"Quicksilver" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be tempted to say that really it is not so much that there is a veil on the mirror as that there is no quicksilver at all behind. You meet in life characters so thin, so shallow, that every good thought seems to go through and out of them at the other side; they hear with one ear, and it goes out at the other. You can make no impression ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... "Quicksilver? I should think it was quick! See it run back, now the tube is cool. But father called it something else the ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... a stink of tallow to remind you that it was once clothed and mitred with flame. That is past by. I was once a volume of gold leaf, rising and riding on every breath of Fancy, but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, and now I sink in quicksilver and remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane that makes oaks and straws join in one dance, fifty yards high ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... have lost my punch, though at that I'm not exactly a pork-and-beaner. Hum-m-m! Ahem! Harumph-h-h! This must be a hard order to fill. Mister Consul, when Gus Redell has to come to me for help. That son of a gun can move faster and go through more obstacles than quicksilver. Gus, what's gone wrong with you? Have you lost your punch ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... my secure hour thy uncle stole, With juice of cursed Hebenon in a vial, And in the porches of my ear did pour The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine; And a most instant tetter bark'd ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... him guess the swift message ready to leap out toward him. He seemed to be drawing her soul to his unconsciously. Tingling in every nerve, athrob with an emotion new and inexplicable, she drew a long slow breath and turned her head away. A hot shame ran like quicksilver through her veins. She whipped herself with her own scorn. Was she the kind of girl that gave her love to a man who did not ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... said Gluck at length, after watching the water spreading in long quicksilver-like streams over the floor for a quarter of an hour; "mayn't ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... be digested, like food, but to pass directly from the stomach into the blood-vessels, and dilute and temper the blood, rendering it more fit to answer the great purpose of sustaining life and health. Now, there is nothing that can do this but water. Alcohol cannot do it, nor can turpentine, oil, quicksilver, melted ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... sharper, and thoroughly up in the art and mystery of loading dice with quicksilver; but having been sometimes detected in his sharping tricks, he was obliged 'to look on the point of the sword, with which being often wounded, latterly he declined fighting, if there were any way of escape.' Having once 'choused,' or cheated, a Mr Levingstone, page of honour to King ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... thermometer does, Dan'l. The little bulb at the bottom contains something that's easily swelled by the heat. In a hot climate, quicksilver is used, because it doesn't boil except at a heat much greater than the air ever gets, though it freezes easily; in a cold climate, they use alcohol because it doesn't freeze except at a degree of cold much colder than the atmosphere ever ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... of business is not so mercenary nor so keen in speculation; that our brains are consumed to furnish their daily supply of poisonous trash. And yet we, all of us, shall continue to write, like men who work in quicksilver mines, knowing that they are doomed ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... a thermometer. I guess you have seen them often enough. A thermometer is a glass tube, fastened to a piece of wood or perhaps tin, and inside is a thin, shiny column. This column is mercury, or quicksilver. Some thermometers have, instead of mercury, alcohol, colored red, so it can ...
— Daddy Takes Us Skating • Howard R. Garis
... the danger of poisoning is imminent in the manufacture of colored paper, colored wafers and artificial flowers; in the preparation of metachromotype, poisons and chemicals; in the painting of leaden soldiers and leaden toys. The on-laying of looking-glasses with quicksilver is simply deadly to the fruit of pregnant women. If, of the live-births in Prussia, 22 per cent. on an average die during the first year, there die, according to Dr. Hirt, 65 per cent. of the live-births of female on-layers of quicksilver, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... death, had they not been made to eat them. And then I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, "Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum;"—I had a great dislike of paper logic. For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. All ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... products of the East, Europe had only rough woolen cloth, arsenic, antimony, quicksilver, tin, copper, lead, and coral to give; and a balance, therefore, always existed for the European merchant to pay in gold and silver, with the result that gold and silver coins grew scarce in the West. It is hard to say what would have happened had not a new supply of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... do!" said Mr. Merryweather. "You all have quicksilver in your heels, I believe. Seven and Twelve! ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... many-coloured costumes, caused the Nile to disappear entirely over an extent of many miles, and presented under the brilliant Egyptian sun a spectacle dazzling in its changefulness. The water, agitated in every direction, surged, sparkled, and gleamed like quicksilver, and resembled a sun shattered into ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... Sunday, the rain came down as if determined to drive the quicksilver entirely out of my poor friend. Mr. Jaffrey sat bolt upright at the breakfast-table, looking as woe-begone as a bust of Dante, and retired to his chamber the moment the meal was finished. As the day advanced, the wind veered ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... that might look like contrition, but was willing to submit the points to the decision of colleagues; that Lord John would submit no point to colleagues 'affecting his personal honour'—to such degrees of heat can the quicksilver mount even in a cabinet thermometer. If such quarrels of the great are painful, there is some compensation in the firmness, patience, and benignity with which a man like Lord Aberdeen strove to appease ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... exposed to solar rays, will ascend to the skies and sometimes suffer a natural change. And if the eggs of the larger description of swans, or leather balls stitched with fine thongs, be filled with nitre, the purest sulphur quicksilver, or kindred materials which rarify by their caloric energy, and if they externally resemble pigeons, they will easily be mistaken ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... away the mist and the clouds, the smoke from Canada. The sun shone with a high brilliancy, the elms of the Common cast sharp, black shadow-patterns on the pavements, and when she reached the office and looked out of his window she saw the blue river covered with quicksilver waves chasing one another across the current. Ditmar had not yet returned to Hampton. About ten o'clock, as she was copying out some figures for Mr. Price, young Mr. Caldwell approached her. He had a Boston newspaper ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Orinoco, took and plundered the town of Santo Tomas and returned in the following March.[183] On 19th October another privateer named Captain Cooper brought into Port Royal two Spanish prizes, the larger of which, the "Maria" of Seville, was a royal azogue and carried 1000 quintals of quicksilver for the King of Spain's mines in Mexico, besides oil, wine and olives.[184] Cooper in his fight with the smaller vessel so disabled his own ship that he was forced to abandon it and enter the prize; and it was while cruising off ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... clung to his arm and eyed the price ticket. Now $98.50. You couldn't see Nick interested in bedroom sets, in price tickets, in any of those settled, fixed, everyday things. He was fluid, evasive, like quicksilver, though they did ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... scale-work, it is of course necessary to determine, first, who are poor and who are rich; nor this only, but also how poor and how rich they are. Which will prove a curious thermometrical investigation; for we shall have to do for gold and for silver, what we have done for quicksilver;—determine, namely, their freezing-point, their zero, their temperate and fever-heat points; finally, their vaporescent point, at which riches, sometimes explosively, as lately in America, "make to themselves wings:"—and correspondently, the number of degrees below zero at which poverty, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... me like shape, like garments wore, And dived with me in that quicksilver stream, Such mind, to my remembrance, then I bore, As when on vain and foolish things men dream; At last our shade it pleased her to restore, Then full of wonder and of fear we seem, And with an ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... is not a quicksilver mine in all Siberia. There is gold and silver, but I don't believe there is a place where quicksilver is found. Anyhow there is not one that is worked. They have been gammoning you, ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... Take of quicksilver one ounce, one ounce nitric acid, one ten cent piece, rain water 1/2 pint to a pint, put the three first articles into a tumbler together; let them stand until dissolved, occasionally stirring, then add the water, and it is ready for ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... incapable, by nature, of a rugged tone or a coarse gesture; a being without the slightest apparent pretension, but refined beyond the wildest dream of dandies. To him, enter Aberford, perspiring and shouting. He was one of those globules of human quicksilver one sees now and then for two seconds; they are, in fact, two globules; their head is one, invariably bald, round, and glittering; the body is another in activity and shape, totus teres atque rotundus; and in fifty years they live five centuries. Horum ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... round like wild fire and half an hour later the price of Estuaries was running up like quicksilver dipped in ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... ran forward to thrust such impudent youngsters outside the palace, but the boys slipped through their fingers like quicksilver, and entered a large hall, where the emperor was dining, ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... Tanci, near Yasica, in the commune of Puerto Plata. The old chronicles refer to silver mines at Jarabacoa and Cotui in La Vega province, also to others near Santiago, near Higuey and on the Jaina River. Platinum occurs at Jarabacoa, traces of quicksilver have been found near Santiago, Banica and San Cristobal, and ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... be no other remedy, our old friend Quicksilver was sent post haste to King Pluto, in hopes that he might be persuaded to undo the mischief he had done, and to set everything right again by giving up Proserpina. Quicksilver accordingly made the best of his way to the great gate, took a flying leap right over the ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... Tredyddlum and Polwheedle Copper Mines (which were as yet under water), besides singing as good a second as any professional man, and besides the Tredyddlum Office, had a Smyrna Sponge Company, and a little quicksilver operation in view, which would set him straight with the world yet. Filby had been every thing: a corporal of dragoons, a field-preacher, and missionary-agent for converting the Irish; an actor at a Greenwich fair-booth, ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mind so remote as thoughts of matrimony. But the rate clerk was a stolid, a suspicious person, and he was gnawed by a low and common jealousy. Reason failing, they came together, amalgamating like two drops of quicksilver. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... factor, and Pedro da Braga as clerk, to be assisted by Joao Nunez, Davane, and one of the pilots from Melinda, he sent on shore for the purpose of trading, a chest of unwrought branch coral, the same quantity of vermilion, a barrel of quicksilver, fifty pigs of copper, twenty strings of large cut coral, and as many of amber, five Portugueses of gold, fifty cruzados, and a hundred testoons in silver; as also a table with a green cloth, and a pair of wooden scales. He directed ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... of a fox, and the blood which raced in his veins was volatile as quicksilver. The same glance which showed him the gray automobile stealing softly across the network of car-lines of one of the city's main thoroughfares revealed a roundsman ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... or the sand on the seashore. And, although not seen, they spoke all kinds of phantom-words, which were heard right and left, before and behind, above and below, and which penetrated through the pores of the skin like quicksilver passing ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... surface, which glowed in the sun like a vast lake of quicksilver: now she stood in a shallow spot, where the water rippled no higher than her middle, and combed out her dripping tresses; then she waded further in, and seemed to rejoice in allowing the little wavelets to kiss her snowy bosom. No fear ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... his flaming scarlet coat of mail, passed through a glassy pool among the rocks, treading sedately on pointed claws; the lancons tunnelled the oozing beach under her pink feet, like streams of living quicksilver; the big, blue sea-crabs sidled off the reef, sheering down sideways into limpid depths. Landward the curlew walked in twos and threes, swinging their long sickle bills; the sea-swallows drove by like gray snow-squalls, melting away against the sky; ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... one lighter than cork, the cork will sink in it as does iron in water; in the second instance, if we change the liquid to one heavier than iron, the iron will float on it as does cork on water, and exactly as an ordinary flat-iron will float on quicksilver, bobbing up and down like a cork in a tumbler of water. If, therefore, solutions of known but varying densities are compounded, it is possible to tell almost to exactitude the specific gravity of ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... have come out of the Mermaid in the days of the Virgin Queen. Outside the moon soared, soared brilliant, a greenish blotch on it like the time-stain on a chased silver bowl on an altar. The broken lion's head of the fountain dribbled one tinkling stream of quicksilver. On the seawind came smells of rotting garbage and thyme burning in hearths and jessamine flowers. Down the street geraniums in a window smouldered in the moonlight; in the dark above them the merest contour of a face, once the gleam of two eyes; opposite against the white wall standing very quiet ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... to give you one chance more, and only one. It's quicksilver, kill or cure, and a stiff dose at that. I've just been talking with Spurling and his two friends. They're to spend the summer fishing from an island off the Maine coast, to earn money to start their college course. ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh—a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush—this the light dust-cloth—which ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... this plaguy tongue of mine for making such a hollo-ballo, that I do—five gallons of cold water has my poor belly been drenched with since night fell, so as my reins and my liver are all one as if they were turned into ice, and my whole harslet shakes and shivers like a vial of quicksilver. I have been dragged, half-drowned like a rotten ewe, from the bottom of a river; and who knows but I may be next dragged quite dead from the bottom of a coal-pit—if so be as I am, I shall go to hell to be sure, for being consarned like in my own moorder, that I will, so I will; ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... threatening sky lay the glittering lake. Its surface of quicksilver was streaked here and there with black shadows—the track of the wind-gusts racing across it. The trees were rustling in the wind, making a sound like a ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... of various sizes, industriously stretching their peacock necks to crop the tiny leaves that fluttered above their heads, in a flowering mimosa grove which beautified the scenery. My heart leapt within me, and my blood coursed like quicksilver through my veins, for, with a firm wooded plain before me, I knew they were mine; but, although they stood within a hundred yards of me, having previously determined to try the boarding system, I reserved ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... motif a little," he said. "I simply want to portray the quicksilver of after-war conditions—England in transition." At this time Delancey seemed to me the least little tiny bit depressed. The income he was sacrificing rose (in his conversation) from 5,000 to 7,000 pounds. ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... once been the defence of a fortalice, of which no vestiges now remained, but which was said to have been inhabited by the same doughty hero we have now alluded to. Brown endeavoured to make some acquaintance with the children, but 'the rogues fled from him like quicksilver,' though the two eldest stood peeping when they had got to some distance. The traveller then turned his course towards the hill, crossing the foresaid swamp by a range of stepping-stones, neither the broadest nor steadiest that could be imagined. He had not climbed far ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... was restored to its proper source. Spawn's treasure of radiumized quicksilver we shipped back to Nareda, where it was checked and divided, and Jetta's share legally awarded ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... perhaps he likely was, for he was splendidly educated, with rows on rows of books in his cabin, and a cyclopediar six feet long. The mate said he knew everything in it up to R, not to speak of working lunars in a saucer of quicksilver, and reckonizing ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... that mystery? At any rate the legend of the "phlegmatic" Englishman has been scattered to the four winds of heaven by the guns of the western front. The men are cool in action, it is true; but for the rest they are, by the French standards, quicksilver. ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... is, quicksilver, or mercury. Now mercury, you ought to know, can transmit an electric current, so that if an electrically charged pin comes down into the cup of mercury, the cup itself being attached to an electric current, ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... she said, going to a mirror, from which the quicksilver was peeling, and which presented her features to her ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... for all manner of diseases, only comes short of one thing (which he despairs not utterly to bring to perfection), to make a horse go on a wooden leg and two crutches. For powdering his ears with quicksilver, and giving him suppositories of live eels, he is expert. All the while you are cheapening, he fears you will not bite; but he laughs in his sleeve when he hath cozened you in earnest. Frenchmen are his best chapmen; he keeps amblers for them on purpose, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the father did me some mischief. But you should have seen how I fought it out with him. Ah, Athos, such encounters never take place in these times! I had a hand which could never remain at rest, a hand like quicksilver,—you knew its quality, for you have seen me at work. My sword was no longer a piece of steel; it was a serpent that assumed every form and every length, seeking where it might thrust its head; in other words, where it might fix its bite. I advanced half ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... on the party until after having previously ascertained where they could be taken to with safety. Upon examining the barometers to-day, I was much concerned to find that they were both out of order and useless; the damp had softened the glue fastening the bags of leather which hold the quicksilver, and the leathers that were glued over the joints of the cisterns, and so much of the mercury had escaped, before I was aware of it, that I found all the previous observations valueless. I emptied the tubes and ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... heart always met affection as swiftly as one drop of quicksilver runs to another, became almost as much attached to him as she was to Rosa. "How kind Gerald is to me!" she would say to Tulee. "Papa used to wish we had a brother; but I didn't care for one then, because he was just as good for a playmate. But ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... prompt and Indian-like. He killed the father and mother at the first opportunity, seized the girl when she was at a distance from the village, and carried her to the deserted quicksilver mine near Spanish Camp. In a tunnel that branched from American Shaft he had fashioned a rude cell of stone and wood, and into that he forced and fastened her. He had stocked it with water and provisions, and for ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... explained the process of squeezing quicksilver through a chamois skin. "And I'm glad it ain't my neck," added Cheyenne. "Joe killed a man, with his bare hands, onct. That's why he never gets in a fight, nowadays. He dassn't. 'Course, he had to kill that man, ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... gun-truck, all but toppling down the deck. Soon that would happen again which had happened for five days past. He would hear again the chattering of monkeys and the screaming of parrots, the mat of green and yellow weeds would creep in towards the Mary over the quicksilver sea, once more the sheer wall of rock would rise, and ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... second it stood, then began swiftly to change, melting with quicksilver quickness from one outline into another as square and triangle and spheres changed places. Their shiftings were like the transformations one sees within a kaleidoscope. And in each vanishing form was the suggestion of unfamiliar ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Strides," said the captain, smiling as he walked away from the place; "if he can escape Phoebe and her children, the fellow must be made of quicksilver. Still, I have a better prison in view. I am glad to see this proof, however, of your own fidelity, by finding all your family in their beds; for those are not wanting who would ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... of being cherished with the utmost care and solicitude. Every ring on the tunic was polished as highly as the metal would admit of, so that the light appeared to trickle over it as its wearer moved. The helmet shone like a globe of quicksilver, and lines of light gleamed on the burnished edge of the shield, or sparkled on the ornamental points of the more precious metals with which the various parts of his armour were decorated. Above all hung a loose mantle or cloak of dark-blue cloth, which was fastened on the ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... some little insight into the habits of the woodcock, and the mode of snaring them in the forests of Le Morvan, during the month of November. At the close of this month, Dame Nature's barometer, their instinct, far better than the quicksilver, tells them the December rains are close at hand; and that if they remain in their hiding-places in the low grounds, they will be driven out by the approaching deluge. They at length make up their minds to ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... must trust in your hands—don't forget that I do so trust it. How would you like to cross Quapaw creek on this piece of quicksilver?" ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... curious and costly figures of birds and quadrupeds. In a lofty pavilion of the gardens, one of these basins and fountains, so delightful in a sultry climate, was replenished not with water, but with the purest quicksilver. The seraglio of Abdalrahman, his wives, concubines, and black eunuchs, amounted to six thousand three hundred persons: and he was attended to the field by a guard of twelve thousand horse, whose belts and cimeters were ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... that day experienced strange alternations of feeling. His spirits seemed to rise and sink, as the quicksilver in the glass is affected by the state of the atmosphere. He looked into the future with terror, and again became, to the astonishment of his guest—we now talk of their conduct after dinner—actuated by ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... is a great deal of quicksilver in this glass ball, and we can play with it. I'll show you how." And away they went ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... her in the sweepstakes then?" Chuck asked eagerly. "I ain't caring what Kiowa horse gets the money just so that Y-Bar outfit is taken down a notch or two. Ever since they got that Thunderbolt horse and beat Old Heck's Quicksilver with him they've been crowing over the Quarter Circle KT and I'm ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... axis, the inequalities and selenography of the moon, the several phases of Venus and Mercury, the improvement of telescopes and grinding of glasses for that purpose, the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of vacuities and nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration therein, with divers other things of like nature, some of which were then but new discoveries, and others not so generally known and embraced as now they are; with other ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... silver, quicksilver, gold, and lead, came into common use in the early stages of civilization, all of which added greatly to the arts and industries. Nearly all of the metals were used for money at various times. The aids to trade and commerce which these metals gave on account of their ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... one of the boat-pullers said. "They put you into the salt-mines and work you till you die. Never see daylight again. Why, I've heard tell of one fellow that was chained to his mate, and that mate died. And they were both chained together! And if they send you to the quicksilver mines you get salivated. I'd rather ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... had arisen my mission now. Mercury—the quicksilver of commerce—so recently come to tremendous value through its universal use in the new antiseptics which bid fair to check all human disease—was being produced in Nareda. The import duty into the United States was being paid openly enough. But nevertheless ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... the last that I was ever to see of Cousin Edie. She stood in the sunlight with the old challenge in her eyes, and flash of her teeth; and so I shall always remember her, shining and unstable, like a drop of quicksilver. As I joined my comrade in the street below, I saw a grand carriage and pair at the door, and I knew that she had asked me to slip out so that her grand new friends might never know what common people ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hands. "Certainly I won't mind, if you'll produce Miss Sylvia. She's slipperier than a drop of quicksilver." ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... Omoa, Accordingly, on the 16th of October, they stormed and carried the fort: taking, and carrying away, the register-ships, on board of which were about three millions of piastres; as well as two hundred and fifty quintals of quicksilver, found on shore in the fortress. From the advantages of participating in this brilliant enterprise, Captain Locker had been thus deprived by want of health; and his second lieutenant, singular as it may seem, by ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... painters observed distinctly how one of the fellows, taking Marianna in his arms (for she had fainted), made off to the gate, whilst Signor Pasquale ran after him with incredible swiftness, as if he had got quicksilver in his legs. At the same time, by the light of the torches, he caught a glimpse of something gleaming, clinging to his mantle and whimpering; no doubt ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... but there was no pang of homesickness now—she was too eager for the world into which she was going. Next morning the air was cooler, the skies lower and grayer—the big city was close at hand. Then came the water, shaking and sparkling in the early light like a great cauldron of quicksilver, and the wonderful Brooklyn Bridge—a ribbon of twinkling lights tossed out through the mist from the mighty city that rose from that mist as from a fantastic dream; then the picking of a way through screeching little boats and noiseless big ones and white ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... could think of such nonsense. Birth, Morton, what the devil does that signify so long as it is birth in another country? A foreign damsel, and a Spanish girl, too, above all others! 'Sdeath, man, as if there was not quicksilver enough in the English women for you, you must make a mercurial exportation from Spain, must you! Why, Morton, Morton, the ladies in that country are proverbial. I tremble at the very thought of it. But as for my consent, I never will give it,—never; and though I threaten thee ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there was a long and blessed ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... had been veiled by mortal lassitude. This had continued, but in the afternoon and at night they had mixed something heavy, like a stone ball, into his drinking-cup, and waves of warmth had flowed to the toes of his healthy foot from the cup. Thoughts chased one another swiftly, like tiny quicksilver balls through some corner of his brain, and while he lay bathed in perspiration, and his eyelids closed of their own accord, not in sleep but in unconsciousness, he had been pursued by strange, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... was so fresh, so unsatisfied and light of foot. It ran and was not wearied, anticipated him everywhere. It put a girdle round the earth while he was going from New York to Moorlock. At this moment, it was tingling through him, exultant, and live as quicksilver, whispering, "In July you will ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... all, swerving neither to the right nor to the left, preached the crusade of the Holy Sepulcher till at last his words of fire burned through dull understandings, into cold hearts, and steel-clad Europe quivered like a million globules of quicksilver, then ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the bosom of the Bocardon family and remained there, its Cousin Quicksilver and its entirely happy and idolized hero, until the indignation of the eminent M. Say ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... readily combines with nearly all other metals, and is used in the manufacture of looking-glasses, barometers, thermometers, &c.; in some of the arts, and in the preparation of several powerful medicines. It is found in California, Hungary, Sweden, Spain, China, and Peru. The quicksilver mine of Guanca Velica, in Peru, is one hundred and seventy fathoms in circumference, and four hundred and eighty deep. In this profound abyss are seen streets, squares, and a chapel, where religious ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... mounting as rapidly as quicksilver. Bessie Mather appeared at the gate as she finished her last mouthful, and, giving Wealthy a great hug, Eyebright ran out to meet her, with a lightness and gayety of heart which surprised even herself. The blue sky seemed bluer than ever before, the grass greener, the sunshine was like yellow gold. ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... Gluck at length, after watching the water spreading in long, quicksilver-like streams over the floor for a quarter of an hour; "mayn't I take ...
— The King of the Golden River - A Short Fairy Tale • John Ruskin.
... her efforts to control such animals. On the other hand, many small horses which play up are most difficult to sit, for, although they may not take their rider's breath away by their display of physical power, they are like quicksilver on a frying-pan, and highly test our agility in the matter of balance ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... his bed and crown. That as he was sleeping in his garden, his custom always in the afternoon, his treasonous brother stole upon him in his sleep, and poured the juice of poisonous henbane into his ears, which has such an antipathy to the life of man, that swift as quicksilver it courses through all the veins of the body, baking up the blood, and spreading a crustlike leprosy all over the skin: thus sleeping, by a brother's hand he was cut off at once from his crown, his queen, and his life: and he adjured Hamlet, if he did ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... a small thermometer in her trunk, which she consulted a dozen times an hour, in order to regulate the temperature of the room. Alas for me if the quicksilver rose above 60! I devoutly hoped she would leave it behind in some of our numerous stopping-places, and with an eye to that possibility, I must confess, I hung it in the most out-of-the-way corners I could find; but it seemed to be ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... reflectors. Some of them he would dash against and push out of their places; others he would burn up and consume to ashes: and others again he would split into fritters, and their fragments would instantly take a globular form, like spilled quicksilver, and become satellites to whatever other worlds they should happen to meet with in their career. In short, the whole seemed an epitome of the creation, past, present, and future; and all that passes among the stars during one thousand years was here generally performed ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... luck—not a witch, however ugly, who stayed behind; for when it is a question of beauty, no scullion-wench will acknowledge herself surpassed; every one piques herself on being the handsomest; and if the looking-glass tells her the truth she blames the glass for being untrue, and the quicksilver for ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... pellicle to the action of the atmosphere, these surfaces in many plants strongly repel moisture, as cabbage-leaves, whence the particles of rain lying over their surfaces without touching them, as observed by Mr. Melville (Essays Literary and Philosop. Edinburgh) have the appearance of globules of quicksilver. And hence leaves laid with the upper surfaces on water, wither as soon as in the dry air, but continue green many days, if placed with the under surfaces on water, as appears in the experiments of Mons. Bonnet (Usage des Fevilles.) ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... was wide awake in an instant. He knew that he had been robbed and grabbed for the fellow who slipped away as though he had been quicksilver and when Jim who became entangled in the bed clothes got to the door of the sleeper it was locked. Perhaps he has gone the other way, thought Jim, and he rushed to the other end of the car; the ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... liver is primarily affected, small doses of quicksilver act in a wonderful and a prodigious manner. How the stomach, when wrong, disturbs the head, is apparent to every one. How a faulty action of the liver disturbs the head is also well known; but the liver, in an especial ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... Athens once more, and thence to the Morea; but my stay depends so much on my caprice, that I can say nothing of its probable duration. I have been out a year already, and may stay another; but I am quicksilver, and say nothing positively. We are all very much occupied doing nothing, at present. We have seen every thing but the mosques, which we are to view with a firman on Tuesday next. But of these and other ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... all danger was out of the question. He sank down again on his elbows, and as he rested his now powerless limbs, I saw the blood welling out of a wound in the loins, as it shone in the moonlight, and trickled off his sleek-painted hide, like globules of quicksilver. As I looked into his countenance, I saw all the devil alive there. The will remained—the power only had gone. It was a sight never to be forgotten. With head raised to the full stretch of his neck, ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... of water. After I had washed my face and hands I filled the kettle from a stream bright and lively as quicksilver (a stream presenting, as the autumn leaves tossed in the eddies which went leaping and singing over the stones, a truly enchanting spectacle), and, returning, and peeping through the bushes, perceived the woman to be crawling on hands and knees over the stones, and anxiously ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... things and fishes, and we three would lie by the hour, flat on the rocks, chin in fist, watching the comedies and tragedies and the strange chancy life of the pools. And they were absorbing enough to keep even Carette quiet, although her veins seemed filled with quicksilver and her life ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... long-tongued, swivel-eyed chameleon, the Romans are at hand. (A cry of terror from the women: they would fly but for the spears.) Not even the descendants of the gods can resist them; for they have each man seven arms, each carrying seven spears. The blood in their veins is boiling quicksilver; and their wives become mothers in three hours, and are slain and ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... room, has pressed on me with a weight I found it difficult to bear, and recollection has not failed to be as alert, poignant, obtrusive, as other feelings were languid. I attribute this state of things partly to the weather. Quicksilver invariably falls low in storms and high winds, and I have ere this been warned of approaching disturbance in the atmosphere by a sense of bodily weakness, and deep, heavy mental sadness, such as some would call PRESENTIMENT,—presentiment indeed it is, but not at ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... tankards, balls and the like out of their minerals, and we firmly believe all that is wanting here is to have a beginning made; for there are in New Netherland two kinds of marcasite, and mines of white and yellow quicksilver, of gold, silver, copper, iron, black lead and hard coal. It is supposed that tin and lead will also be found; but who will seek after them or who will make use of them as long as there are ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... eagle, from whose beak was suspended a bottle of the water, and no other light was shed upon the scene than the silver and golden radiance emitted together from this bottle, as if ten thousand infinitely small goldfish floated there in liquid quicksilver. The spring itself, flowing over its ancient mound of lime, iron and clay, like the venerable beard over the Arabian prophet's yellow breast, shed another light as if through a veil fluttered the molten fire ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... commend me for a traveller. HERE ends my Cornish expedition. Does it recall to thee, O sire, thine own of old time, undertaken (if I remember rightly) with Dr. Kidd?—Mails then did not travel like the Quicksilver, averaging 12 miles an hour, and few people go 40 miles before breakfast. Now, I feel able to get nearer my Albury destination, and in a week or so, shall hope to be residing at Dorchester, near the Blandford ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... against the sky, an object lesson for Belleville. I walked up to the Arc de l'Etoile, and coming back I strolled into a little leafy open-air restaurant for a cup of coffee. Suddenly I recognised the place—the fountain—a largo quicksilver ball—a little wooden pavilion festooned with coloured lamps. It was as though eight years ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... explorations of a geographical commission, for which purpose either Professor Hind, or Sir William Logan, or Mr. Sterry Hunt, or all these well known Canadians, are at once available. Professor Hind's suggestion as to the supply of quicksilver by the Company to miners, may or may not be valuable to a Company desiring to retain the lead of trade in portions of its own territory; but a reference to his report will show that it was not proposed to you as ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... further admixture, mated with a Russian fur trader called Shpack, also known in his time as the Big Fat. Shpack is herein classed Russian for lack of a more adequate term; for Shpack's father, a Slavonic convict from the Lower Provinces, had escaped from the quicksilver mines into Northern Siberia, where he knew Zimba, who was a woman of the Deer People and who became the mother of Shpack, who became the grandfather ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... when the two little ones had fallen into their noonday sleep, and were left with their mother to the care of good Miss Mercy, he set out for some parish work at Ormersfield, still taking with him little Kitty, whose quicksilver nature would never relieve her elders by ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he exclaimed, waving his hand. "We meet to-night, I trust. I will show you a new dance—the Dance of Death, I shall call it. I seem calm, but I am on fire with excitement. To-night I shall dance as though quicksilver were in my feet. You must not miss it. ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... soaked it in. I dashed a few drops also, playfully, upon the image of the dog, which had taken, the evening before, such fantastic liberties with my overwrought fancy. But these drops gathered themselves up nimbly into little shining balls, and fled off to the ground like so much quicksilver. I looked out upon the wan pools and marshes, whence a greenish mist steamed up, and seemed to poison the sunlight streaming through it. It is possible that this semblance of an unwholesome mist was not so much the fault of the marshes as a condition of the ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... where he "plant him sextant," but the flood had been over the spot and washed it away. When returning I found the trough for an artificial horizon washed upon the banks of the creek, this had been left with the sextant. Jackey crossed the creek, and found a small wooden bottle of quicksilver in the same place ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... avoyd Circumlocutions, call that Instrument, wherein a Cylinder of Quicksilver, of between 28. and 31. Inches in Altitude, is kept suspended after the manner of the Torricellian Experiment, a Barometer or Baroscope, first made publick by that Noble Searcher of Nature, Mr. Boyle, and imployed by Him and others, to detect all ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... sharply that the king only hurt his own foot by stamping on the floor. For eight days did he pursue the cat everywhere: up and down the palace he was after it from morning till night, but with no better success; the tail seemed made of quicksilver, so very lively was it. At last the king had the good fortune to catch Minon sleeping, when tramp, tramp! he trod on the tail ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... It would presumably prove to be a general law, and not an isolated fact. If bismuth turned into mercury, what would mercury turn into? There would be no rest for me until I had solved the question. I renewed the exhausted batteries and passed the current through the bowl of quicksilver. For sixteen hours I sat watching the metal, marking how it slowly seemed to curdle, to grow firmer, to lose its silvery glitter and to take a dull yellow hue. When I at last picked it up in a forceps, and threw it upon the table, ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... British diadem. That good payable gold-bearing rock exists there I know beyond question. I also know beyond all doubt that diamonds are to be easily won from the soil, and I am thoroughly cognisant of the fact that at least one, and I believe many, quicksilver mines can be located there. Others who know the country well have told me of coal and tin and silver mines, and samples have been shown to me which made my mouth water. Yet, all this wealth, which nature's generous hand has scattered so liberally for the use of mankind, is jealously locked ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... about it and possibly I may be of service to you. I have helped a good many young men through adventures that looked difficult enough beforehand. Perhaps you may have heard of me. I have more names than one, but the name of Quicksilver suits me as well as any other. Tell me what the trouble is and we will talk the matter over and see ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... pressure, which, while committing him to nothing, might tend to calm her feelings and by its vaguely reassuring influence help to stave off a crisis for the remainder of their walk. He did not, however, succeed in carrying out the scheme; for at the moment of contact her hand eluded his, as quicksilver glides from the grasp. There was no hint of coquettish hesitation in its withdrawal. She snatched it away as if his touch had burned her; and although she did not at the same time wholly relinquish his arm, that ...
— A Love Story Reversed - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... "To-morrow it may be different. Pardon me, monsieur, but I do not understand your people. They are too much like quicksilver; one is never sure where to catch them. Just now they welcome Conde as a hero, but who can say what they ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... by no fewer than six chandeliers, with numerous burners, and between the chandeliers depend from the ceiling large glass balls, coated inside with quicksilver, which serve to reflect the light and add something of brilliancy. There are two round holes for ventilation in the ceiling: the only windows are two which are at the lower end of the hall, and look out on a gloomy courtyard ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... great noon, when the blue abyss of day seemed to yawn over the world more deeply than ever before, a sudden change touched the quicksilver smoothness of the waters—the swaying shadow of a vast motion. First the whole sea-circle appeared to rise up bodily at the sky; the horizon-curve lifted to a straight line; the line darkened and approached,—a monstrous ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... Gawd!" he repeated over and over. There was a flickering look about the eyes that made Brent catch his breath. It seemed for just a passing second that they had been converted into little balls of trembling red quicksilver; that was the only thing to which he could liken those eyes just then—red quicksilver. But this passed so quickly that it might have been a reflection from the lamp. At any rate, Dale was continuing: "Why, Brent, I can't go to jail! Nor I ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... empty canvas and quested on over the sea in the hope of wind-ruffles on the water. But all was glassy calm, each great sea, of all the orderly procession of great seas, heaving up, round-topped and mountainous, like so much quicksilver. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... the Captain was over the rail like quicksilver. The hands were all in the bow, looking and pointing to the west. Jim slid down the ratlines, bubbling over with suppressed news. Before his feet had touched the deck Kitchell had kicked him into ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... little as he bent over the grizzly and crushed a small lump between his thumb and finger. He wandered if there was clay coming into the pay streak. Clay gathered up the "colors" it touched like so much quicksilver. Dog-gone, if it wasn't one thing it was another. If the tunnel wasn't caving in, he struck a bowlder, and if there wasn't a bowlder ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... Black Prince and his consort Bay might find their way to their own stables without depositing me at the front door of the house at Hyde Park Gate. I told Clarence so, to his great astonishment, and walked across the road in an opposite direction to home, as though my feet were winged with quicksilver. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... metals are Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Luna; vulgarly known as Lead, Tin, Iron, Copper, Quicksilver, and Silver. Gold is not included; because it is not in its nature a metal. It is all Spirit and incorruptible; wherefore it is the emblem of the Sun, which presides over ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Rest assured. The police might as well try to put their fingers on a globule of quicksilver. It is but three days since they left the Piazza del Popolo, Torre del Greco. To-morrow, if their business is finished to-night, they will vanish again; and ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... with which it is charged has no effect. The jar is charged with sulphuric acid, (common oil of vitriol) diluted in eight parts its bulk of water. The zinc plates of the battery have been amalgamated with quicksilver, and when the battery is set into the jar of acid there should be no action percieved upon them when the poles F, G, are not in contact. Should any action be percieved, it indicates imperfect amalgamation; ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... hair, which has been turning from the cradle, arrives. Another, the mirror shows back a sag beneath the eyes. That sag had come now to Mrs. Ross, giving her eye-sockets a look of unconquerable weariness. The streak of quicksilver had come, too, but more successfully combated. The head lying back against the brocade chair was guilty of new gleams. Brass, with a greenish alloy. Sitting there with the look of unshed tears seeming to form a film over her gaze, it was as if the dusk, flowing into a silence ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... you would have supposed that there might likewise be wings on his feet. To enable him to walk still better (for he was always on one journey or another) he carried a winged staff, around which two serpents were wriggling and twisting. In short, I have said enough to make you guess that it was Quicksilver; and Ulysses (who knew him of old, and had learned a great deal of his wisdom from him) recognized him in ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Rothschilds of London. In addition British capital controls some smaller mines in northern Spain. England thus largely controls the European commercial situation in this commodity, and London is the world's great quicksilver market, where prices are fixed and whence supplies go to all corners of the globe. Reserves of the Almaden ore bodies are very large. Sufficient ore is reported to have been developed to insure a future production ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... the encounter with a swollen lip and a feeling that one of his ribs was broken, and he had not had the pleasure of landing a single blow upon his slippery antagonist, who flowed about the room like quicksilver. But he had not flinched, and the statement of Francis, as they shook hands, that he had "done varry well," was as balm. Boxing is one of the few sports where the loser can feel the same thrill of triumph as the winner. There is no satisfaction ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... she murmured, "that some of us in our youth must have drunk from some poisoned cup, something which turned our blood into quicksilver. I must live, or I must die. I must have excitement every hour, every second, or break down. There are others too—many others. No wonder that that idiot of a man in Harley Street talked to me gravely about my heart. No excitement. A quiet ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... went to England, and raised, as if by magic, the enthusiasm of the English; how one fortune after another has been swallowed up in the dark, deep gulf of speculation; how expectations have been disappointed; and how the great cause of this is the scarcity of quicksilver, which has been paid at the rate of one hundred and fifty dollars per quintal in real cash, when the same quantity was given at credit by the Spanish government for fifty dollars; how heaps of silver lie abandoned, because the expense of acquiring quicksilver renders it wholly unprofitable to extract ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... dancers; they have far more quicksilver in their feet than their English cousins. Perhaps the very best waltzers I have ever danced with were English girls, who understood the poetry of the art and knew how to reflect not merely the time of the music, ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... three and thirty inches distant from the line XY) I subdivide into Decimals; then stopping the end F with soft Cement, or soft Wax, I invert the Frame, placing the head downwards, and the Orifice E upwards; and by it, with a small Funnel, I fill the whole Glass with Quicksilver; then by stopping the small Orifice E with my finger, I oftentimes erect and invert the whole Glass and Frame, and thereby free the Quicksilver and Glass from all the bubbles or parcels of lurking Air; then inverting it as before, I fill it top full with clear and well strain'd ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... loathe, detest, Abhor, condemn, abjure the mortal made Of such quicksilver clay that in his breast No permanent foundation can be laid; Love, constant love, has been my constant guest, And yet last night, being at a masquerade, I saw the prettiest creature, fresh from Milan, Which gave me some ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... shaft of light looked like quicksilver. The smoke from the funnel mixed in the heavy air with the mist and the light, and formed a fantastic beam of vapor from the ship to the shore. Up this stream of quivering, scintillating irradiation, as brilliant ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... nothing. Bond, who better apprehended the spirit of the hour, let himself loose in a vein of pure fantasy,—he ventured on the whimsical, the sprightly, the paradoxical. The poor fellow sent to interview him might as well have tried to grasp a bundle of sunbeams or a handful of quicksilver. His report turned out a frightful bungle; the wretched Bond, made clumsy, fatuous, pointless, sodden, when he had meant to show himself as witty and brilliant as possible, was completely crushed. With Joyce going for next to nothing and Bond for worse than nothing, the Art ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... said, in reply, "but I've sent a ball of quicksilver through an inch plank, and that's not a thing to be done every day—even here, although it is cold enough sometimes to freeze up ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... in going there, they experience very great trouble, still a constant stream of vessels go thither, for great profits are derived there. These vessels go to Siam, Camboja, Borney, Maluco, and Macasar. In short, they coast and go everywhere, and carry iron, quicksilver, silk, rice, pork, gold, and innumerable other things, without causing any deficiency for their own sustenance. They carry away all the silver in the world; and even that of Europa, or its value, is about to cease, for the Portuguese and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... delicacy of its steering: saying, 'O my moonbeam, if thou wouldst save the life of thy master, or restore the five senses of the Princess Melilot, thou must surpass thyself to-day. Listen, thou heaven-sent limb, thou miracle of quicksilver, and have a long mind to my words; for in a short while I shall have no speech left in me till the thing be done, and the deliverance, from head to feet, ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman |
