"Alembic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... raining plum cakes!" exclaimed the Chevalier La Corne to his lively companion. "Joy's golden drops are only distilled in the alembic of woman's heart! What think you, Hortense? Which of Quebec's fair daughters will be willing to share ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... artist; but nature and human life, for the purposes of fiction, need a creative genius. The importation into the novel of the vulgar, sordid, and ignoble in life is always unbearable, unless genius first fuses the raw material in its alembic. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Stirling's DARIUS (1604), lines in themselves very tolerable, alike in cadence and sonority, but destined to be remembered by reason of the way in which the master, casting them into his all-transmuting alembic, has remade them in the fine gold of his subtler ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers and adversaries, but when the letter of the Scriptures presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth century, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... leaden-colored horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down about one, beyond which nothing is visible save in faint line or dark projection; the ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a chimney-pot. He who can extract pleasurable emotions from the alembic of such a day has a trick of alchemy with which I am ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the nobility of the common people and of its song; the national phase is a mere incident of political conditions. The war of races is no alembic for beauty of art. If there were no national lines, there would still be folk-song,—merely without sharp distinction. The future of music lies less in the differentiation of human song, ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... incapable. Feed well the hungry mind, lest it perish of inanition. It is a sponge in infancy that imbibes ideas without an effort; it is a safety-valve through which fancy and poetry conduct away foul vapors; it is an alembic, retaining only the pure and valuable of all that is poured into it, to be stored for future use. It is a lightning-rod that conducts away from the body all superfluous electricity. It does not harm a sensible child to put it to study ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... the woods is the wizard gone; In his grotto the maiden sits alone. She gazes up with a weary smile At the rafter-hanging crocodile, The slowly swinging crocodile. Scorn has she of her master's gear, Cauldron, alembic, crystal sphere, Phial, philtre—"Fiddlededee For all such trumpery trash!" quo' she. "A soldier is the lad for me; ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... formidable reflector of her own image was scarcely self-complacent or serene. It was rather studious, anxious, critical, almost fierce, like that one would expect to find on the face of an ancient alchemist contemplating an alembic of precious compounds. Year in, year out, ever since her gradually waning youth had begun to add ever fresh complications to her once rapid and easy toilet, Mrs. Delarayne had faced herself with this determined and defiant expression on her features, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... and others. For women in childbed and for consumptives were reserved the bouillons or "restaurants,"—these were composed of meat, of animals or of chickens, cut up very fine and distilled in an alembic with peeled barley, dried roses, cinnamon, coriander, and Damascus raisins. One of the most succulent of these bouillons was called ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... may be made to ascertain their qualities. Zosimus, the Panopolitan, had described in former times the operation of distillation, by which water may be purified; the Arabs called the apparatus for conducting that experiment an alembic. His treatise on the virtues and composition of waters was conveyed under the form of a dream, in which there flit before us fantastically white-haired priests sacrificing before the altar; cauldrons of boiling water, in which there are walking about ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... perform his duty, in whatever situation he may be placed, leaving consequences to follow in their natural course. These, my first impressions, were fully confirmed by subsequent intercourse, in situations and under circumstances which, by experience, I have found an unfailing alembic for the trial of character—a crucible wherein, if the metal be impure, the drossy substances are sure to display themselves. It is not my province to extol or pronounce judgment upon his acts; they are a ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... himself from society altogether, and give himself up to the study of those Arabian sages and alchemists in whom he had delighted when he was a young man. He saw him shun the daylight, and sleep its hours away, and then by night abandon himself like another Cagliostro to strange experiments with alembic and crucible, breathing acrid and poisonous vapours, seeking to extort from Nature her yet undiscovered secrets,—the Philosophers Stone, and the Elixir of Life. He saw him turn for a little from his strange and deadly experiments, and venture forth to show his blanched and worn ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... product of Goethe's muse. We believe that it is an old ballad of Denmark; a country which possesses, next to Scotland, the richest and most interesting store of ancient ballad poetry in Europe. However, although originally Danish, it has received some touches in passing through the alembic of translation, which may warrant us in giving it a prominent place, and we are sure that no lover of hoar tradition will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... ashes from the hearth, Fling back the dust I borrowed from the earth Into the chemic broil of death and birth, The vast alembic of the cryptic scheme, ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... no—that is, if you want to see it in print. Offer it to the first-class houses. Some publisher's reader may be mad enough or drunk enough to report favorably on it. You've read the books. The meat of them has been transmuted in the alembic of Martin Eden's mind and poured into 'The Shame of the Sun,' and one day Martin Eden will be famous, and not the least of his fame will rest upon that work. So you must get a publisher for ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... those drawn from vegetables by common distillation in the alembic, with the aid of water; these contain the oily and volatile part of the plant, and are called essential oils. The third sort are those produced by distillation, but of a different kind in an open vessel, and ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... Scheele's Om Brunsten, eller Magnesia, och dess Egenakaper. Stockholm, 1774, and published as Alembic Club Reprints, No. 13, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... by the claim of intellect, but by the warmer appeal to the heart, of kindred sympathy and suffering. True poets, they have placed in their spiritual alembic the common woes and sorrows of life, and extracted from them "by force of their so potent art," a cordial for ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... parts comprising the animal economy. The urine is this detritus in a state of solution. The components of urine are chemically similar to those of calculi, and as the components of the one vary according to the disintegration occurring at the time in the vital alembic, so do those of the other. While, therefore, a calculus is only as urine precipitated and solidified, and this fluid only as calculous matter suspended in a menstruum, it must appear that the lithic diathesis ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... refused for the glory of God, from whose holy angel she believed she had received the water. The receipt for making it and directions for using it were also found on the fly-leaf. The principal component parts were burnt wine and rosemary, passed through an alembic; a drachm of it was to be taken once a week, "etelbenn vagy italbann," in the food or the drink, early in the morning, and the cheeks were to be moistened with it every day. The effects, according to the statement, were wonderful—and perhaps they were upon the queen; but whether the water ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... dyspeptic. They are a mill-stone slung about the neck of the giant of civilization. "What will people say?" Well, if you tell them a new truth, they will say that you are a demagogue or a blasphemer, an anarchist or a Populist; but when your new truth has been transformed by Time's great alembic into an old falsehood, they will have absorbed it—it will have become respectable—and you couldn't purge it from their soggy brain with Theodorus' Auticyrian hellebore. They said of Galileo, "Imprison ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the sinful gibberish; notwithstanding, to this day I believe that in all truth he was nigh attaining his purpose; and he might have done so at last were it not that, a short space after this, he was choked by the vapor from an alembic ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the belly turns the world into a robber's cave. Eating means killing. Distilled in the alembic of the stomach, the life destroyed by slaughter becomes so much fresh life. Everything is melted down again, everything has a fresh ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... arena, till the scent of its sawdust was dear to their nostrils. But the people knew little of them individually and took their tone from the politicians of the past. So—as it is a known fact that politicians are never satisfied—the Cabinet and Congress, as tried in the hotel alembic, were not ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... demonstration. We cannot blame science for ruling out that which it cannot touch with its analysis, or repeat with its synthesis. The phenomena of life are as obvious to us as anything in the world; we know their signs and ways, and witness their power, yet in the alembic of our science they turn out to be only physico-chemical processes; hence that is all there is of them. Vitality, says Huxley, has no more reality than the horology of a clock. Yet Huxley sees three equal realities in the universe—matter, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... share in the excitement of the departure for "meeting." Gay clamored to go, but was pacified by the gift of a rag-doll that Samantha had made for her the evening before. It was a monstrosity, but Gay dipped it instantly in the alembic of her imagination, and it became a beautiful, responsive little daughter, which she clasped close in her arms, and on which she showered the tenderest ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... already been intimated,—was provided for by an interest in certain distinct and dividend-bearing securities, which—to the honor of the Major—had never been submitted to the alembic of his figures and "accounts current." She was placed at a school where she accomplished herself for three or four years; and put the seal to her accomplishments by marrying very suddenly, and without family consultation,—under which she usually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... me I had no right to love, I do love, and I study women. I began with the ugly ones, for it is best to take the bull by the horns. So I took my master's wife, who has certainly been an angel to me, for my first study. Perhaps I did wrong; but I couldn't help it. I passed her through my alembic and what did I find? this thought, crouching at the bottom of her heart, 'I am not so ugly as they think me'; and if a man were to work upon that thought he could bring her to the edge of the abyss, pious ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... physician, who travelled in China, says he never saw an alembic or distillatory apparatus in the whole country. The art of distillation, however, is very well known, and in common practice. Their Sau-tchoo, (literally burnt wine), is an ardent spirit distilled from various kinds of grain, but most commonly ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... supreme and over against this he set with strong finality man's hopeless fallen state. He was doubtless in debt to St. Paul for these governing conceptions but they took new character as they passed through the alembic of his own experience. "The one pervading thought of the Greek fathers concerning the redemptive work of Christ is that men are thereby brought into unity with God. They do not hesitate to designate this unity to be as a deification ... they dwell on the idea that ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... had been one of the sultriest of August. It would seem as if the fierce alembic of the last twenty-four hours had melted it like the pearl in the golden cup of Cleopatra, and it lay in the West a fused mass of transparent brightness. The reflection from the edges of a hundred clouds wandered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... see one of the works to which he referred in his history; whereupon Carlyle packed up and sent down to Gad's Hill all his reference volumes, and Dickens read them faithfully. But the more he read the more he was astonished to find how the facts had passed through the alembic of Carlyle's brain and had come out and fitted themselves, each as a part of one great whole, making a compact result, indestructible and unrivalled; and he always found himself turning away from the books of reference, and re-reading with ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... to know facts but quite another thing to know the significance of facts. And imagination is the alembic that discovers the significance of the facts. A thousand men of England knew the facts touching the life and education of the children of that country, but the facts remained mere facts until the imagination of Dickens interpreted ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... thoughts, sparkling with wit, teeming with sentiment, and each and all of them based on immutable truths. The more I read of the works of this highly gifted writer, the more am I delighted with them; for his philosophy passes through the alembic of a mind glowing with noble and generous sentiments, of which ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... composed of various tubes fitted with their several fluids, the laws and functions of which have been deduced from calculations of velocities, altitudes, diameters, friction, &c. Another class considered man as a mere chemical engine, and his stomach as an alembic. The doctrine of affinities, attractions, and repulsions, now had full play. Then came the notion of sympathies and antipathies, by which name unknown and unknowable causes were sought to be explained, and ignorance was cunningly veiled in mystery. But ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... heart I cannot hit with my small-arm, marking the goodly masses and unobtrusive meek beauties of it, and longing for them in vain. No amount of dissecting shall reveal the core of Sandro's Venus. For after you have pared off the husk of the restorer, or bled in your alembic the very juices the craftsman conjured withal, you come down to the seamy wood, and Art is gone. Nay, but your Morelli, your Crowe, ciphering as they went for want of thought, what did they do but screw Art into test- tubes, and serve you up the fruit ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if, in the moment of riot, and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness, by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilization amongst us, and among many other nations, we are ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... year, I may say that music is the one essential. After the evening spent around the piano, or the flute, or the violin, how warm and how chastened is the kiss with which the family all say good night! Ah, the music has taken all the day cares and thrown them into its terrible alembic and boiled them and rocked them and cooled them, till they are crystallized into one care, which is a most sweet and rare desirable sorrow—the yearning ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... with it, it will be -very intelligible to the audience, even if they have not read the original fable; and you have had the address to make it coherent, without the marvellous, though so much depended on that part. In short, you have put my extravagant materials in an alembic, and drawn off only ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the alembic to which the Animal conveys what each of its organizations, in proportion to the strength of that vessel, can absorb of that Substance, which ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... natural affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him justice, he is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt you are selected as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be death; perhaps a fate more awful still. Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest of science before his eyes, will ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... adulterated copper, but unadulterated lead. Incredible as it may seem to readers of the historian, the poeticule has actually contrived so far to transfigure by dint of disfiguring him that this most noble and pathetic scene in all the annals of chivalry, when passed through the alembic of his incompetence, appears in a garb of transforming verse under a guise at once weak and wordy, coarse and unchivalrous. The whole scene is at all points alike in its unlikeness ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... admonitions of the inditer of this correspondence. Become not a smuggler—forswear poteen. The Lord forgive me, Mr. Hycy—no, I only wished to say forswear—not the poteen—but any connection wid the illegal alembic from which it is distillated, otherwise they will walk off wid the 'doublings,' or strong liquor, leaving you nothing but the residuum or feints. Take a friend's advice, therefore, and retrograde out of all society and connection wid the villains I have described; or if you superciliously ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... In that terrible alembic the spiritual ingredients which made Peter's soul had been stirred until only the essential remained. But that essence was the real Peter—a wholesome young man steeped in idealism slightly tinged with humor. It was idealism that had made him attempt the impossible, ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... currency; exchange rate; bureau de change. chemistry, alchemy; progress, growth, lapse, flux. passage; transit, transition; transmigration, shifting &c. v.; phase; conjugation; convertibility. crucible, alembic, caldron, retort. convert, pervert, renegade, apostate. V. be converted into; become, get, wax; come to, turn to, turn into, evolve into, develop into; turn out, lapse, shift; run into, fall into, pass into, slide into, glide ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... attention. The one is but the flying abroad of all the faculties to the open doors and windows at every passing rumor; the other is the concentration of every one of them in a single focus, as in the alchemist over his alembic at the moment of expected projection. Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... time. And vinegar, as it contains much vinous spirit, is probably a noxious part of our diet. And the distilled vinegar, which is commonly sold in the shops, is truly poisonous, as it is generally distilled by means of a pewter or leaden alembic-head or worm-tube, and abounds with lead; which any one may detect by mixing with it a solution of liver of sulphur. Opium, when taken as a luxury, not as a medicine, is as pernicious as alcohol; ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of Life, is it a play Which runs a thousand nights? Is it a dream Precipitated into some alembic Or glass ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... water into fresh, by boiling the former and passing the steam through a cooled pipe into a recipient, would not have escaped the students of the Philosopher's "stone;" and thus we find throughout Europe the Arabic modifications of Greek terms Alchemy, Alembic (Al- ), Chemistry and Elixir; while "Alcohol" (Al-Kohl), originally meaning "extreme tenuity or impalpable state of pulverulent substances," clearly shows the origin of the article. Avicenna, who died in A.H. 428 1036, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... find the transient and the immortal confounded together, and the transient often uppermost. Even a foreign country is not always, as has been said, a contemporaneous posterity. It is said that no American writer was ever so warmly received in England as Artemus Ward. It is only the slow alembic of the years that finally eliminates from this vast mass of literature its few immortal drops, and leaves the rest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... heats." Into the glowing music of Wagner my son read lessons in renunciation, the sordidness of the lust for gold, the sublimity of pure human love, the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. The occasional voluptuousness of the music was so transmuted in the alembic of his temperament that for him the sensual element was eliminated. An incident illustrative of his devotion to Wagner is worth recording. In the summer of 1913, during our holiday tour in Germany, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... add to them half a handful of rosemary, half a handful of balm, and one quarter of a handful of sweet marjoram. Let them steep in an earthen pot twenty-four hours, and, as you put them into the alembic to distil them, bruise them with your hands; make a gentle fire under them, and distil by slow degrees. You may mix the waters at your pleasure when you have drawn them all. Sweeten it with loaf sugar; then strain it into ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... the last alembic, is distilled the refined essence of that thought which began with the Gods, and which they left him to ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... similar terms that he pressed the forms of his book on the acceptance of the English exiles at Frankfort, and to a great extent with success. Their Book of Common Order is founded on Farel's and Calvin's services, but is so after these services have passed through the alembic of Pollanus and been modified and supplemented by him. This will appear from several of the notes subjoined, and will be more fully ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... the mischief in the false ideas of constancy which are generated and cherished in its name, if not by its agency. Your enemies are intense, but temporary. Time wears off the edge of hostility. It is the alembic in which offenses are dissolved into thin air, and a calm indifference reigns in their stead. But your friends are expected to be a permanent arrangement. They are not only a sore evil, but of long continuance. Adhesiveness ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... unaware that within herself there was a power, a certain intellectual alembic of which she was quite unconscious, by which she could distil the good of each, and quietly leave the residuum behind her ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... proceeded to actual experiment with rude crucible and alembic in her own chamber. She essayed some age-old recipes of blended herbs and ingredients within her reach, handled at certain hours of the night and phases of the moon. All were innocent enough, it seemed. She cured a beloved old dog of rheumatism and partial blindness. She discovered ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... ounces of English saffron very clean, cut it fine, and steep it twenty-four hours in a gallon of the best white wine. Put it into an alembic with three gallons of water, draw it off gently so long as the saffron tastes, and sweeten it with white sugar candy. Dissolve the candy in some of the weaker extract, after the stronger part is drawn off, by setting it on the fire, and then mix the ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... fixed on the window; he hardly seemed to hear her. At length he walked across the room and pulled up the shade. The electric lights were dissolving in the gray alembic of the dawn. A milk-cart rattled down the street and, like a witch returning late from the Sabbath, a stray cat whisked into an area. So rose the ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... In the Middle Ages, the blessing of some saint was invoked to protect from the rude attacks of the barbarians, and the destructive hand of time, the building erected by man's devotion to the worship of God. So, with this Bridge will ever be coupled the thought of one, through the subtle alembic of whose brain, and by whose facile fingers, communication was maintained between the directing power of its construction, and the obedient agencies of its execution. It is thus an everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of woman, and of her capacity for that ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... pledge you in one draught of song, Caught in this rhymster's cup from earth's delight, Where English fields are green the whole year long— The wine of might, That the new-come spring distills, most sweet and strong, In the viewless air's alembic, that's wrought too fine for sight. Good health! we pledge, that care may lightly sleep, And pain of age be gone for this one day, As of this loving cup you take, and, drinking deep, Are glad at heart straightway To feel once more the friendly heat of the sun ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... while in some there has been such a fusion of the two systems that we cannot decide which of the ingredients was the older, except by a process of analysis and a comparison of the several products of the alembic with the recognized institutions of the class of original or of ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... planned experimental investigation, and of clear reasoning upon the results of experiment. It is neither so widely read by the younger chemists nor is it so readily accessible as it ought to be, and the object of the Alembic Club in issuing it as the first volume of a series of Reprints of historically important contributions to Chemistry, is to place it within easy reach of every student of Chemistry and of the ...
— Experiments upon magnesia alba, Quicklime, and some other Alcaline Substances • Joseph Black
... to match thy rich perfume Chemic art did ne'er presume Through her quaint alembic strain, None so sov'reign to the brain; Nature, that did in thee excel, Framed again no second smell. Roses, violets, but toys For the smaller sort of boys, Or for greener damsels meant; Thou art ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... followed Evelyn Colcord, sitting like a statue, unable to move nor to speak, passed through a limbo of nameless emotion. Through her mind swept a flashing filament of despair, hope, craven fear, and sturdy resolution. Tortured in the human alembic, she was at length resolved, seeing with a vision that pierced all her horizons. And then, trembling, tense, there came—a thought? A vision? She knew not what it was, nor was she conscious of attempting to ascertain. She knew only that for a fleeting instant the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... seeks, in the language of Scripture, a meaning that is not expressed by any of the ordinary rules of language. It sets at defiance all the laws of language, and makes fancy the interpreter of prophecy. "It subjects clear predictions to an exegetical alembic that effectually subtilizes and ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... how the immortal phantoms crowd around me! I see the vast alembic ever working, I see and know the flames that heat the world, The glow, the blush, the beating hearts of lovers, So blissful happy some, and some so silent, dark, and nigh to death; Love, that is all ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... theory,—That the Sun is an Electric Space, fed and governed by the {42} planets, which have the property of attracting heat from it; and the means of supplying the necessary pabulum by their degenerated air driven off towards the central space—the wonderful alembic in which it becomes transmuted to the revivifying necessities of continuous action; and the central space or Sun being perfectly electric, has the counter property of repulsing the bodies that attract it. How wonderful a conception! How ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... matron, whitened with good works and age, Approached the Sabbath of her pilgrimage; Her spirit to himself the Almighty drew, Breathed on the alembic, and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan |
