to feed on. The people gaze on him with curious looks, And step ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... Your sooty smoky-bearded compeer, he Will close you so much gold in a bolt's head, And, on a turn, convey in the stead another With sublimed mercury, that shall burst i' the heat, And all fly out in fumo. The Alchemist. ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... might not profess to scorn glory as a cynic, I yet made very slight account of that honor which I hoped to acquire only through fictitious titles. And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... had scarce had its laugh at Bell, and its shout of "I told you so!" at poor Langley, when lo! the telephone became the world's nervous system, and aeroplanes began to multiply like summer flies. To common sense the alchemist's dream of transmuting lead into gold seems preposterous, yet in a hundred laboratories radium is breaking down into helium, and the new chemistry bids fair to turn the time-honored jeer at the alchemists completely upside down. A wife whose mind was oriented in the new direction effectually silenced ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... by no means given up the popular stage when he turned to the amusement of King James. In 1605 "Volpone" was produced, "The Silent Woman" in 1609, "The Alchemist" in the following year. These comedies, with "Bartholomew Fair," 1614, represent Jonson at his height, and for constructive cleverness, character successfully conceived in the manner of caricature, wit and brilliancy of dialogue, they stand alone in ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... present time it is a frequent source of complaint that physicians often prescribe remedies with even whose physical appearance they are not familiar and whose composition is often quite unknown to them, this complaint of the old-time chemist alchemist will be all the more interesting for the modern physician. It is evident that when Basil Valentine allows his ire to get the better of him it is because of his indignation over the quacks who were abusing medicine and patients in his time, as they have ever since. ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... black coffee; "I never wanted her; she is a weather vane, never still two moments; she is a spaniel that quits the Plantagenet the moment the battle goes against him, and fawns on Bolingbroke; she is an alchemist's crucible, that has every fair and rich thing thrown into it, but will only yield in return the calcined stones of chagrin and disappointment; she is a harlot, whose kisses are to be bought, and who runs after those who brawl the loudest and swagger ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... [Footnote 5: Ben Jonson's Alchemist having taken gold from Abel Drugger, the Tobacco Man, for the device of a sign—'a good lucky one, a thriving sign'—will give him nothing so commonplace as a sign copied from the constellation he ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... knowledge called themselves, meant by this was precisely the same as the conception we have here reached through our own way of studying matter ('Salt' standing for 'functional phosphorus', 'Mercury' for 'functional carbon'). Only the alchemist's way was a ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... a Lombard who would accommodate you. But nothing can be done; of the 12,000 crowns you shall not have a brass farthing if this same ladies'-maid does not come here to take the price of the article that is so great an alchemist that turns blood ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... which the Scene is discovered, being a Laboratory or Alchemist's work-house. Vulcan looking at the registers, while a Cyclope, tending the fire, to the cornets began ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... from Ben Jonson's Alchemist gives a curious clue to the derivation of the popular term "scab" found in No. VI. Webster's forcible picture in ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... lady of the ancien regime, in the great Brinvilliers poisoning-period, and she is buying from an old alchemist in his laboratory the draught which is to kill her triumphant rival. Small, gorgeous, and intense, she sits in the strange den and watches the old wizard set about his work. She is due to dance at the King's, but there ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... reap each newly-fallen bone That once thrilled soft, a little limb, within her womb; And mark yon alchemist, with zodiac-spangled zone, Wrenching the mandrake root that fattens in ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... I shall need some alchemist to help me, who call upon men to sell their books and to build furnaces; quitting and forsaking Minerva and the Muses as barren virgins, and relying upon Vulcan. But certain it is, that unto the deep, fruitful, and operative ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... common people, as Dee well knew, Kelley had the reputation of being a bold and wicked wizard. He had been born in Worcester, and trained in the apothecary's business, but, tempted by the prospect of securing great wealth at a minimum of trouble, he had turned alchemist and magician. It was rumored that on at least one occasion he had disinterred a freshly buried corpse, and by his incantations had compelled the spirit of the dead man to speak to him. There was more truth in the report that the reason he always wore a close-fitting skull-cap was to conceal the ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... await his calling, and the coming Of the good spirit. You did ill to upbraid him. The Alchemist. ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... His Highness, as you may have heard, is ruled by his confessor, an adroit Dominican. The confessor, it is true, has two rivals, the Countess Belverde, a lady distinguished for her piety, and a German astrologer or alchemist, lately come to Pianura, and calling himself a descendant of the Egyptian priesthood and an adept of the higher or secret doctrines of Neoplatonism. These three, however, though ostensibly rivals for the Duke's favour, live ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... not merely in heaping together, but making gold. Of all dreams, that of the alchemist is the most poetical, for he looked at the finest symbol. "Gold," says one of our friends, "is the hidden light of the earth, it crowns the mineral, as wine the vegetable order, being the last expression ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... green lane which shall hereafter be North Street, we see the Curwen House, newly built, with the carpenters still at work on the roof nailing down the last sheaf of shingles. On the lower corner stands another dwelling,—destined, at some period of its existence, to be the abode of an unsuccessful alchemist,—which shall likewise survive to our own generation, and perhaps long outlive it. Thus, through the medium of these patriarchal edifices, we have now established a sort of kindred and hereditary acquaintance with ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a most mischancy visage: hard, curious, inhuman eyes he had, thin, sunken cheeks, and a black straggling moustache, the whole surmounted by a great bald dome of brow. 'By Alchemist out of Misanthropos,' I suggested, after a lengthy scrutiny, 'and perhaps Misogynist as well.' My companion laughed appreciatively. 'That's about it,' he said; 'yet there is a tale of a fisherman's daughter, the belle ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... one of them is the large and beautiful church, with its very fine tower and high crocketed pinnacles, each pointed by a cross. The roof is adorned by 'bosses, carved and painted with heads, flowers and leaves, and also figures or marks which obscurely shadow forth the learning of the alchemist.' The presence of these symbols is explained by a tradition that the church was built by miners. 'On one of the bosses is the combination of three rabbits, each with a single ear, which join in the centre, forming a triangle—a favourite alchemical symbol, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... discouraged. He sought relief in the study of alchemy, and indulged the vain hope of discovering some chemical means of making gold from base metals. All this wasted his time and means, and it is to be regretted that he was less wise than his master, for when an alchemist tried to interest Rubens in the same subject, that great artist replied: "You come too late, my good fellow; I have long since discovered the philosopher's stone. My palette and brushes are worth far more than ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... in the year 1669 that Brandt, an alchemist and a merchant—a very distinguished scientific man—discovered the remarkable substance I have here, which we call phosphorus. Brandt was an alchemist. I do not know whether you know what an alchemist ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... was an Italian physician, alchemist and philosopher, born at Abano, near Padua, in 1246, died about 1320. He had the reputation of a wizard, and was imprisoned by the Inquisition. He was condemned to be burnt; he died in prison, and ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Christendom, antichrist. CHRO'MA, color—chromatic, chrome, chromic, chromotype, achromatic. CHRU'SOS, gold—chrysalis, chrysolite. CHU'LOS, the milky juice formed by digestion—chyle, chylifaction. CHU'MOS, juice—chyme, chemist, chemistry, alchemy, alchemist. ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... the alchemist's glass! something twinkles in it; it is glowing, pure and heavy. He lifted it with a trembling hand and shouted with a trembling voice: "Gold! gold!" He reeled, and I could easily have blown him over,' said the wind, 'but I only blew upon the embers, and followed him to ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... in a joyous and triumphant tone, "that is not only an Icelandic name, but of a learned professor of the sixteenth century, a celebrated alchemist." ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... of a clay bowl with a glass tube; his eyes were so intently fixed on the bowl that he did not discover the presence of a stranger. A lamp burning on the table shed the light around on the wizen countenance of the aged alchemist, on the walls of the chamber, and on the roof, from which hung suspended several iron chains, and stuffed birds and beasts and other creatures of curious form, unlike anything the Count had before seen. He stood for some time watching ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... an alchemist, and was possessed with a consuming desire to learn the secrets of life and ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... sciences seemed, and justly so from his point of view, not less impious than futile. His "Canon Yeoman's Tale," a story of imposture so vividly dramatic in its catastrophe as to have suggested to Ben Jonson one of the most effective passages in his comedy "The Alchemist," concludes with a moral of unmistakeable solemnity against the sinfulness, as well as uselessness, of "multiplying" (making gold by the arts ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... stays in his course, and plays the alchemist, turning with the splendor of his precious eyes the meagre, cloddy earth to ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... have met to-night, was indeed a laboratory. Vigorous, life-like portraits, poetic and historic groups, occasionally grew upon his easel; but there were many hours—yes, days—when absorbed in study among galvanic batteries and mysterious lines of wires, he seemed to us like an alchemist of the middle ages in search of ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... order to that of the sun. The current might therefore be defined as the swift carrier of heat. Loading itself here with invisible power, by a process of transmutation which outstrips the dreams of the alchemist, it can discharge its load, in the fraction of a second, as light and heat, at the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the voter whose politics are formed by his newspaper, than there was between the legislator who passed laws against witches, and the burgher who defended his guild from some feudal aggression? between the enlightened scholar and the dunce of to-day, than there was between the monkish alchemist and the block head of yesterday? Peasant, voter, and dunce of this century are no doubt wiser than the churl, burgher, and blockhead of the twelfth. But the gentleman, statesman, and scholar of the present age are at least ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... that is master of so rich a store May laugh at Croesus and esteem him poor; And with his smoky sceptre in his fist, Securely flout the toiling alchemist, Who daily labors with a vain expense In distillations of the quintessence, Not knowing that this golden herb alone ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... into the party was wholly appropriate, if one may call to witness some of Jonson's writings. The subject under discussion was one that Jonson was acquainted with, in The Alchemist: ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... design to anatomy, and composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have that impression which those around Leonardo received from him. Poring over his crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying, by a strange variation of the alchemist's dream, to discover the secret, not of an elixir to make man's natural life immortal, but of giving immortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of painting, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... possible to form an absolute system of pedagogy, as, with fixed elements, there is formed the science of chemistry. But the quick atoms of spirit that manifest their affinities under the eye of that alchemist, the teacher, are far more subtle than the elements that go into the crucible in any ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... always been working itself clearer and clearer, and depositing impurity after impurity. There was a time when the most powerful of human intellects were deluded by the gibberish of the astrologer and the alchemist; and just so there was a time when the most enlightened and virtuous statesmen thought it the first duty of a government to persecute heretics, to found monasteries, to make war on Saracens. But time advances; facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint glimpses ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and modern China, including the spirits recognized by Chinese Buddhism, are curiously mixed and vague personalities.[559] Nature worship is not absent, but it is nature as seen by the fancy of the alchemist and astrologer. The powers that control nature are also identified with ancient heroes, but they are mostly heroes of the type of St. George and the Dragon of whom history has little to say, and Chinese ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... planned, as he says, by Nicolo de Lazina, a Cremonese noble, who was chancellor at the time. It is interesting both from the point of view of the carving and costume, and as showing the apparatus of an alchemist's laboratory. Close by it on the wall is the "metrical epitaph," which De Diversis says the chancellor composed. The columns, which are of Curzola marble, belong to the earlier building, though the entasis shows that classical feeling was ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... chiefly of animal origin. It is mostly procured by the decomposition of the phosphoric acid which is found in bones. It was accidentally discovered at Hamburgh, in 1669, by an alchemist named Brandt. ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... can with Logic absolute The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute: The Sovereign Alchemist that in a trice Life's leaden metal ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... which he was rebuked, was running a stick through the ceiling of a low passage to find some new chamber, which could be made effective for some flights of his vivid imagination." He was very much attached to his sisters, and used to entertain them with stories, in which "an alchemist, old and grey, with a long beard," who was supposed to abide mysteriously in the garret of Field Place, played a prominent part. "Another favourite theme was the 'Great Tortoise,' that lived in Warnham Pond; and any unwonted noise was accounted for ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Torah (Law), hitherto hidden in the points and strokes of the Pentateuch, in its vowels and accents, and even in the potential transmutations of the letters of its words. Lurya, the great German Egyptian Cabalist, with Vital, the Italian alchemist, sojourned to the grave of Simon bar Yochai, its fabled author. Lurya himself, who preferred the silence and loneliness of the Nile country to the noise of the Talmud-School, who dressed in white on Sabbath, and wore a fourfold garment to signify the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... house old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory; not such as a modern man of science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling apparatus, and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose. With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Easter morning—the church bells were ringing. The sun was careering in the heavens. Under a burning fever the alchemist had watched all night: he had boiled and cooled—mixed and distilled. I heard him sigh like a despairing creature; I heard him pray; I perceived that he held his breath in his anxiety. The lamp had gone out—he did not seem ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... income. I remember that I once heard a mesmerist, at Madame d'Espard's, undertake to prove by very specious historical deductions, that this old man, if put under the magnifying glass, would turn out to be the famous Balsamo, otherwise called Cagliostro. According to this modern alchemist, the Sicilian had escaped death, and amused himself making gold for his grandchildren. And the Bailli of Ferette declared that he recognized in this extraordinary personage the ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac |
