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More "Alchemy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... warmth of feeling about a peasant-girl, and Wordsworth cherish the domestic affections in a cottage; but for the dazzling, brilliant forms of passion we must enter the world of magic, where diamonds are as plentiful as blackberries, and all surrounding objects are turned to gold by the alchemy of an excited imagination. The only difference is that, while other men assume that the commonest things will take a splendid colour as seen through a lover's eyes, Disraeli takes care that whatever his lovers see ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... energies are paralyzed. But hope lends wings,—hope and faith are creative, and can both control and change the trend of events. Circumstances are but the crude material, which is subject to any degree of transformation by the alchemy of faith. "When a god wishes to ride, every chip and stone will bud and shoot out winged feet to carry him," and it is hope and faith that give the power of ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... as there seems no given instant when a man passes actually from sleep to waking, from pleasure to pain, from joy to grief. There is, indeed, no fixed threshold between the states of normal and abnormal consciousness. In this stranger he imagined a sense of companionship that by some magic of alchemy transformed his deep loneliness into joy, and satisfied his passionate yearnings by bringing their subjective fulfillment within range. To have found acceptance in his sight was thus a revolutionary fact in his existence. While ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... girl who used to be, The days are long in Faerie,— Their garnered sunshine's wealth of gold No royal treasure-vault may hold. And now, as if our earth possessed Alchemy's fabled Alkahest, Our harbors blaze with jewelled light, Our air-ships wing their ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... it was this fact that enabled him to waste money on all sorts of hobbies instead of going to his office with his little black bag and behaving generally as a "weel tappit" husband and king would do. Rudolph's hobbies were alchemy and astronomy. The chief object of the former extremely inexact science seems to have been to make gold by the synthetic process. Any charlatan who came along with a declared conviction that he ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... were great schools of magic. The teachers taught that all knowledge might be obtained by the assistance of fallen angels. These teachers were skilled in the abstract sciences, in alchemy, in the various languages of mankind, and of the lower animals, divinity, magic, and prophecy. They professed to possess the power of controlling the winds and waters, and of influencing the stars. They also pretended to be able to cause earthquakes, spread diseases or cure them, release souls ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... the plants germinate and grow, first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. But it is not the husbandman who makes them grow. It is, first, the miraculous plasmic power in the grain of seed, which brings forth after its kind; then the alchemy of sunlight which, in presence of the green colouring matter of the leaves, gathers hydrogen from the water and carbon from the gases in the air, and mingles them in the hydro-carbons of plant growth; and, finally, the wholly occult vital powers of the plant itself, stored ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... the best period of the Renaissance. Italy went through the disease earlier, when Petrarch in the fourteenth century confessed, in his polemic against it, that gold-making was a general practice. Since then that particular kind of faith, devotion, and isolation which the practice of alchemy required became more and more rare in Italy, just when Italian and other adepts began to make their full profit out of the great lords in the North. Under Leo X the few Italians who busied themselves with it were called 'ingenia curiosa,' and Aurelio Augurelli, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... and moral chemistry changes the material base of thought, giving more spirituality to consciousness and causing it to depend 422:18 less on material evidence. These changes which go on in mortal mind serve to reconstruct the body. Thus Christian Science, by the alchemy of Spirit, destroys ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... was especially fatal), that in all cases, e.g. of heat or cold, the forma, or set of conditions, is one thing. A similar notion, viz. that each property of gold, as of other things, has its one forma, produced the belief in Alchemy. ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... from them, that they now knew that the Jefferson menace which had been built up week after week by rumor and also by fact, as represented in scores, was real,—that the purple team was invincible, that Ridgley had met the irresistible force and could not by any alchemy of spirit ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... bravely, as the moment's tension passed, 'my original idea was simply to treat Bourcelles as an epitome, a miniature, so to speak, of the big world, while showing how Nature sweetened and kept it pure as by a kind of alchemy. But that idea has grown. I have the feeling now that the Bourcelles we know is a mere shadowy projection cast by a more real Bourcelles behind. It is only the dream village we know in our waking life. The real one—er—we ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... almost as the humanizing feature, of earthly life. It is noticeable that the clergyman, the physician, and the artist are the only specific types that attracted Hawthorne; he held them all romantically, and science he conceived as alchemy. This same predisposition appears in "Rappaccini's Daughter;" she was the experiment of her father in creating a live poison-woman, a vitalized flower, the Dryad as it were of the poison-tree humanized in ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... moved none ever recollected, but the entire mass—men, women, children, dogs—made a simultaneous and tumultuous rush for the entrance. They congested the doorway, pushing for precedence—resolving themselves at length into a line and moving up step by step. By some subtle spiritual or physical alchemy observation had been transmuted into action—the sightseers had become participants in the spectacle—the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... at the ends of these tracts there are upwards of a hundred English tracts, nearly all of the period, and most of them translations. Alchemy looks up since the chemists have found perfectly different substances composed of the same elements and proportions. It is true the chemists cannot yet transmute; but they may in time: they poke about most assiduously. It seems, then, that the conviction that alchemy must be ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... relations, however, were not broken off, and they continued to meet. Penautier was considered such a lucky fellow that it was generally expected he would somehow or other get some day the post he coveted so highly. People who had no faith in the mysteries of alchemy declared that Sainte-Croix and ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... directed by the philosophic spirit, and quickened with the life and energy of the nineteenth century, is a very different pursuit from the Archaeology of our forefathers, and has as little relation to their antiquarianism as modern Chemistry and modern Astronomy have to their former prototypes—Alchemy and Astrology. In proof of this, I may confidently appeal to the good work which Archaeology has done, and the great advances which it has struck out in different directions within the last fifty years. Within this brief period it has made discoveries, perhaps in themselves ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... is another race of critics who might be designated as the Occult School—vere adepti. They discern no beauties but what are concealed from superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind. Their art is the transmutation of styles. By happy alchemy of mind they convert dross into gold—and gold into tinsel. They see farther into a millstone than most others. If an author is utterly unreadable, they can read him for ever: his intricacies are ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... found it necessary to be more mystical and weird in his dealings with this second party than with the first. He did a great many strange things which savored of magic and alchemy. Among other things, he got some fine bone dust, which he assured his followers was the dust of the bodies of the spirits who were to lead them to the treasure; and a little of this, wrapped up in a paper, he gave to each one of them, which they were to keep ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... precious steps into the unknown that enable humanity after them to see things more clearly than ever before. There are definite historical grounds for placing Basil Valentine as the first of the series of careful observers who differentiated chemistry from the old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of information to the uses of medicine. It is said to have been because of the study of Basil Valentine's work that Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic traditions, so supreme in medicine up to his time, and began ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... word, if you don't mind. You have been abominably treated and you seek no revenge. That is very fine. You have been abominably treated and you bear no malice. That is superior. You have been abominably treated and you accept it with a smile. That is alchemy. It is only a noble nature that can extract the beautiful from the ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... liquid—namely, "alcohol," and its origin is not less singular. The Dutch physician, Van Helmont, lived in the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century—in the transition period between alchemy and chemistry—and was rather more alchemist than chemist. Appended to his "Opera Omnia," published in 1707, there is a very needful "Clavis ad obscuriorum sensum referandum," in which the following ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the alchemy of the Great War, many things are changing and in the wonderful days of reconstruction that lie ahead the Farmer is destined to play an upstanding part in the new greatness of our country. Because of this it ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... the place where I first met my parents. It was at that time that an acquaintance sprang up which has ripened in later years into mutual respect and esteem. It was there that what might be termed a casual meeting took place, that has, under the alchemy of resist-less years, turned to golden links, forming a pleasant but powerful bond of union between my parents and myself. For that reason, I hope that I may be spared to my parents ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... beyond their legitimate application was a source of confusion in the early ages of science. Most of the superstitions of primitive religion, of astrology, and of alchemy, arose from this source. A good example is the extension of the metaphor in the words generation and corruption: words in constant use in scientific works until the nineteenth century began. Generation is the production of a substance that before was not, and corruption is the destruction ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... thoroughly well, that this divine alchemy, this transmutation of the human creature into God, is generally impossible, for the Saviour, as a rule, keeps His singular favours for His elect; but after all, every one, however unworthy, is presumably able to attain that majestic end, since God only decides, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... Catholic gentleman. Sandy (Napier) was also probably his mother's medical adviser: he certainly acted as such to some members of her family. A man of fervent piety—his "knees were horny with frequent praying," says Aubrey—he was, besides, a zealous student of alchemy and astrology, a friend of Dee, of Lilly, and of Booker. Very likely Kenelm had been entrusted to Allen's care at Oxford on the recommendation of Sandy; for Allen, one of his intimates, was a serious occultist, who, according to his servant's account, "used ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... prove a solace, sympathy will be given, for sympathy grows spontaneously in a democratic atmosphere. Books, pictures, and flowers come forth as if by magic to bear their kindly messages and to render their appointed service. By the subtle alchemy of her very presence, the teacher who is deeply imbued with the spirit of democracy fuses the spirits of her pupils and causes them to blend in the pursuit of truth. Thus she brings it to pass that the spirit of democracy ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... felicitations to Jacques Coictier bore reference principally to the temporal advantages which the worthy physician had found means to extract, in the course of his much envied career, from each malady of the king, an operation of alchemy much better and more certain than the pursuit of the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... one so young! and strangely read In books of quaint philosophy—although His mind's strange alchemy could find some Rich thought hidden in the basest thing, Which he transmuted into golden words, So that in hearing him I often thought Upon the story of that Saint whose mouth Was radiant with the angel's blessed touch, Which gave him superhuman eloquence; And though he was thus gifted, ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... Mr. Clausen," she said, at the same time, by some transforming alchemy of woman, presenting to the newcomer eyes that showed no hint ...
— The Game • Jack London
... (Vol. iii., p. 168.).—Bishop Thornborough may have been thus styled from his attachment to alchemy and chemistry. One of his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... which was a drug and a curse to our manufacturers, when treated under the hands of the chemist, has been the means of supplying us with dyes rivalling in loveliness and variety the hues of the rainbow. If the alchemy of science can extract beautiful colours from coal tar, cannot Divine alchemy enable us to evolve gladness and brightness out of the agonised hearts and dark, dreary, loveless lives of these doomed myriads? ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... performance,—something which that witty and splendid company, who made up the Christmas party at Whitehall, on the occasion of its first exhibition there, who sat there 'rustling in silk,' breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; though there might have been one among them, 'a gentleman of blood and breeding,' who could have told ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... are together, O mysterious tome, whose Arab name breathes a strange mustiness of occult lore and claims kindred with the sciences of almagest and alchemy. What will you show me? Let us turn the leaves at random. Before fixing one's eyes on a definite point in the landscape, it is well to take a summary view of the whole. Page follows swiftly upon page, telling me nothing. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... her hunger, when on her return she gave play to her teeth. Now by reason of reading the legends written by the way, and of separating by death the embraces of birds and wild beasts, she discovered a mystery of natural alchemy, while colouring her complexion, and superagitating her feeble imagination, which did little to pacify her warlike nature, and strongly tickled her desire which laughed, played, and frisked unmistakably. The seneschal thought to disarm ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... and, merely because of his violent antipathy towards the Eurasian element in the Far East, the dulcissima had appeared invariably as a tall, slender creature, with the lightest of flaxen hair and the grayest of gray eyes. Now, some alchemy devised by the magician spirit of New York had fashioned his ideal, though slender, not so tall, and she owned a wealth of brown hair, hair that shone and glistened in every changing light, while her eyes were either blue ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... You have but to look at the master, she says, and you will comprehend. 'There he stands, a stately figure, gray and rugged, yet with a certain graciousness; simple, kindly, and yet austere; one who had accepted his sorrow, and, by some alchemy of the spirit, transmuted it into universal compassion, to speak, through the Cremona, ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... the well leaves would decay to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust would carry clear of the canyon and scatter in the subjacent woods. Even moisture and decaying vegetable matter could not, with all nature's alchemy, concoct enough soil to nourish a few poor grasses. It is the same, they say, in the neighbourhood of all silver mines; the nature of that precious rock being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar. Both were plenty in our Silverado. ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he returned to the excavation and scooped out yet another collection. This time there could be no mistake. Nature's own alchemy had fashioned a veritable ingot. There were small lumps in the ore which would need alloy at the mint before they could be issued as sovereigns, so free ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... generation, Wilkinson left the work to the magic and sovereign forces now at play; he did not risk marring the alchemy by a single word. After a moment which seemed an hour he found himself once more confronted by the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... are postulating a linear progression from the old social sciences—forget it," Neel said. "There is the same relationship here that alchemy holds to physics. The old boys with their frog guts and awful offal knew a bit about things like distilling and smelting. But there was no real order to their knowledge, and it was all an unconsidered by-product of their single goal, ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... finally, the other kind of men whom this other Shepherd leads into His pastures, 'They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.' Aye! that is it. That is why He can lead them where He does lead them. Strange alchemy which out of two crimsons, the crimson of our sins and the crimson of His blood, makes one white! But it is so, and the only way by which we can ever be cleansed, either with the initial cleansing of forgiveness, or with the daily cleansing of continual purifying and approximation to the divine ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a man of considerable social talent, lively in conversation, and dealing in playful wit and amusing sarcasm. Dominici relates that two Spanish officers, visiting at his house one day, entered upon a serious discussion on the subject of alchemy. The host, finding their talk some what tedious, gravely informed them that he him self happened to be in possession of the philosopher's stone, and that they might, if they pleased, see his way of using it, the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... and prophecy. It was the frequent theme or satire in the New Comedy of the Greeks and in the Comedy of Rome; it has fallen under the lash of Horace and Juvenal; nowhere is Lucian more amusing than when dealing with this species of roguery. Chaucer with exquisite humour exposed it and its kindred alchemy in the fourteenth century, and Ben Jonson and the author of Albumazar in the seventeenth. Nothing in Hudibras is more rich in wit and humour than the exposure of Sidrophel, and one of the best of Dryden's comedies is the Mock Astrologer. But it was reserved for Swift to produce the ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... no less warmly: "We can hardly give too much appreciation to that subtile alchemy of the brain which has enabled him to produce out of dull, crabbed, and often illegible state papers, the vivid, graphic, and sparkling narrative which he has given ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... discovering the human heart like affliction, especially the affliction which springs from passion. Does a writer startle you with his insight into your nature, be sure that he has mourned; such lore is the alchemy of tears. Hence the insensible and almost universal confusion of idea which confounds melancholy with depth, and finds but hollow inanity in the symbol of a laugh. Pitiable error! Reflection first leads us to gloom, but its next stage ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the soul in a natural and easy condition, and openeth it to the solaces of that pure and sublime entertainment which the angels do spread for such as obey the will of their Creator, hath discovered a more subtle alchemy than any of which the philosophers did dream,—for he transmuteth the enjoyments of others into his own, and his large and open heart partaketh of the satisfaction of all around him. Are there any here who, in the midst of outward abundance, are sorrowful of heart,—who ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... birth, This weakling man, my craft shall girth With cunning strength. Him I will take, And in stern arts my scholar make. This smoking reed, in which hold The empyrean spark, shall mould Rock and hard steel to use of man: He shall be as a god to plan And forge all things to his desire By alchemy of fire. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... been a girl of extraordinary beauty and charm. He had travelled far and seen many, but there had been none like Evelina. How he had loved her, in those dead yesterdays, and how she had loved him! The poignant sweetness of it came back, changed by some fatal alchemy into bitterness. ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... palace conspiracies of St. Petersburg; he lived at Berlin, and, under the name of Tzarogy, at the Court of the Margrave of Anspach. Thence he went, they say, to Italy, and then north to the Landgrave, Charles of Hesse, who dabbled in alchemy. Here he is said to have died about 1780-85, leaving his papers to the Landgrave; but all is very vague after he disappeared from Paris in 1760. When next I meet Saint-Germain he is again at Paris, again mysteriously rich, again he rather disappears than dies, he calls himself ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... book-hunter sometimes passes an evening is a medical man of no small talent. But attached as he is to his profession, archaeology is for ever striving with medicine for the first place in his affections, and his knowledge of herbals and the literature of alchemy is immense. His collection of works dealing with these subjects is well known to the booksellers, and the book-hunter sometimes receives a line from him asking him to pay a visit for the purpose of examining some recently ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... carried on discussions with them. Many of his writings are lost, but enough is extant to show that he was one of the earliest Chinese alchemists. The question has not yet been settled, but it is probable that alchemy first appeared in China, together with the cult of the "art" of prolonging life, and was later carried to the West, where it flourished among the ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... enveloped in the incense they burn at your feet." Wherever she went, as if a celestial magnet passed, all faces drifted towards her with admiring love and pleasure. By her lofty integrity and her matchless sweetness and skill, as by a rare alchemy, she transmuted her fugitive lovers into permanent friends. Her talents were as attractive as her features: little by little her conversation made the listener forget even her loveliness. Saint-Beuve says, "As her beauty slowly retreated, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... chilled the fervour of imagination, scattered into fragments many a noble design, and paralysed the finest genius. The distractions of GUIDO'S studies from his passion for gaming, and of PARMEGIANO'S for alchemy, have been traced in their works, which are often hurried over and unequal. It is curious to observe, that CUMBERLAND attributes the excellence of his comedy, The West Indian, to the peculiarly happy situation in which he found himself at the time of ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... satisfied Anstice that Iris had not been mistaken. Cheniston was dead; and as he stood looking down on the quiet face, which, by virtue of Death's magic alchemy, had regained in the last hour something of its former youth, Anstice knew a sincere and unfeigned pity for the young life so ruthlessly cut ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... troubled him, and that was how Rabelais, who had slept so long in peace beneath the Fig Tree of the Cemetery of St. Paul, could be risen now when his grave was weighed upon by No. 32 of the street of the same name. Howsoever, he would have guessed that the alchemy of that immeasurable mind had in some way got rid of the difficulty, and really the Hack must be forgiven for his faith, since one learned enough to know so much about sites, history and literature, is learned enough to doubt the senses ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... Vandyck, his style of living was so splendid and costly as to involve him in heavy debt. To repair his fortunes, he studied alchemy for a time, in the hope of discovering the philosopher's stone. But towards the end of his life he was enabled to retrieve his position, and to leave a comfortable competency to his widow. Rembrandt, on the other hand, involved himself in debt through his love of art. He was an insatiable ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... all magic, but a troublesome error, a pernicious foppery? physic, but intricate rules and prescriptions? philology, but vain criticisms? logic, needless sophisms? metaphysics themselves, but intricate subtleties, and fruitless abstractions? alchemy, but a bundle of errors? to what end are such great tomes? why do we spend so many years in their studies? Much better to know nothing at all, as those barbarous Indians are wholly ignorant, than as some ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... contribution the Greeks made to political study was that they invented it. It is not too much to say that, before fifth-century Greece, politics did not exist. There were powers and principalities, governments and subjects, but politics no more existed than chemistry existed in the age of alchemy. An imitation of an idea, as Plato has taught us, is not the same as an idea; nor is the imitation of a science the same as a science. Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar, Croesus the Lydian and Cyrus the Persian, ruled over great empires; but within their dominions there were no politics because there ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... discovering the natural causes. Thus it is only by degrees that fetishism is superseded by what now appears a common-sense interpretation of physical phenomena; that exorcism gives place to medicine; alchemy to chemistry; astrology to astronomy; and so forth. Everywhere the miraculous is progressively banished from the field of explanation by the advance of scientific discovery; and the places where it ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... of the earth, lay bare the primary strata of human nature: they expose to us elements we might forget, or suppose to be transmuted by the alchemy of civilization. In this respect they are, like those geological expositions, useful lessons ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... plus quam Salomon hic! You have here in your presence an incomparable treasure, that is, my lord Pantagruel, whose great renown hath brought me hither, out of the very heart of England, to confer with him about the insoluble problems, both in magic, alchemy, the cabal, geomancy, astrology, and philosophy, which I had in my mind. But at present I am angry even with fame itself, which I think was envious to him, for that it did not declare the thousandth part of the worth that indeed is in him. You have seen how his disciple only hath satisfied ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... of political import be intrusted to Van Baerle, who not only was, but also boasted of being, an entire stranger to the science of government, which, in his opinion, was more occult than alchemy itself? ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... events in the long life of Izaak Walton have been carefully investigated by Sir Harris Nicolas. All that can be extricated from documents by the alchemy of research has been selected, and I am unaware of any important acquisitions since Sir Harris Nicolas's second edition of 1860. Izaak was of an old family of Staffordshire yeomen, probably descendants of George Walton of Yoxhall, who died in 1571. Izaak's father was Jarvis Walton, who died in ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... impossible sweet and rapturous memory, clutching with a poignant passion at his heart. What was the secret of the fragrant days that had departed and could never return? Was it well to recall them? And what too was the secret of that strange and beautiful alchemy of the mind, that forgot all the troubles and cares of the old life, and even touched the few harsh incidents that it did retain with a wistful beauty, as though they had had some desirable element in ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ruler will be as incomprehensible to the democratic citizen as alchemy, but, in order to draw anything like true inferences or useful deductions, in order to understand the situation and to get a true likeness of the ruler, one must take this utterly unfamiliar and to us incomprehensible ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... chimes of sun and shade, Of sound and echo, man and maid; The land reflected in the flood; Body with shadow still pursued. For nature beats in perfect tune And rounds with rhyme her every rune; Whether she work in land or sea Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. Not unrelated, unaffied, But to each thought and thing allied, Is perfect nature's ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... profoundly. On his left knee his left hand rested with two fingers held up. By some rapid mental alchemy these fingers had now become Home Rule and Tariff Reform. His right hand which had hitherto taken no part in the controversy, had raised its index finger by imperceptible degrees. It had been raised almost subconsciously. And by still obscurer processes this finger had become Mrs. ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... still' were at first Raleigh's chief amusement and study. Assaying and transfusing metals, distilling simples and compounds, concocting medicines, and testing antidotes, with exercises in chemistry and alchemy, were the studies of both Raleigh and the Earl. But soon the policy of the Court changed. The prisoners had less liberty and saw less of each other, and so the stills were pulled down, and the gardens given up. Raleigh was more closely watched, and entrapped. Then there ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... out this proposition, that in order to make the least amount of extravagance produce the utmost admiration and envy, it is desirable to be improvident as publicly as possible; the means for such expenditure being gleaned from retrenchments in the home department. Thus, by a system of domestic alchemy, the education of the children is resolved into a vehicle; a couple of maids are amalgamated into a man in livery; while to a single drudge, superintended and aided by the mistress and elder girls, is confided the economy of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... has done many times and will doubtless do many times again. It is merely a matter of altering the valence of the atoms in an old element; whereupon it shifts its position in the periodic scale and becomes a new element. Nature accomplishes this alchemy by means of great heat, which is certainly to be found ...
— Spawn of the Comet • Harold Thompson Rich
... made by and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious people; while the most important artistic monuments of that legend sufficiently prove that the Romantic spirit was really at work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not without the elements of tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of a matter, at ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... spirit. And, in fact, they pass their time in preaching, not the eternal mysteries, but a twopenny morality, in changing the Wine of Angels and the Bread of Heaven into gingerbeer and mixed biscuits: a sorry transubstantiation, a sad alchemy, as it ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... stepped down among the millions and millions. His Divine Right, crumbling under the grandeur of partition among the millions, became for himself the most infinitesimal of shares, neither greater nor less than that of any other human being. But glorified now by the holy alchemy of Charity, the tiny grain became divine indeed, and he beheld it as a glowing spark, his own inalienable share in the rights of man. So, for a moment, the poet prince knew again his old-time exultation. Even Truth, he now ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... hath been born of Evil, many times, As pearls and precious ambergris are grown, Fruits of disease in pain and sickness sown, So think not to unravel, in thy thought, This mingled tissue, this mysterious plan, The Alchemy of Good ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the rank and dignity of a science by making it appeal to the reason instead of the fear and superstition of the people. The governments of the past, basing their claims upon divine right, bear about the same relation to democracy that astrology and alchemy do to the modern sciences of astronomy and chemistry. The old political order everywhere represented itself as superimposed on man from above, and, thus clothed with a sort of divine sanction, it was exalted ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... his being. It was very like a sea, this deadly languor, that rose and rose and drowned his consciousness bit by bit. Sometimes he was all but submerged, swimming through oblivion with a faltering stroke; and again, by some strange alchemy of soul, he would find another shred of will and strike out ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... stolid cliff Loosing himself, he followed his high heart To swim on sunshine, masterless as wind; And I believe the brown earth takes delight In the new snowdrop looking back at her, To think that by some vernal alchemy It could transmute her darkness into pearl; What is the buxom peony after that, With its coarse constancy of hoyden blush? 130 What the full summer to that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... advance, it grows ever clearer that regret or surprise at the passing of empires is like regret or surprise at the passing of youth. Man might as well start once more to discover the elixir of life and alchemy's secrets as hope to found an empire that ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... standing challenge to everybody else. If one man can grow absorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over something else. Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener, is to be very meanly organised. A man should be ashamed to take his food if he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... turn a false direction to such practical and mechanical aims as were suffered to exist. The assumption universal among the ancients and in the Middle Ages, that there were principles of heat and cold, dryness and moisture, etc., led directly to a belief in alchemy; in a transmutation of substances, a change from one Kind into another. Why should it not be possible to make gold? Each of the characteristic properties of gold has its forma, its essence, its set of conditions, which if we could discover, and learn ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... cousin of Musa, who had learned alchemy from Kulsum, the Lawgiver's sister. The keys of his treasure loaded forty mules; and his palace had doors and roof of fine gold. As he waxed fat he kicked against his chief, who as usual became exceeding wroth, and prayed that the earth might ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... the imagination is almost complete in the pseudo-sciences (alchemy, astrology, magic, occultism, etc.), which it would be more proper to call embryonic sciences, for they were the beginnings of more exact disciplines and their fancies have not been without use. In the history of science, this is the golden age of the creative ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... in his language, save when 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 says of ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... by even encouraging them to continue poisoning themselves and their descendants by over-indulgence in alcoholic drink?[1216] Surely "the defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... fantastical: asserting, moreover, that those witches were compelled by the severity of torture to confess acts that they had never done; that innocent blood was shed by a cruel judicature; and that by a new alchemy gold and silver were extracted from human blood. 3. Thereby, and by the like assertions, partly diffused by private oral communications among the vulgar, partly by various letters addressed to both branches of the magistracy, imputing to superiors and judges the exercise ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key. What his philosophy seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd byways to knowledge. To him philosophy was to be something giving strange swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... elaborated in the deep seclusion of mountain and forest. The dewy areca-palms throw a dark network of interlacing shadows across the red road, winding for miles through the sylvan scenery, the alchemy of the rising sun transmuting the myriad feathery fronds into fountains of green fire. Only the creaking of a bullock-waggon, or the thud of a falling cocoanut, breaks the hush of the tropical daybreak, when the leaves only whisper in their dreams, and the vernal earth, fresh ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... sky, Mysterious, fair as the moon-led sea, The vast plain flames on the dazzled eye Under the fierce sun's alchemy. The slow hawk stoops To his prey in the deeps; The sunflower droops To the lazy wave; the wind sleeps— Then swirling in dazzling links and loops, A riot of shadow and shine, A glory of olive and amber and wine, To the westering sun the colors run Through ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... to me who all my life had lived among men and women who laughed at those simple virtues. The simple conditions of life are all that are worth striving for. They come to us fresh from Nature and from Nature's God. The complex are but concoctions of man after recipes in the devil's alchemy. So much gold, so much ambition, so much lust. Mix well. Product: so ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... step, at perfection. That such was the tardy process by which the School for Scandal was produced, will appear from the first sketches of its plan and dialogue, which I am here enabled to lay before the reader, and which cannot fail to interest deeply all those who take delight in tracing the alchemy of genius, and in watching the first slow workings of the menstruum, out of which its finest ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... (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, foil, cupellation, gild, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... stretches were many, the slopes gradual, and to those sweet city-bird ladies everything was new and delightful; a log cabin!—with clay chimney on the outside!—a well and its well-sweep!—another cabin with its gourd-vines! They knew that blessed alchemy which turns all things into the poetry of the moment. Sweet they would have been anywhere to any eye or mind; but I was a homeless trooper lad, and sweeter to the soldier boy than water on the battlefield are short hours ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... is the resident, man, a creature compact of wonders that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to himself. He inhabits a body which he is continually outliving, discarding and renewing. Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy, restore his spirits and the freshness of his countenance. Hair grows on him like grass; his eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and touch and hear, to partake the sun and wind, to sit down and intently ponder on his astonishing attributes and situation, to rise up ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ideas is anyhow unmistakable. If metaphysical thinking is nonsensical, its empire over the human imagination must still be confessed; if it is as chimerical a science as alchemy, it is no less fertile in by-products of importance. And if we are to consider Leibniz historically, we cannot do better than take up his Theodicy, for two reasons. It was the only one of his main philosophical works to be published in his lifetime, so that it was a principal means ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... that Isaac Newton, who had no soft sex-sentiment in his nature, quite unlike Galileo, still believed in alchemy and astrology, while Galileo's cold intellect at once perceived the fallacy of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... and versed in all manner of knowledge, so that the fame of his learning was blazed abroad over the land and he became renowned as an ocean of lore and skill in medicine and astronomy and geometry and astrology and alchemy and natural magic and the Cabbala and Spiritualism and all other arts and sciences. One day, he said to his mother, "My father Daniel was exceeding wise and learned; tell me what he left by way of books or what not!" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Fabius.]—reflect back merit upon the means by which it was achieved, or, by a retrospective miracle, convert that into wisdom, which chance had only saved from the worst consequences of folly. Just as well might we be called upon to pronounce Alchemy a wise art, because a perseverance in its failures and reveries had led by accident to the discoveries of Chemistry. But even this sanction of good-luck was wanting to the unredeemed mistakes of Mr. Pitt. During the eight years that ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... mold. Like scrolls and rolled-up flags of silk, He saw the fruits unfold, And all our expectations in one wild-flower-written dream, Confusion and death sweetness, and a thicket of crab-thorns, Heart of a hundred midnights, heart of the merciful morns. Heaven's boughs bent down with their alchemy, Perfumed airs, and thoughts of wonder. And the dew on the grass and his own cold tears Were one in brooding mystery, Though death's loud thunder came upon him, Though death's loud thunder struck him down— The boughs and the proud thoughts swept through ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... his stories nor his " plot," if we may so call it. He wrote in the middle of the fourteenth century (1344-8) when the West had borrowed many things from the East, rhymes[FN8] and romance, lutes and drums, alchemy and knight-errantry. Many of the "Novelle" are, as Orientalists well know, to this day sung and recited almost textually by the wandering tale-tellers, bards, and rhapsodists ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... more than two miles when he saw before him the superb city of Alcina. It was surrounded with a wall of gold, which seemed to reach the skies. I know that some think that this wall was not of real gold, but only the work of alchemy; it matters not; I prefer to think it gold, for it ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... in an instant. There was no mistaking the glow of the limbs, the midsummer languor of the smile, the magical atmosphere in which the gold of sunlight, of autumn leaves, of amber grapes, seemed fused by some lost alchemy of the brush. As he gazed, the scene changed, and he saw himself in a darkened room with cabalistic hangings. He saw Heiligenstern's tall figure, towering in supernatural light, the Duke leaning eagerly forward, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Force, and Product,—are they not an echo, lingering along the ages, of some confused knowledge of the Absolute? Stahl, Becker, Paracelsus, Agrippa, all the great Searchers into occult causes took the Great Triad for their watchword,—in other words, the Ternary. Ignorant men who despise alchemy, that transcendent chemistry, are not aware that our work is only carrying onward the passionate researches of those great men. Had I found the Absolute, the Unconditioned, I meant to have grappled with Motion. Ah! while I am ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... cast aside the brilliant thoughts and happy imagery I meet in my reading?" No, I only ask you not to use them now. Note them for re-reading. Cast them as nuggets into the smelting-pot of your own brain. Trust to time and the alchemy of thought to transmute them. Wait till these thoughts become your thoughts. The intellect will assimilate this foreign material and send it forth on some future occasion, palpitating with the warm blood of natural life, to strengthen the ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... another name for this peculiar liquid—namely, "alcohol," and its origin is not less singular. The Dutch physician, Van Helmont, lived in the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century—in the transition period between alchemy and chemistry—and was rather more alchemist than chemist. Appended to his "Opera Omnia," published in 1707, there is a very needful "Clavis ad obscuriorum sensum referandum," in which the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Before the arbiter of their destinies some thirty creatures, hideous and authentic, poised, cohering in a sole chaos of desire; a fluent and numerous cluster of vital inhumanity. As I contemplated this ferocious and uncouth miracle, this beautiful manifestation of the sinister alchemy of hunger, I felt that the last vestige of individualism was about utterly to disappear, wholly abolished in a gambolling ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key. What his philosophy seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd byways to knowledge. To him philosophy was to be something giving strange swiftness and double sight, divining the sources of springs beneath the earth or of expression ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... one-half), but after another proportion than is used in pewter. But alas, I am persuaded that neither the old Arabians nor new alchemists of our time did ever hear of it, albeit that the name thereof do seem to come out of their forge. For the common sort indeed do call it alchemy, an unwholesome metal (God wot) and worthy to be banished and driven out of the land. And thus I conclude with this discourse, as having no more to say of the metals of my country, except I should talk of brass, bell metal, and such as are brought ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... ever found his powers inadequate, his aid of small avail. Yet the purpose of his soul, his energy and ardent resolution, prevented any re-action of sorrow. He seemed born anew, and virtue, more potent than Medean alchemy, endued him with health and strength. Idris hardly recognized the fragile being, whose form had seemed to bend even to the summer breeze, in the energetic man, whose very excess of sensibility rendered him more capable of fulfilling his station ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... to sting the children of the house, and give no honey,—soils which refuse to bear the products which intelligence has anticipated,—all are transformed into "something rich and strange" by the poet's alchemy, without any sacrifice of truth, or the insertion of details which a farmer would disavow as inaccurate or sentimental. The "Ik" is a full counterpoise to the "Marvel," even to the most literal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... Margaret and her troubles. Father Warner despised all human affections of whatever kind, with the intensity of a nature at once cold and narrow. Father Nicholas was of a far kindlier disposition, but he was completely engrossed with another subject. Alchemy was reviving. The endless search for the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, and other equally desirable and unattainable objects, had once more begun to engage the energies of scientific men. The real end which they were approaching was ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... its first radiance, and her smile was angelic. She was short of stature, but it was impossible to imagine more beautiful features or hands. Her education had been very desultory; she had learned more from lovers than from teachers. She had a strong taste for empirical medicine and for alchemy, and was always compounding elixirs, tinctures and balms, some of which she regarded as valuable secrets. So it was that charlatans, trading on her weakness, made her consume, amid drugs and furnaces, a talent and a spirit which might have distinguished her in the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... different schools, and carried on discussions with them. Many of his writings are lost, but enough is extant to show that he was one of the earliest Chinese alchemists. The question has not yet been settled, but it is probable that alchemy first appeared in China, together with the cult of the "art" of prolonging life, and was later carried to the West, where it flourished among the Arabs and in ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... smooth surface of the water, whilst the men stretched out as if unconscious of the exertion of pulling, every one of them feeling his share of the excitement. From the western sky the last lingering rays of the sun shot athwart the wave, turning it, as it were, by the alchemy of light into a flood of gold. Overhead, the cope of heaven was gradually growing soberer in hue from the withdrawal of those influences which lately had warmed and brightened it; but in the west a brilliant halo encircled the declining ruler of the day. In these latitudes ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... distance called vividly to mind the effect of one of those great glass bottles of reddened water, behind which apothecaries of all degrees put a lamp at dusk in order that their light may the better shine in the darkness. It was one of the most surprising feats of nature's alchemy that a liquid so brown as that contained in the decanters on Patrick's sideboard should be able to produce and maintain anything so supernaturally red as ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... debt. King Charles himself was in great trouble, and he had no money with which to pay his painter's pension. The artist had lived so extravagantly that he did not know at last which way to turn, so in desperation he thought to try alchemy and maybe to learn the secret of making gold. He wasted much time at this, as cleverer men have done, but at last he became too ill for that or for his own proper work, and badly off though Charles was himself, he offered his court physician a large sum ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... application to the arts of life, and then considering how much ground of this kind was acquired in the ten centuries which preceded the Renaissance, that we are at all able to estimate the expansive force which was then generated. Science, rescued from the hand of astrology, geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with the Renaissance. Since then, as far as to the present moment she has never ceased to grow. Progressive and durable, Science may be called the first-born of the spirit of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... fire is struck from flint. But under inspirational moods the mind begins to glow and kindle. Then the reason of the orator, the poet or reformer ceases to be like a taper, needing a match to light it, and becomes a sun, blazing with its own radiance. Spencer wrote: "By no political alchemy can we get golden conduct out of leaden instincts." Thus there is no necromancy by which the mind can get superior work ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... master of both in these occult sciences. The ' furnace ' and the ' still' were at first Raleigh's chief amusement and study. Assaying and transfusing metals, distilling simples and compounds, concocting medicines, and testing antidotes, with exercises in chemistry and alchemy, were the studies of both Raleigh and the Earl. But soon the policy of the Court changed. The prisoners had less liberty and saw less of each other, and so the stills were pulled down, and the gardens given up. Raleigh was more closely watched, and entrapped. ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... have never cared to piece together and supplement the scattered scraps of his education, would have rested on his oars when he had once shot into the waters of ordinary journalism. With Dickens it was not so. The alchemy of a fine nature had transmuted his disadvantages into gold. To him the lessons of such a childhood and boyhood as he had had, were energy, self-reliance, a determination to overcome all obstacles, to fight the battles ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... sense of duty perhaps at its best; the sacrifice greatest, for it is life. Theirs are the most momentous decisions for weal or woe; theirs the tragedy beyond all other tremendous and solemn. It is right that the sacrifice they have witnessed should possess an alchemy to ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... afternoon, Mr Dunning had some conversation with the assistant in charge, and took occasion to ask who the stout gentleman was. 'Oh, he's a man named Karswell,' said the assistant; 'he was asking me a week ago who were the great authorities on alchemy, and of course I told him you were the only one in the country. I'll see if I can catch him: he'd like to ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... in his 'Virtuoso' found material for profane merriment in some of the unquestionably absurd inquiries made or suggested by the natural philosophers. "Science was then only just emerging from the Mists of Superstition." Astrology and Alchemy still infected Astronomy, Chemistry, and Medicine. A Fellow of the Royal Society, along with the Puritan, made a ridiculous figure on the stage. But Puritanism and Natural Philosophy both survived the "test of truth," and ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... animating sound of drum and trumpet, with the more persuasive music of impassioned words, with shoutings and with revelry, these jocund compeers, from the highest to the lowest, mingled into one by the alchemy of a common joy, chased the hours of that memorable night and gave strange welcome to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... fifty men and women one true and sublime poet,—the dying "Grammarian," who applies the alchemy of a lofty imagination to the dry business of ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... acquire that degree of improvement her natural good sense was capable of receiving; she knew something of philosophy and physic, but not enough to eradicate the fondness she had imbibed from her father for empiricism and alchemy; she made elixirs, tinctures, balsams, pretended to secrets, and prepared magestry; while quacks and pretenders, profiting by her weakness, destroyed her property among furnaces, drugs and minerals, diminishing those ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... period the alchemist is represented by his descendant as a Puritan impregnated with the secret doctrine of Robert Fludd. In 1639 Vaughan returned to England, but was immediately attracted to Denmark by the discovery of a golden horn adorned with mysterious figures, which he and his colleagues in alchemy supposed to typify the search for the philosophical stone. At the age of twenty-eight, Vaughan made further progress in the Rosicrucian Fraternity, being advanced to the grade of Adeptus Minor by Amos Komenski, in which year also Elias Ashmole entered the order. Accompanied by Komenski, ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... however, were not broken off, and they continued to meet. Penautier was considered such a lucky fellow that it was generally expected he would somehow or other get some day the post he coveted so highly. People who had no faith in the mysteries of alchemy declared that Sainte-Croix and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... after them to see things more clearly than ever before. There are definite historical grounds for placing Basil Valentine as the first of the series of careful observers who differentiated chemistry from the old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of information to the uses of medicine. It is said to have been because of the study of Basil Valentine's work that Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic traditions, so supreme in medicine up to his time, and began our modern pharmaceutics. Following ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... necessary to raise MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS to her somewhat insecure pinnacle of devotion; by the alchemy of a machine centuries have been shortened to days and nights in the meteoric career of Miss PICKFORD. Yet merit has joined fortune in high cabal. Handicapped by a somewhat uneuphonious patronymic, MARY PICKFORD has established her rule without recourse to any of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... fact were not historically attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- 'alchemy,' 'alcohol,' 'alembic,' 'algebra,' 'alkali,' 'almanack,' 'azimuth,' 'cypher,' 'elixir,' 'magazine,' 'nadir,' 'tariff,' 'zenith,' 'zero '?—for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... furnace, that has consumed a thousand delusions, and must consume all that remain. We cast into it astrology and alchemy, and their ashes barely remain to tell of their existence. Old notions of the earth and heavens went in, and vanished as their dupes gazed upon them. Old religions, old gods, have become as the incense that was burned ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... seduction and other carnal enormities, adulation, simony, soothsaying, astrology, witchcraft, trafficking with the public interest, hypocrisy, highway robbery (on the great Italian scale), sacrilege, evil counsel, disturbance of the Church, heresy, false apostleship, alchemy, forgery, coining (all these, from seduction downwards, in one circle); then, in the frozen or lowest circle of all, treachery; and at the bottom of this is Satan, stuck into the centre ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... place to enter into a full examination of the meaning and value of alchemy in its original legitimate sense (which must not be confused with activities that later on paraded under the same name). Only this we will say - that genuine alchemy owes its origin to an impulse which, at a time when the onlooker-consciousness first arose, led to the foundation of a school ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... and alchemy. A memorial addressed to the king by the heirs of Gilles de Rais informs us that this immense fortune was squandered ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... criminal justice, and the piece, from the punishment of the guilty, has everything but a merry conclusion. In the Alchemist, both the deceivers and deceived supply a fund of entertainment, only the author enters too deeply into the learning of alchemy. Of an unintelligible jargon very short specimens at most ought to be given in comedy, and it is best that they should also have a secondary signification, of which the person who uses the mysterious ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... in jest that she had said to Smythe, "He shall tell me!" But in the night, by some strange alchemy, that jest had been transmuted into a purpose of which she was still doubtful, if not afraid. And yet to go forward seemed less difficult than to go back. For she had let the days of Seth's recovery ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... criminal or in foolish pursuits, have chilled the fervour of imagination, scattered into fragments many a noble design, and paralysed the finest genius. The distractions of GUIDO'S studies from his passion for gaming, and of PARMEGIANO'S for alchemy, have been traced in their works, which are often hurried over and unequal. It is curious to observe, that CUMBERLAND attributes the excellence of his comedy, The West Indian, to the peculiarly ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of wonders that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to himself. He inhabits a body which he is continually outliving, discarding and renewing. Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy, restore his spirits and the freshness of his countenance. Hair grows on him like grass; his eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and touch and hear, to partake the sun and wind, to sit ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spiritedly with Her Majesty about Roger Bacon. "Before my time, of course," the Queen was saying, "but I'm sure he was a most interesting man. Now when dear old Marlowe wrote his Faust, he and I had several long discussions about such matters. Alchemy, Doctor—" ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... brown and blue to blight Beneath the blemish of the sun; And e'en the spotless robe of white, Worn overlong, grows dim and dun Through the strange alchemy of light. ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... his destiny. He had pictured the desirable one in day-dreams, and, merely because of his violent antipathy towards the Eurasian element in the Far East, the dulcissima had appeared invariably as a tall, slender creature, with the lightest of flaxen hair and the grayest of gray eyes. Now, some alchemy devised by the magician spirit of New York had fashioned his ideal, though slender, not so tall, and she owned a wealth of brown hair, hair that shone and glistened in every changing light, while her eyes were either blue or violet, ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... stopped in a town, his hostess probably begged of him a charm against toothache or rheumatism. The penniless knight discoursed with him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving his fortune by the art of transmuting metals into gold. The queen or bishop worried him in private about casting their nativities, and finding their fates among the stars. But the statesman, who dealt with ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... aught but silently marvel at this alchemy? A little bundle of muscle and blood, which in this freezing weather can transmute frozen beetles and zero air into a happy, cheery little Black-capped Chickadee, as he names himself, whose ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... help coloring at that benign pleasantry. It was all the more painful to him because it was at once true and untrue. How should he explain the sort of literary alchemy, thanks to which he was enabled to affirm that he never drew portraits, although not a line of his fifteen volumes was traced without a living model? He replied, therefore, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... world. A haunt of the Muses, the sensual city was a hermitage of philosophy as well. These things collectively represented a great literary feast, of which not all the courses have descended to us, though, as is not impossible, a lost dish or two, transmuted, by the alchemy of faith, from dross into gold, the ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... and a greeting to his beloved City of London. This should have excited only admiration; but seen through the prying eyes of a prurient pressman, this touching tribute had been changed by the vile alchemy of suspicion to an unseemly and ridiculous action of midnight debauchery which could only have turned the noble Lion to stone, had it not ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... thing's sensible qualities, where it was especially fatal), that in all cases, e.g. of heat or cold, the forma, or set of conditions, is one thing. A similar notion, viz. that each property of gold, as of other things, has its one forma, produced the belief in Alchemy. ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... our inextinguishable longings after the unseen and eternal. It is true that such a religion presupposes Christianity, to which it owes its best and noblest features, and that, as far as we can see, it is inconceivable if Christianity had not first been. Still, we may say that alchemy preceded chemistry, and was not the more true for being the step to what is true. But what we cannot say of such a religion is that it takes the place of Christianity, and is such a religion as Christianity has been and claims to ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... during his illness, received great attention from Fraeulein von Klettenberg, a friend of his mother's, a pietist of the Moravian school. She initiated him into the mystical writings of those abstracted saints, and she engaged him in the study of alchemy, which served at once to prepare him for the conception of Faust and for the scientific researches of his ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... outside, touching the warm tangle of gillyflowers to fire, transmuting the pallor of the narcissus to light itself, making the very shadows more luminous than a winter's shining. The freakish sun, lit this and left that, after its habit, for nowhere is more mysterious alchemy than the mixing of sun and shadow in the spaces of the air. Ishmael's keen eyes could see how a spider's thread, woven from one tall plant to another, and wavering ever so delicately in the faint breeze, was one moment lit here and there to a line of pure light that merged ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... that the Jefferson menace which had been built up week after week by rumor and also by fact, as represented in scores, was real,—that the purple team was invincible, that Ridgley had met the irresistible force and could not by any alchemy of spirit turn defeat ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... Parable. Section I. The Parable. Section II. Dream And Myth Interpretation. Part II. Analytic Part. Section I. Psychoanalytic Interpretation Of The Parable. Section II. Alchemy. Section III. The Hermetic Art. Section IV. Rosicrucianism And Freemasonry. Section V. The Problem Of Multiple Interpretation. Part III. Synthetic Part. Section I. Introversion And Regeneration. A. Introversion And Intro-Determination. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... came home; possessed merely of the Polish language, and of what talents the gods had given him, which were considerable. And now, in the mean while, Johann, who at one time promised well 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, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy. ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... it was not what he spoke. It was his personality that spoke more eloquently than any word he could utter. It was an alchemy of soul occultly subtile and profoundly deep—a mysterious emanation of the spirit, seductive, sweetly humble, and terribly imperious. It was illumination in the dark crypts of their souls, a compulsion ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... not fascinate the poet as Italian art did, for the fully sufficient reason that it does not stand for a great epoch of intellectual awakening, yet with what fair alchemy he has touched those few artists he has chosen to honor. Notwithstanding his avowed devotion to Italy, expressed in "De Gustibus," one cannot help feeling that in the poems mentioned in this chapter, there is that ecstasy of sympathy ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... of social alchemy, my dear Paul, is to get the most we can out of each age of life through which we pass; to have and to hold the buds of our spring, the flowers of our summer, the fruits of our autumn. We amused ourselves once, a few good fellows and I, for a dozen or more years, like ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... postulating a linear progression from the old social sciences—forget it," Neel said. "There is the same relationship here that alchemy holds to physics. The old boys with their frog guts and awful offal knew a bit about things like distilling and smelting. But there was no real order to their knowledge, and it was all an unconsidered by-product ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... evolution and development were taught in their schools. In fact, they carried them much farther than we are disposed to do, extending them even to inorganic or mineral things. The fundamental principle of alchemy was the natural process of development of metalline bodies. "When common people," says Al-Khazini, writing in the twelfth century, "hear from natural philosophers that gold is a body which has attained to perfection of maturity, to the goal ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... part," he said quietly, "I have no belief in that stone, or in that power of alchemy after which men since the beginning of time have been vainly striving. They may seek and seek, but I trow they will never find it; and I verily believe if found it would but prove a worthless boon. For in the hands of a rapacious master, so quickly would gold be poured upon the world that soon ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the world has not benefited by them in the end. Thus Astrology, which ascribed to the stars an influence over the actions and destinies of man; Magic, which attempted to reverse the laws of nature, and Alchemy, which aimed at securing unlimited powers of self-reward; all tended to the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... acrid wine, It is dusky red, like the ebb of poppies, And purple, like the blood of elderberries. Surely it is a strong wine—juice distilled of the fierce iron. I am drunk of its fumes. I feel its fiery flux Diffusing, permeating, Working some strange alchemy... So that I turn aside from the goodly board, So that I look askance upon the common cup, And from the mouths of crucibles Suck forth ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... of the court were expert in the adventures of love. The poor king, calling to mind his many adventures, gave vent to a deep-drawn sigh, and exclaimed, that no woman of any country, including those of the moon, knew better than the ladies of France the secrets of this alchemy and at the remembrance of the savoury, gracious, and vigorous fondling of one alone, he felt himself the man, were she then within his reach, to clasp her to his heart, even on a rotten plank a hundred feet ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... "Success" is after all very much like reading in old books of alchemy. "How not to do it," is the lesson of all the books and treatises. Geber and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully, and the whole crew of "pauperes alcumistae," all give the most elaborate directions showing their student how to fail in transmuting Saturn ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... But he that hath found charity to be the temper of happiness, which doth put the soul in a natural and easy condition, and openeth it to the solaces of that pure and sublime entertainment which the angels do spread for such as obey the will of their Creator, hath discovered a more subtle alchemy than any of which the philosophers did dream,—for he transmuteth the enjoyments of others into his own, and his large and open heart partaketh of the satisfaction of all around him. Are there any here who, in the midst of outward abundance, are sorrowful of heart,—who go mourning on their way ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the decree of Allah Almighty, an adept in every science and versed in all manner of knowledge, so that the fame of his learning was blazed abroad over the land and he became renowned as an ocean of lore and skill in medicine and astronomy and geometry and astrology and alchemy and natural magic and the Cabbala and Spiritualism and all other arts and sciences. One day, he said to his mother, "My father Daniel was exceeding wise and learned; tell me what he left by way of books or what not!" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Alchemy and dread, Turns half the Glory of your Gold to Lead; Thus Time,—at Ronsard's wreath that vainly bit, - Has marred the Poet to preserve the Wit, Who almost left on Addison a stain, Whose Knife cut ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... when on her return she gave play to her teeth. Now by reason of reading the legends written by the way, and of separating by death the embraces of birds and wild beasts, she discovered a mystery of natural alchemy, while colouring her complexion, and superagitating her feeble imagination, which did little to pacify her warlike nature, and strongly tickled her desire which laughed, played, and frisked unmistakably. The seneschal thought to disarm the rebellious virtue of his wife by making her scour ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... where each Adds to the stock of happiness for all; Wisdom's own forums! whose professors teach Eloquent lessons in their vaulted hall! Galleries of art! and schools of industry! Stores of rich fragrance! Orchestras of song! What marvelous seats of hidden alchemy! How oft, when wandering far and erring long, Man might learn truth and virtue ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... traveller, had listened to her plead for his own life. It was his turn to plead. She was not to be won by fighting Leddys or tearing up pine-trees by their roots. That armor was without a joint; a lance would bend like so much tin against its plates, and yet there must be some alchemy that would make it melt as a mist before the sun. It was tenanted by a being all sentiency, which saw him through her visor as a passer-by in a gallery. But one in armor does not fly from passers-by as she had flown while he was climbing up ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... most active research projects of the S.M.M.R. was the construction of a more powerful symbology. Psionics had made tremendous strides in the previous four decades, but it was still in the alchemy stage. So far, symbols for various processes could only be worked out by cut-and-try, rule-of-thumb methods, using symbols already established, including languages and mathematics. None were completely satisfactory, ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of time, knowledge is obtained and mysteries are revealed. Chemistry and medicine, released from the tedious but not useless apprenticeship they had served to alchemy and empiricism, set up on their own account, and as a consequence, the 'nut of the sea' soon lost its European reputation as a curative, though it was still considered a very great curiosity, and the unsettled problem of its origin formed a famous stock of building materials ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... "My old studies in alchemy," observed he, "and my sojourn, for above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours—she is none ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... perfect thing without beginning, as long descended as the folds of downs which sheltered it. The austere Tudor front, the Restoration wing, the offices built under Queen Anne, the library added in the days of the Georges, had by some alchemy become one. Peace and long memories were in every line of it, and that air of a home which belongs only to places that have been loved for generations. It breathed ease and comfort, but yet had a tonic vigour in it, for while it stood knee-deep ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... parents. It was at that time that an acquaintance sprang up which has ripened in later years into mutual respect and esteem. It was there that what might be termed a casual meeting took place, that has, under the alchemy of resist-less years, turned to golden links, forming a pleasant but powerful bond of union between my parents and myself. For that reason, I hope that I may be spared to my parents for many years ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... the ship carrying it sank, with the splendid services rendered by it in Mesopotamia; the recruiting of a Bengali regiment for active service, 900 strong, with another 900 reserves to replace wastage, and recruiting still going on—these are instances of the divine alchemy which brings the soul of good out of evil action, and consecrates to service ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... extending analogies beyond their legitimate application was a source of confusion in the early ages of science. Most of the superstitions of primitive religion, of astrology, and of alchemy, arose from this source. A good example is the extension of the metaphor in the words generation and corruption: words in constant use in scientific works until the nineteenth century began. Generation is the production of a substance that ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... the man and woman shall live together as one in their hopes, thoughts, deeds and desires; where they shall work for each other; live for each other; and through this blending of spirit, we will be able to forget the sordid present, the squalid here, the rankling now. By love's alchemy we will gild each hour and day, so it will be a time of joyous hope, and life will be a continual feast-day. And so through the desire and effort to express, we will reach the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... to Jacques Coictier bore reference principally to the temporal advantages which the worthy physician had found means to extract, in the course of his much envied career, from each malady of the king, an operation of alchemy much better and more certain than the pursuit of the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... of authority, and of credentials, but of intrinsic reality. You must know how to assay and test the gold yourself. This is where the "Alchemy of the Great Work" comes in, and here lies the beginning of Adeptship, the preparation for the "Great Work." I can demonstrate this from a score of old books, some of them ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... I call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life so humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a 'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical, 'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and sober judgment; an upsetting of truth ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... years after the death of Peter Woulfe, who was thought to be the last of the true believers in alchemy, Sir Richard Phillips visited an alchemist at Lilley, near Hitchin, named Kellerman, who was believed by some of his neighbours to have discovered the philosopher's stone, and the universal solvent! His room was a realization of Tenier's "Alchemist." ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... is glorified by God glorifies God, as showing the most wonderful working of His power in making such a man out of such material, by an alchemy that can convert base metal into fine gold; as showing the most wonderful condescension of His love in taking to His heart man, into whose flesh the rotting ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Richard Steele was infatuated, with notions of Alchemy, and wasted money in its visionary projects. He had a laboratory at Poplar. Addisoniana, vol ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... is beyond his practice; and, although this passage has in it a deeper meaning than the one attributed to it here, it well illustrates the position of the medical man in such cases. Most doctors of the time were mere empirics; dabbled more or less in alchemy; and, in the treatment of mental disease, were little better than children. They had for co-practitioners all who, by their credit with the populace for superior wisdom, found themselves in a position to engage in a profitable employment. Priests, preachers, schoolmasters—Dr. ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... alleys, silvered by the moon, and redolent of flowers that had been made magical by the alchemy of night, surrounded them. They came to a spot where a circular wall of foliage, rising behind stone benches, hemmed in a fountain, above which a marble antique warrior was lifting in his arms a ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... dualism and supernaturalism of Plato, by adopting the popular notions about spheres and sphere-movers, by separating intelligence from sense, by conceiving matter as independent and the principle of individuation, and by making science relate only to the universal, he paved the way for astrology, alchemy, magic, and all the forms of superstition, retarding the advance of several sciences, as for example astronomy and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... for the most part to the sceptical side of the question. He was not insensible to the growing influence of the scientific spirit, though he believed implicitly in witchcraft, spoke with high respect of alchemy and astrology, and refused to believe that the earth went round the sun. He feels that his favourite creatures are doomed to extinction, and though dealing lovingly with them, speaks rather like an attached mourner ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Newton, the great English natural philosopher, was born, and in that same year Galileo, the Italian astronomer, died. Meanwhile the Thirty Years War had destroyed the prosperity of central Europe and there was a sudden but very general interest in "alchemy," the strange pseudo-science of the middle-ages by which people hoped to turn base metals into gold. This proved to be impossible but the alchemists in their laboratories stumbled upon many new ideas and greatly helped the work of the chemists ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... of it at the first performance,—something which that witty and splendid company, who made up the Christmas party at Whitehall, on the occasion of its first exhibition there, who sat there 'rustling in silk,' breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; though there might have been one among them, 'a gentleman of blood and breeding,' who could have ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... of alcalis and acids, and converted the poisonous minerals into soft and salutary medicines. But the most eager search of Arabian chemistry was the transmutation of metals, and the elixir of immortal health: the reason and the fortunes of thousands were evaporated in the crucibles of alchemy, and the consummation of the great work was promoted by the worthy aid of mystery, fable, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... time for the study of Greek history and Greek civilisation had come. Miss Stone laboured early and late. Instruction from the university down the lake was pressed into service.... But out of it all the child seemed, by some kind of precious alchemy, to extract only the best, ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... certain authors in any art. The sciences themselves, which have had better intelligence and confederacy with the imagination of man than with his reason, are three in number: astrology, natural magic, and alchemy; of which sciences, nevertheless, the ends or pretences are noble. For astrology pretendeth to discover that correspondence or concatenation which is between the superior globe and the inferior; natural magic pretendeth to call and ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... aid the kabouters, and, from these ugly little fellows, got some useful hints; for they, dwelling in the dark caverns, know many secrets which men used to name alchemy, and which they now ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... irresistibly nearer, ever nearer: for now they had touched and were not two, but one inseparable drop, crystallized beyond change, not to be disintegrated by time, nor shattered by death's blow, nor resolved by any alchemy. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
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