"Crucible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had a friend who was zealously and perseveringly devoted to the study of alchemy. At one time, while he was intent upon his operations, a gentleman entered his laboratory, and kindly offered to assist him. In a few moments, a large mass of the purest gold was brought forth from the crucible. The gentleman then took his hat, and went out: before leaving the apartment, however, he wrote a recipe for making the precious article. The grateful and admiring mortal continued his operations, according to the ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... assuming complex forms, those complex forms appear. As soon as oxides can be there, oxides appear; when temperature admits of carbonates, then carbonates are forthwith formed. These are experiments which any chemist can to-day repeat in a crucible. And on a cooling planet, as soon as temperature will admit the presence of life, then life appears, as the evidence of geology shows us." When we speak of the beginning of life, it is not clear just what we mean. The unit of all organized bodies is the cell, but the cell is itself an organized ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... him fearfully; but he is struggling hard for the mastery over himself, and you may be sure, madam, that he will gain it. Your son is a young man of no light stamp of character; and he will come out of this ordeal, as gold from the crucible." ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... do not forget that this war, blending all classes, has also blended in a new crucible all the capacities of our country. They are now turned against the aggressor, but they will have to be used in time for union, love, and peace. Omne regnum divisum contra se desolabitur; et omnis civitas vel ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... man has summoned Evil since the youngest days of the world have I not answered? Have I not brought my presence to the magician's lamp? Have I not shadowed the alchemist at his crucible? When the woman called upon me with ancient knowledge, did I not come. I am the guardian of the Barrier. Whoever would pass this way must pass me. Have you the power? Die, ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... became a frontier melting-pot. Puritan, Cavalier, Irishman, Scotch-Irishman, German—all were poured into the crucible. Ideals clashed, and differing customs grated harshly. But the product of a hundred years of cross-breeding was a splendid type of citizenship. At the presidential inaugural ceremonies of March 4, 1881, six men chiefly attracted ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... iron dropped in a crucible full of glass will eat through it. Crucibles are made of graphite and ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... softened the hearts in the same crucible that hardened the hands. The arrogance of the strong mellowed into consideration for the weak; wisdom and culture went hand in hand with ignorance and brawn; malice and rancour left the hearts of the lowly and met half-way the departing insolence of the ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... at it. He turned in his seat, and peered at the shimmer of the city's lights, strung like a luminous rosary along the river's edge. Then he looked up at the roseate flush on the sky, flung there by the metropolis as from the mouth of a crucible. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... slay the lad! Even if he could get the consent of his wounded and protesting heart, how could he reconcile the act with the promise, "In Isaac shall thy seed be called"? This was Abraham's trial by fire, and he did not fail in the crucible. While the stars still shone like sharp white points above the tent where the sleeping Isaac lay, and long before the gray dawn had begun to lighten the east, the old saint had made up his mind. He would offer his son as God had directed him to do, and then trust God to raise him from ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... the Art we loved. The strife consumed the dross of daily, petty hopes and fears, which make the happiness of common lives, and left my soul a crucible receptive for refinement only; and Aspiro tempted me to new endeavors by glimpses of the court which Nature holds, wearing Dalmatian mantle and spray-bright crown, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... state of nitrous gas; whilst the muriatic acid is converted by the heat into muriatic acid gas, and may be collected in proper vessels. The arseniac acid is entirely freed from the other acids employed during the process by heating it in a crucible till it begins to grow red; what remains ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... in his sharp, dogmatic way, "either breaks or makes. You go into the crucible a mere ore, a possibility. You come out slag or steel." He was standing now, looking down at her with quizzical eyes. "You're about due to leave ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... blue of the sky and casting its pagan shadow upon the grass of English graves—that of Keats, among them—with an effect of poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But the most touching element of all is the appeal of the pious English inscriptions among all these Roman memories; touching because of their universal expression of that trouble within trouble, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... inspiring exemplars and the models for coming times. If defeat has brought us shame, it has brought us also firmer resolve. No man can be said to know himself, or to have assurance of his force of principle and character, till he has been tested by the fires of trial in the crucible of defeat. The same is true of a nation. The test of defeat is the test of its national worth. Defeat shows whether it deserves success. We may well be grateful and glad for our defeat of the 21st of July, if we wrest from it the secrets of our weakness, and are thrown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... one moment, did he abandon the sublime standard of truth: he investigated, he studied, he thought, he separated the gold from the dross in the crucible of his brain. He was never found on his knees before the altar of superstition. He stood erect by the tranquil column of Reason. He was an admirer, a lover, an adorer of Nature, and at the age of ninety, bowed by the weight of nearly a century, covered ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... contains no silver—John Chinaman takes good care of that. My mortar was a jam tin, without top or bottom, placed on an anvil; the pestle a short steel drill. The blacksmith at Mundi Mundi Station made me a small wrought iron crucible, also a pair of bent tongs from a piece of fencing-wire. The manager gave me a small common red flower pot for a muffle, and with the smith's forge (the fire built round with a few blocks of talcose schist) for a furnace, ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... facts and principles had to run through his crucible and be tested by the fires of his analytic mind; and hence, when he did speak, his utterances rang out gold-like, quick, keen and current upon the counters of the understanding. He reasoned logically, through analogy and ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... of acid on the shelf and picked up a pair of tongs. As he raised the cover of the glowing crucible a sudden transformation took place. The upper part of the laboratory blazed out fiercely, and in this light Pierre moved with gesticulating arms, the lower part of his body wholly hidden. He lifted the crucible, shook it for a moment ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... bewildered, examined each work of art with the greatest amazement. Here she found fortunes accounted for that melt in the crucible under which pleasure and vanity feed the devouring flames. This woman, who for twenty-six years had lived among the dead relics of imperial magnificence, whose eyes were accustomed to carpets patterned with faded flowers, rubbed gilding, silks as forlorn ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... world, that was all. In his, outside that canvas crucible and between performances, she would have died of mortification if, by chance, there had been one-tenth of the exposure. Here, she was as fully dressed and as modestly as she would be an hour later, clothed from head to foot in the conventional garments of ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... so obscured the simple teachings of Christ himself; for it has shown that the more we know of our sacred books, the less certain we become as to the authenticity of "proof texts," and it has disengaged more and more, as the only valuable residuum, like the mass of gold at the bottom of the crucible, the personality, spirit, teaching, and ideals of the blessed Founder of Christianity. More and more, too, the new scholarship has developed the conception of the New Testament as, like the Old, the growth of literature in obedience to law—a conception which in al probability will give ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... shortly after Germany took these provinces from France in 1871 a method was discovered by two British metallurgists, Thomas and Gilchrist, by which the phosphorus is removed from the iron in the process of converting it into steel. This consists in lining the crucible or converter with lime and magnesia, which takes up the phosphorus from the melted iron. This slag lining, now rich in phosphates, can be taken out and ground up for fertilizer. So the phosphorus which used ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... been discovered for accurately determining the melting temperature of platinum, but it must be enormous. And yet, if you put a bit of lead into the crucible with the platinum, both metals will melt down together at the low temperature that fuses the lead, and if you try to melt lead in a platinum crucible, you will find that as soon as the lead melts the platinum ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... be cooked in the terrible heat for twenty-four hours before it is fit for use. In front of the working holes are the workmen. A long steel tube is thrust into the batch and a quantity of the mixture accumulated on the end. From the moment it is taken out of the crucible until the form is completed the operator never allows the hot glass to be still for a moment. It ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... medium. There are schools which unite the best qualities of public and private schools, large enough to stimulate and develop energies mental and physical, yet not so framed as to melt all character in one crucible. For instance, there is a school which has at this moment one of the first scholars in Europe for head-master,—a school which has turned out some of the most remarkable men of the rising generation. The master sees at a glance if a boy be clever, and takes pains with him accordingly. ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was at the same time enlisted. The men who stir the world with thought, and give intellectual cast to the age in which we live, are to be met with thought, met with reason, met with truths tried in the crucible. ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... been the refining agent of our qualities. Just as a number of chemicals put into a crucible are refined by a certain acid, while yet the original substances remain, though in different forms, so has civilization refined and remolded the crude elements of our nature, leaving the essence of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... will tell me which crucible to try," said Marietta, "I will make the tests for you. Then we can move the table to your side and you can prepare the new ingredients according ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... destiny. This declaration came like a thunderbolt into my religious life, and stirred up a violent agitation from which it took me ten years to fully deliver myself. I was now about fourteen years old, and already had a desire to measure everything in the crucible of logic or cause and effect, and to accept nothing which did not come within the range of my reason. Looking at things from the standpoint of cause and effect, I was naturally caught in the meshes of fatalism, and this aggravated the ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... water, you will forget all the misery that human folly has so recently allotted you. Oh! listen to me, my prince. I do not jest. I have a heart, and mind, and soul, and can read your own,—aye, even to its depths. I will not take you unready for your task, in order to cast you into the crucible of my own desires, of my caprice, or my ambition. Let it be all or nothing. You are chilled and galled, sick at heart, overcome by excess of the emotions which but one hour's liberty has produced in you. For me, that ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... men might fairly make use of Aaron's explanation. They have put into the crucible of life their gold, themselves, God's finest gold intrusted to their hands. And under their manipulation what has come out is as a vealy, callow calf, a bull calf at that too, scrub stock, fit only ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... conversation by some shorthand process of his own; and afterwards, when he read it over to them to see what they could make of it, they all burst out laughing. And, in truth, the tinsel jargon which circulates among the upper ranks in every country yields mighty little gold to the crucible when washed in the ashes of literature or philosophy. In every rank of society (some few Parisian salons excepted) the curious observer finds folly a constant quantity beneath a more or less transparent varnish. Conversation with any substance in it is ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... red crucible I had plunged, and now emerged—remolded. In one brief year and a half I had lived my life, dreamed the undreamable, accomplished the unaccomplishable. Much had gone from me, yet much had come—and ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... just now is that the reader shall see how the valley first explored by the French has given and is giving bread to the world, and has postponed the dread augury of the Malthusian doctrine; how the larger valley of the explorers of the lens and crucible, Lavoisier and Berthelot, is opening into infinite distances; and how the under valley, when breathed upon by the air, has given its wealth to the over valley—and through this all to realize that France's geographical ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... of Nature's activity in the crucible at the earth's centre make one reflect on the possible consequences of the next great convulsion, and the fate that is in store for those intrepid villagers who have perched their primitive huts on the very edge of the Teng'ger crater. ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... property. She fully understood the deliberate ardor, the well-considered, inalterable steadfastness of Balthazar; if it were indeed true that he was seeking to make gold, he was capable of throwing his last crust into the crucible with absolute indifference. But what was he really seeking? Up to this time maternal feeling and conjugal love had been so mingled in the heart of this woman that the children, equally beloved by husband and wife, had never ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... energies, walked straight up to the crucible, drew it out of the furnace, and looked in. The gold was all melted, and its surface as smooth and polished as a river; but instead of reflecting little Gluck's head, as he looked in, he saw meeting his glance from ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... and I want it taken back," he said. "It's slander. I'm a celebrated mineralogist and assayer. Tell you how the deep leads run; analyze you anything. For example, we'll proceed to put this hotel-keeper in the crucible, and see what we get. It's thirty parts hoggish self-sufficiency, and ten parts ignorance. Forty more rank dishonesty, and ten of insatiable avarice. Ten more of go-back-when-you-get-up-and-face-him. Can't even bluff a drunken man. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... they have of late not been so renowned, this has arisen from a want of what Ashmole calls "apertness;" a qualification early inculcated among these illuminated sages. We find authentic accounts of some who have lived three centuries, with tolerable complexions, possessed of nothing but a crucible and a bellows! but they were so unnecessarily mysterious, that whenever such a person was discovered, he was sure in an instant to disappear, and was never ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Thus, in the crucible of shame amidst the white heat of naked truths, the passion that the man had felt for the girl he had considered his social inferior was transmuted into love. And as he staggered on there burned within him beside his newborn love another great passion—the passion of hate ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... pioneer hardship, however, fell heaviest on the women of whom Virginia Aydelot was a type. Into the crucible out of which a state is moulded, she cast her youth and strength and beauty; her love of luxury, her need for common comforts, her joy in the cultured appointments of society. She had a genius for ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Society. It may seem surprising that his play should have had so great a success in the States, where they are not supposed to have a passion for hearing home truths. But then its main theme is the glorification of America as the Melting Pot or crucible into which are flung the wrongs and hatreds and slaveries of the old world, to re-appear in the shape of justice and love and freedom. This is the theme upon which David Quixano, a Kishineff Jew who has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... Fate, which had tried her heart in its crucible fires, and found its gold as unalloyed as her smile, now smiled, in turn, and Rose was deeply appreciative of that fact. She knew that in Gertrude Merriman she had found a friend who was a blessed comforter for her in her days of trial; in truth, the nurse was destined ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... looked upon a woman as capable of affording happiness; and I thought, 'Ah! ah! thine eyes roll about like the tail of the water-wagtail, thy lips resemble the ripe fruit, thy bosom is like the lotus bud, thy form is resplendent as gold melted in a crucible, the moon wanes through desire to imitate the shadow of thy face, thou resemblest the pleasure-house of Cupid; the happiness of all time is concentrated in thee; a touch from thee would surely give life to a dead image; at thy approach a living admirer would be ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... perpetual youth from dust and ashes, tempt coy Truth in many light and airy forms from the bottom of her well, and discover one crumb of comfort or one grain of good in the commonest and least-regarded matter that passes through our crucible. Spirits of past times, creatures of imagination, and people of to-day are alike the objects of our seeking, and, unlike the objects of search with most philosophers, we can insure their ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... were laying the foundations of a great nation. Such a vast work as this could scarcely be carried on without some commotion; the chemist must look for explosions when he produces a strange new compound from diverse elements; and it was, therefore, no wonder that the crucible in the valley of the Oro was often the scene of much boiling and seething. Then the tavern came, with its brain-destroying fire, and sometimes after harvest, when the Fighting MacDonalds and the belligerent Murphys met before it, ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... troublesome if every time a poor man had occasion either to buy or sell a farthing's worth of goods, he was obliged to weigh the farthing. The operation of assaying is still more difficult, still more tedious; and, unless a part of the metal is fairly melted in the crucible, with proper dissolvents, any conclusion that can be drawn from it is extremely uncertain. Before the institution of coined money, however, unless they went through this tedious and difficult operation, people must always have been liable to the grossest frauds and ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... knew that, had he been in truth an artist now, those last words of his would have been: "My work! My work!" For to those who hold the greatest gift, there is no experience in life, from highest joy to highest sorrow, that is not transmuted, in the crucible of the artist's brain, into some new form of knowledge to be used in his labor. Such a one was Ivan, whom Nathalie herself could only have served again and again to quicken into higher and richer ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... seemed to heave like black masses of cotton wool far down in the abyss, left the imagination to perform acrobatic feats as it attempted to picture the possible depths that lay below. The thing was weird, terrible, fear-inspiring. It looked like a mighty crucible in which infernal things might have been manufactured in the days when the ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... In this crucible of fact the famous spoon melted. So far as Captain Barry and his clews were concerned, we had ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... magnesia was exposed in a crucible for about an hour to such a heat as is sufficient to melt copper. When taken out, it weighed three drams and one scruple, or had lost ...
— Experiments upon magnesia alba, Quicklime, and some other Alcaline Substances • Joseph Black
... severity of the rhythm, do what he would to retain it, and the verse was like a medal which has turned out imperfect through the inexperience of the caster, who has not calculated the proper quantity of metal necessary for filling the mould. With ingenious patience he poured the metal back into the crucible and began all over again. Finally the verse came out full and clear, and the whole sonnet lived and breathed like a ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... forces, men were one in purpose and need. If Europe was to be crushed, it was only a question of time until all that Europe had done for the world in America, or the Antipodes, or in the islands of the sea, would follow it. Then would come our turn, then all Asia would be thrown into tyranny's crucible, and the world must begin anew. It was not a mere diplomatic alliance that drew us into the contest. Our own struggles had not been those of aggression; but it was easy to see what ruthless conquest meant even if it seemed to be far away. Therefore, we acted promptly and we hope ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... surprising vitality from the laboratory. Neither had he imagined, with certain sanguine theosophists, that, by faithful adoration of the Highest, unheard-of powers would be vouchsafed to man. A practical materialist, what Bannadonna had aimed at was to have been reached, not by logic, not by crucible, not by conjuration, not by altars; but by plain vice-bench and hammer. In short, to solve nature, to steal into her, to intrigue beyond her, to procure some one else to bind her to his hand;—these, one and all, had not been ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... on any account do that," answered the alchemist. "It might prove the destruction of my hopes were I to leave this crucible for a moment. Know that I am on the point of making the great discovery which is the object of my life," and the old man ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... garbage; we make a better use of that divine and adorable endowment. We invite Thought to share, and by sharing to enhance, the pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir from our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of consciousness everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could have discussed at greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... Homer, and of St. Dunstan's book 'De Occulta Philosophia;' concerning which lattter [Transcriber's Note: latter], Elias Ashmole is vehement in commendation.[208] From all these (after melting them down in his own unparalleled poetical crucible—which hath charms as potent as the witches' cauldron in Macbeth) he gives the world many a wondrous-sweet song. Who that has read the exquisite poems, of the fame of which all Britain 'rings from side to side,' shall deny to such ancient legends a ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... contemporary. These ideas are, or ought to be, common property; and it has been impracticable to trace them to their sources and offer detailed acknowledgment. Nothing has been presented here that has not first passed through the crucible of my own thinking and experience; and where the sparks came from that kindled each particular thought I am sure I ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... was the breeding-ground of inspiration. I think, on the whole, that the total and entire absence of any species of inertia in Hugh's temperament reacted in a way unfavourably on his books. I do not think they simmered in his mind, but were projected, hot and smoking, from the fiery crucible of thought. There seems to me a breathless quality about them. Moreover I do not think that there is much trace of the subtle chemistry of mutual relations about his characters. In life, people undergo gradual modifications, and other people exert psychological ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... been melted down for the trifling value of the metal; and at Abbeville, a silver St. George, of uncommon workmanship, and which Mr. Garrick is said to have desired to purchase at a very high price, was condemned to the crucible— ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... account, and found that Nature had already done in Eldorado precisely what I was trying to do. You see," continued the old man abstractedly, "I had put youth, and love, and hope, besides a great many scarce minerals, into the crucible, and they all dissolved slowly, and vanished—in vapor. It was curious, but they left no residuum except a little ashes, which were not strong enough to make a lye to cure a lame finger. But, as ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... are not so luminous at the same temperature; for instance, melted silver, which reflects well, is not so luminous as carbon at the same temperature, and common salt, which is very transparent for most kinds of radiation, when poured in a fused condition out of a bright red-hot crucible, looks almost like water, showing only a faint red glow for a moment or two. But all such bodies appear to lose their distinctive properties when heated in a vessel which nearly encloses them, for in that case those radiations which they do not emit are either ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Schimmel's arms and hurried into the laboratory as fast as his tired feet could carry him. There he blew the bellows so violently that the housekeeper looked at him with silent indignation. When all was prepared he poured the liquid into a crucible, set it among the glowing and sparkling coals and murmured strange words and spells over the seething fluid until it boiled up and the hissing bubbles ran over the rim of the crucible. Then he stood the hot vessel in cold water, pronounced one more incantation ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... but she turned with disgust from the finery of Guarini, as tawdry and as paltry as the rags of a chimney-sweeper on May-day. Whatever ornaments she wears are of massive gold, not only dazzling to the sight, but capable of standing the severest test of the crucible. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... me most about poor Jules' (de Goncourt) death, is the survivor. I am sure that the dead are well off, that perhaps they are resting before living again, and that in all cases they fall back into the crucible so as to reappear with what good they previously had and more besides. Barbes only suffered all his life. There he is now, sleeping deeply. Soon he will awaken; but we, poor beasts of survivors, we see them no longer. A little while ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... the depletion of his honor. He was not a moralist, a saint, a sinner. Need sweeps all theories aside; in need's fierce crucible they are transmuted to concrete realities. Those who have never known what it is to be thrown with Garrison's handicap on the charity of a great city will not understand. But those who have ever tasted the bitter crust of adversity will. And it is the old blatant advice from the Seats of the ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... some fairy alchemist had melted in magic crucible topaz, ruby, sapphire, gold, and amethyst, to deck each ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... proceeds, after he has his tools in readiness, to construct a chalice. First, he puts the silver in a crucible, and when it has become fluid, he turns it into a mould in which there is wax (this is evidently the "cire perdu" process familiar to casters of every age), and then he says, "If by some negligence it should happen that the melted silver be not whole, cast ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... melancholy, the suggestion of the more serious and aged aspect presented by gloomy colouring. The bugle cry of red, the limpid confidence of white, the repeated Hallelujahs of yellow, the virginal glory of blue, all the quivering crucible of glass was dimmed as it got nearer to this border dyed with rusty red, the tawny hues of sauces, the harsh purples of sandstone, bottle-green, tinder-brown, fuliginous ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... took everything naively as it came, and as she was told. Nothing with her ever passed through any changing crucible of thought. It required no planning to elude her. Her mind was like a stretch of wet sand, on which all impressions are equally easy to make and equally fugitive. He liked them all, she supposed, in spite of ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, Horace Bianchon had been a medical student lodging in a squalid boarding house in the Quartier Latin, known as the Maison Vauquer. This poor young man had felt there the gnawing of that burning poverty which is a sort of crucible from which great talents are to emerge as pure and incorruptible as diamonds, which may be subjected to any shock without being crushed. In the fierce fire of their unbridled passions they acquire the most impeccable honesty, and get into the habit of fighting the battles which ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... humanity; all the time wasted in the wrong-headedness of archaeology would be saved; for there would be nothing of the past except its influence on the immediate present, and nothing but the pure human ingot would finally be left of the long whirlings in the crucible of history. Some one has said that all recent literature is one gigantic plagiarism from the past. Why plagiarize with toil the toils of the past, when all that is good in them lives, necessarily and of its own tendency, in the winged and growing spirit of man? The stream flows in a channel, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... across a grave. All men, all things, he analyzed once and for all; he summed up the Past, represented by its records; the Present in the law, its crystallized form; the Future, revealed by religion. He took spirit and matter, and flung them into his crucible, and found—Nothing. Thenceforward he became ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... your breezes soft, and may you ever bring good tidings!" said Holy Friday; then she commanded him to hasten to Holy Thursday and tell her she must be ready with the gold crucible, for Petru was in a sad case:—from there the Spring wind was to rush to Holy Wednesday and tell her she must come to the well with the water of life. "Do you understand?" said Holy Friday. "And go as fast as you can," and ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... "and in the knowledge you have communicated I felt a charm that at times seems to me to be only fatal. You have confounded in my mind evil and good, or rather, you have left both good and evil as dead ashes, as the dust and cinder of a crucible. You have made intellect the only conscience. Of late, I wish that my tutor had been ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Nature, to invert society, to play the part of merciless innovators to imperil religion, to place all civil and religious freedom in jeopardy; that if our ends were accomplished all the public and private virtues would be melted as in a crucible and thrown upon the ground, thence to cry aloud to heaven like the blood of righteous Abel. Were it not that curiosity is largely developed in this class, they would go down to their graves wholly uninformed of our true principles, motives, and aims. They look upon us as black ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... will not buy them, will you melt them down for me?" "Melt them down!" answers the silver smith, "that is quite another matter." He takes the chalices and the crucifix with a pair of tongs; the silver, thus in bond, is dropped into the crucible, melted, and delivered to the thief, who lays down five pistoles and decamps with his booty. The young servant stares at this strange scene. But the master very gravely resumes his lecture. "My son," he says, "take warning by that sacrilegious ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... which the electrolysis was carried out. In the same year, O. Ruff and W. Plato (Ber. 1902, 35, p. 3612) employed a mixture of calcium chloride (100 parts) and fluorspar (16.5 parts), which was fused in a porcelain crucible and electrolysed with a carbon anode and an iron cathode. Neither of these processes admitted of commercial application, but by a modification of Ruff and Plato's process, W. Ruthenau and C. Suter have made the metal commercially available. These chemists ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... woman laid some embers of fire, and, pouring oil over them, they sent forth a little blaze, shining out and lighting up the faces with a lurid glare, casting dark shadows behind them. For a moment no voice broke the stillness of the place. After the woman had placed her crucible upon the fire, she turned ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... power, and a great nation looking towards herself for support and consolation, she might well shrink as she contemplated the arduous task which had so suddenly devolved upon her. Moreover, death is the moral crucible which cleanses from all dross the memories of those who are submitted to its unerring test; and in such an hour she could not but forget the faults of the husband in dwelling upon the greatness of the monarch. Who, then, shall venture to follow her through the reveries of that ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... blankets, and is retorted by the Chinamen themselves, and then they bring it for sale. The retorting has usually been badly done, and there remains a good deal of quicksilver and nitric acid adhering to the gold. The only way of dealing with it is to put the whole into a crucible, then make it red hot, and keep the gold at the melting-point for five ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... of this Prescott took a small crucible of black lead. "Now we are ready to try it," he cried in great excitement. "Here I have a crucible containing some copper. Any substance in the group would do, even hydrogen if there was any way I could ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... put on the top of a perch; pitch or sulphur to fill a hole; wax sufficient to fill the mouth of a small hole; brick-clay sufficient to make a mouth of a crucible bellows for goldsmiths—Rabbi Judah says, "sufficient to make a crucible stand;" bran sufficient to put on the mouth of a crucible blow-pipe for goldsmiths; ointment sufficient to anoint the little finger of girls—Rabbi Judah says, "sufficient to make the ...
— Hebrew Literature
... it went home to her. She feared him; she feared the strength that lay behind that calm; she feared the masterfulness of his wild but inscrutably hidden nature; she was afraid to surrender to such a man as this, afraid that in the hot crucible of his love her own nature would be dissolved, transmuted, and rendered part of his. Yet, though the truth was now made plain to her, she thrust it ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... him the "British Bernhardi," and invoked the support of "these medical gentleman" (this with a smile at Doctor Mary's expense) for his point of view. War tested, proved, braced, hardened; it was nature's crucible; it was the antidote to softness and sentimentality; it was the vindication of the strong, the elimination of ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... waters,—the courage and the fortitude, the hope that battled against hope, the comprehensive outlook, the sagacious purpose, the resolute will, the unhesitating self-sacrifice, the undaunted devotion which has made this heroic ground: cast these into your own glowing crucible, O gracious friend, and crystallize for yourself such a gem of days as shall worthily be set forever in your crown of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... some periods, however, in the early part of mediaeval history when this material was not forgotten: when the caliphs of the East formed of it some of the beautiful ornaments of their palaces; when the Arabian alchemists subjected it to the crucible, and so produced the pigment ivory black; when a Danish knight killed an elephant in the holy wars, and established an order of knighthood which still exists; when Charlemagne, the emperor of the West, had ivory ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... prescriptive, are placed with imprescriptible characters, culture, national honor and humanity. No; the Filipinos have no need ever to make use of reprisals because they seek independence with culture, liberty with unconditional respect for the law, as the organ of justice, and a name purified in the crucible of human sentiments. ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... Johnson trembled from head to foot and sat close to Bud. Then, as burly Mr. Soden, with great gusto, depicted materialistic tortures that startled the nerves of everybody except Bud, Walter wanted to leave, but Bud would not let him. For some reason he wished to keep his companion in the crucible as long as possible. ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... my veins, and the same flesh, now in Venice, which I carried about me three years since, up and down London streets, having, in lieu of beer and ale, drunk wine all this while, and fed upon different viands. Now, the stomach is like a crucible, for it hath a chemical kind of virtue to transmute one body into another, to transsubstantiate fish and fruits into flesh within and about us; but tho it be questionable whether I wear the same flesh which is fluxible, I am sure my hair is not ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... no wise "vanities," when filtered by the Sunday crucible. After much troubling of the waters of my life, a radiant thought of the meaning and beauty of earthly existence will descend like a healing angel. The stillness permits me to hear a pure tone from the One ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... evening with her, and bravely melted down his five francs in the crucible of prodigality. Mademoiselle Laure was charmed with his manners, and was good enough only to notice that Rodolphe had not escorted her home at the moment when he was ushering ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... our heroine presents a career not more extraordinary than those that excite our surprise in the lives of the penitent saints venerated on the alters of the Church. Sanctity is not to be judged by antecedents. The soul crimsoned with guilt may, in the crucible of repentance, become white like the crystal snow before it touches the earth. This consoling thought is not a mere assertion, but a matter of faith confirmed by fact. There are as great names among the penitent saints of the Church as amongst the few brilliant stars ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... existence. They loved one another and were ready without hesitation to commit all sorts of follies, deeming them mere bagatelles, which on solid land they would never have condoned in themselves. Their rejoicing was a crucible melting together all the barriers by which convention divides man from man. They experienced a sense of relief and liberation, and drew in deep breaths of ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... matter how settled were his views on the management of this old world, his stay "over there" has changed his point of view. His whole mental attitude has undergone something of the nature of a revolution in the crucible of war. Up the "line," he saw things stripped to the buff, saw life and death in all their nakedness. The veneer of so-called civilization has been worn off, and the real man shows through. That, to my mind, is why friendships made amid the blood, mud, hunger, ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... and in the consciousness of man." The sympathetic reader of Browning's "Paracelsus" will realize, however, that the drama he presents is spiritual, rather than occult. It is not the search for the possible mysteries, or achievements of the crucible. It is the adventure of the soul, not the penetration into the secrets ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... melting together in large crucibles certain proportions of copper and zinc. The heat applied must be considerable, for during the fusion of the two metals a white flame from the zinc and a green one from the copper flash from the mouth of the crucible. When properly mixed the molten alloy is poured into rectangular or cylindrical moulds. After cooling, the bars are driven between immense rollers, to be formed into sheet-brass. This process is very much like rolling out dough for pie-crust, ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, April 22, 1897, Vol. 1, No. 24 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So. Carpenter ( resuming his work). Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he's queer; says nothing ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas, The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter in science fiction with Seetee Ship and ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... Pumpelly, lawful spouse of Vice President Pumpelly, of Cuban Crucible, erstwhile of Athens, Ohio, was fully conscious that even if she wasn't the smartest thing on Fifth Avenue, her snappy little car was. It was, as she said, a "perfec' beejew!" The two robes of silver fox alone had cost eighty-five hundred dollars, but that ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... addition to this, chance combinations yield nothing but products of the same nature as the elements combined, so that life and organisation will not be produced by a flow of atoms, and a chemist when making his compounds will never give them thought and feeling in his crucible. [Footnote: Could one believe, if one had not seen it, that human absurdity could go so far? Amatus Lusitanus asserts that he saw a little man an inch long enclosed in a glass, which Julius Camillus, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Peak and look down upon the world and the sea gives one a great notion of the making of things. Once the world was a crucible. The islands are all volcanic, all ash and cinders, lava and pumice. But I perceived that the Peak itself, the final peak, the last five thousand feet of it, was but the last result of a dying fire—a mere gas spurt to what had been. The whole anatomy of the island is laid bare; the history and ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts |
