"Alembic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... study of those Arabian sages and alchemists in whom he had delighted when he was a young man. He saw him shun the daylight, and sleep its hours away, and then by night abandon himself like another Cagliostro to strange experiments with alembic and crucible, breathing acrid and poisonous vapours, seeking to extort from Nature her yet undiscovered secrets,—the Philosophers Stone, and the Elixir of Life. He saw him turn for a little from his strange and deadly experiments, and venture forth to show his blanched and worn ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... powerfully acting body, united with the tincture of antimony, at a gentle heat of the water-bath. Then, being exposed to the heat of open fire in an aludel, (or alembic,) a sublimate filled its heads in succession, which, if it appeared with various ...
— Faust • Goethe
... imitate them, and who burned one of his children in order to teach its mother how to look after the rest, would soon find himself in the criminal court, or in an asylum. But what would be insanity or criminal cruelty in the case of man, becomes, in the alembic of religious apologetic, goodness ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... They are a mill-stone slung about the neck of the giant of civilization. "What will people say?" Well, if you tell them a new truth, they will say that you are a demagogue or a blasphemer, an anarchist or a Populist; but when your new truth has been transformed by Time's great alembic into an old falsehood, they will have absorbed it—it will have become respectable—and you couldn't purge it from their soggy brain with Theodorus' Auticyrian hellebore. They said of Galileo, "Imprison him!" because ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Doctrine of Science, the charter of independence of the Romantic School, announcing the annihilation of physical values, proclaiming the soul as above things perceived, the inner spirit as that alembic in which all objects are produced. With almost insolent freshness Fichte asserted a re-valuation of all values: what had been "enlightenment" was now to be called shallowness; "ancient crudities" were to be reverenced ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... designs. That their acts are lawful he does not pretend to deny. I called for proof to sustain his charges. None such has been offered, and none such exists, or can be found. I repel them as calumnies double-distilled in the alembic of slavery. I deny them, also, in the particulars and inferences; and let us see upon what ground they rest, or by what process of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... ever make a great national poet, here were all the elements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic, and the lucky moment of projection was clearly come. If a great national poet could ever avail himself of circumstances, this was the occasion,—and, fortunately, Shakespeare was equal to it. Above all, we may esteem it lucky that he found words ready to his use, original and untarnished,—types ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... product of Goethe's muse. We believe that it is an old ballad of Denmark; a country which possesses, next to Scotland, the richest and most interesting store of ancient ballad poetry in Europe. However, although originally Danish, it has received some touches in passing through the alembic of translation, which may warrant us in giving it a prominent place, and we are sure that no lover of hoar tradition will blame us ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... restrained by natural affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him justice, he is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt you are selected as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be death; perhaps a fate more awful still. Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest of science before his ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... raining plum cakes!" exclaimed the Chevalier La Corne to his lively companion. "Joy's golden drops are only distilled in the alembic of woman's heart! What think you, Hortense? Which of Quebec's fair daughters will be willing to share ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... governors and preserved their customary laws; while in some there has been such a fusion of the two systems that we cannot decide which of the ingredients was the older, except by a process of analysis and a comparison of the several products of the alembic with the recognized institutions of the class of ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... which it cannot touch with its analysis, or repeat with its synthesis. The phenomena of life are as obvious to us as anything in the world; we know their signs and ways, and witness their power, yet in the alembic of our science they turn out to be only physico-chemical processes; hence that is all there is of them. Vitality, says Huxley, has no more reality than the horology of a clock. Yet Huxley sees three equal realities ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... eloquence of the Emperor in favour of all the extra-provincial Gauls in general, and the Aedui in particular. From the way in which he wrote harangues—that of Galgacus in his Agricola, for instance, —he would have caught in his alembic the essence of the original, and sublimated it; but he would not have placed before us an offspring that does not reflect one feature of its parent. Yet that is what the author of the Annals did with the speech of Claudius: he fabricated that which bears not the faintest resemblance ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... brain is the alembic to which the Animal conveys what each of its organizations, in proportion to the strength of that vessel, can absorb of that Substance, which returns it transformed ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... case of the present writer, whose earliest recollection of the great world of literature, his first dawn-glimpse of it, lying in dreamy beauty, was Bellerophon's pool, the memory is potent and yields an appreciation not to be distilled in any other alembic. Few facts are more fixed in his memory than that he was the child who watched the pool for the tall boy with the shining bridle who was his strange friend from another world. If to wake and feed the imagination and charm it, and fill the budding ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... was curiously intent—as of some midnight worker in research who sees a bright near glimpse of the gold his alchemy has so long sought to materialize in the alembic of fact. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... semoule, the lassagnes and others. For women in childbed and for consumptives were reserved the bouillons or "restaurants,"—these were composed of meat, of animals or of chickens, cut up very fine and distilled in an alembic with peeled barley, dried roses, cinnamon, coriander, and Damascus raisins. One of the most succulent of these bouillons ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... admonitions of the inditer of this correspondence. Become not a smuggler—forswear poteen. The Lord forgive me, Mr. Hycy—no, I only wished to say forswear—not the poteen—but any connection wid the illegal alembic from which it is distillated, otherwise they will walk off wid the 'doublings,' or strong liquor, leaving you nothing but the residuum or feints. Take a friend's advice, therefore, and retrograde out of all society and connection wid the villains ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... son, are the machinations of our invisible enemies. The treasures and golden secrets of nature are surrounded by spirits hostile to man. The air about us teems with them. They lurk in the fire of the furnace, in the bottom of the crucible, and the alembic, and are ever on the alert to take advantage of those moments when our minds are wandering from intense meditation on the great truth that we are seeking. We must only strive the more to purify ourselves from, those gross and earthly feelings which becloud the soul, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... these were condemned to the alembic of the melting-pan; and, mixed with the common lead, produced a set of balls hard enough for the hide of the rhinoceros itself—so that this day the hunters had no fears of failure upon ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... mental aliment of which the other is incapable. Feed well the hungry mind, lest it perish of inanition. It is a sponge in infancy that imbibes ideas without an effort; it is a safety-valve through which fancy and poetry conduct away foul vapors; it is an alembic, retaining only the pure and valuable of all that is poured into it, to be stored for future use. It is a lightning-rod that conducts away from the body all superfluous electricity. It does not harm a sensible child to put it to study early, but it destroys a dull one. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... burning might In the alembic of the morn, Is, in the Triune splendors, born Of the ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... now vote constitutionally and rightfully, although the word "white" stands as before in most of the State constitutions; and yet they vote in spite of it. Some potent alembic has destroyed the force of this word, although the text remains as of old. We are at once referred to the XV. Amendment for a solution. That has conferred the power of voting upon them, and it is superior to the State constitutions and statutes, and executes itself, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... in purity, and is, in fact, identical in character with rain-water; the latter being merely steam, condensed into rain in the great alembic of the sky. But both have the curious property of taking up and dissolving lead wherever they find it; and it is for this reason that lead pipes as leaders from or to cisterns should never be allowed, unless lined ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... to their nostrils. But the people knew little of them individually and took their tone from the politicians of the past. So—as it is a known fact that politicians are never satisfied—the Cabinet and Congress, as tried in the hotel alembic, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... the ringing of my bells, and I shall not commit the error of an atom." Saying this, he drew a laced handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away the perspiration which rained down his face as from an alembic; but no sooner had Cortado set eyes on the handkerchief, than he marked ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... lips in ready words. But we do not suspect how these manifestations of material Beauty are received by the mysterious alembic of the soul,—how they are worked up there by exquisite and subtile processes of moral chemistry, humanized, spiritualized, and appropriated unconsciously to sweet uses of piety and affection. We do not know ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the last alembic, is distilled the refined essence of that thought which began with the Gods, and which they left him ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... rich, sure food of mother-milk, the absolute adaptation, the whole great living creature an alembic to gather from without, and distil to sweet perfection, what the child needs. Contrast this with the chances of new-born fish or fly, or even those of the bird baby, whose mother must search wide for the food she brings. The mammal ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... SAFFRON. Pick eight ounces of English saffron very clean, cut it fine, and steep it twenty-four hours in a gallon of the best white wine. Put it into an alembic with three gallons of water, draw it off gently so long as the saffron tastes, and sweeten it with white sugar candy. Dissolve the candy in some of the weaker extract, after the stronger part is drawn off, by setting it on the fire, and then mix ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... who travelled in China, says he never saw an alembic or distillatory apparatus in the whole country. The art of distillation, however, is very well known, and in common practice. Their Sau-tchoo, (literally burnt wine), is an ardent spirit distilled from ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... had been one of the sultriest of August. It would seem as if the fierce alembic of the last twenty-four hours had melted it like the pearl in the golden cup of Cleopatra, and it lay in the West a fused mass of transparent brightness. The reflection from the edges of a hundred clouds wandered hither and thither, over rock and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the bottom of the crucible, to infer that therefore there is neither heaven, nor soul, nor mind, is as monstrous a non sequitur as it would be to infer the non existence of gravity because it cannot be distilled in any alembic nor discerned with any glass. The man who goes into the dark crimson dripping halls of physiology seeking proofs of immortality, and, failing to find them, abandons his faith in it, is like that hapless traveller who, groping in the catacombs under Rome, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... affairs; for it must be said of these ladies we have in mind that they keep up with the current thought, that they are readers of books, even of newspapers—for even the newspaper can be helpful and not harmful in the alembic ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... vinous spirit, is probably a noxious part of our diet. And the distilled vinegar, which is commonly sold in the shops, is truly poisonous, as it is generally distilled by means of a pewter or leaden alembic-head or worm-tube, and abounds with lead; which any one may detect by mixing with it a solution of liver of sulphur. Opium, when taken as a luxury, not as a medicine, is as pernicious as alcohol; as Baron de Tott ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... speech proceeds upon a reminiscence of four lines in the Earl of Stirling's DARIUS (1604), lines in themselves very tolerable, alike in cadence and sonority, but destined to be remembered by reason of the way in which the master, casting them into his all-transmuting alembic, has remade them in the fine gold of his subtler measure. The ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... absurdity it involves,—that God has expressly supplemented human reason by a revelation containing an indeterminate but large portion of falsities, errors, and absurdities and which we are to commit to our little alembic, and distil as we may; not only from the absurdity of supposing that God has demanded our faith, for statements which are to be received only as they appear perfectly comprehensible by our reason;—or, in other words, only for what it is impossible ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... matron, whitened with good works and age, Approached the Sabbath of her pilgrimage; Her spirit to himself the Almighty drew, Breathed on the alembic, and exhaled ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... whole discourse of his friend as unworthy, and calls on Death, the ender of all sorrows, to come to him and quench his heart with his cold stroke. Then he distils anew in tears, "as liquor out of alembic;" and Pandarus is silent for a while, till he bethinks him to recommend to Troilus the carrying off of Cressida. "Art thou in Troy, and hast no hardiment [daring, boldness] to take a woman which that ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... those drawn from vegetables by common distillation in the alembic, with the aid of water; these contain the oily and volatile part of the plant, and are called essential oils. The third sort are those produced by distillation, but of a different kind in an open vessel, and without the help of water. They are likewise divided into vegetable ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... to match thy rich perfume Chemic art did ne'er presume Through her quaint alembic strain, None so sovereign ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... the common people and of its song; the national phase is a mere incident of political conditions. The war of races is no alembic for beauty of art. If there were no national lines, there would still be folk-song,—merely without sharp distinction. The future of music lies less in the differentiation of human song, than in ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... an hydraulic engine, composed of various tubes fitted with their several fluids, the laws and functions of which have been deduced from calculations of velocities, altitudes, diameters, friction, &c. Another class considered man as a mere chemical engine, and his stomach as an alembic. The doctrine of affinities, attractions, and repulsions, now had full play. Then came the notion of sympathies and antipathies, by which name unknown and unknowable causes were sought to be explained, and ignorance was cunningly ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... music is the one essential. After the evening spent around the piano, or the flute, or the violin, how warm and how chastened is the kiss with which the family all say good night! Ah, the music has taken all the day cares and thrown them into its terrible alembic and boiled them and rocked them and cooled them, till they are crystallized into one care, which is a most sweet and rare desirable ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... marriage which she refused for the glory of God, from whose holy angel she believed she had received the water. The receipt for making it and directions for using it were also found on the fly-leaf. The principal component parts were burnt wine and rosemary, passed through an alembic; a drachm of it was to be taken once a week, "etelbenn vagy italbann," in the food or the drink, early in the morning, and the cheeks were to be moistened with it every day. The effects, according to the statement, were wonderful—and perhaps they were upon the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... urine is this detritus in a state of solution. The components of urine are chemically similar to those of calculi, and as the components of the one vary according to the disintegration occurring at the time in the vital alembic, so do those of the other. While, therefore, a calculus is only as urine precipitated and solidified, and this fluid only as calculous matter suspended in a menstruum, it must appear that the lithic diathesis is as natural and universal ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... merely by the claim of intellect, but by the warmer appeal to the heart, of kindred sympathy and suffering. True poets, they have placed in their spiritual alembic the common woes and sorrows of life, and extracted from them "by force of their so potent art," ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... characterizes Americans, the multiplicity of patents, comes from the tendency to go behind the actual, to test possibilities, to bring everything to the standard of thought. Emerson dissolves England in the alembic of his brain, and makes a thought of that. Our politics are yearly becoming more and more questions of principle, questions of right and wrong. There is almost infinite promise and significance in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... gone, why not I? Why may I not rest me from this restlessness and sleep from this wide waking? Was not the world's alembic, Time, in his young hands, and is not my time waning? Are there so many workers in the vineyard that the fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed away? The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside his cradle, and ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... could certainly not have overhauled the Diary, or he would never have left this little red urn full of gems. I found it where Lully buried it six hundred years ago, the lid waxed over, and stamped with an alembic and the man's own family coat of arms. Gad, I wonder where that signet ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... rare, peculiar and strange thing—an honest man. Whether he had genius or not we can not say, since genius has never been defined twice alike, nor put in the alembic and resolved into its constituent parts. All accounts go to show that from very childhood Henry George was singularly direct and true. His ancestry was Welsh, Scotch and English in about equal proportions, and the traits of the middle class were his, even to a theological sturdiness that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Shall fierily search my soul, destroy her ill." Natheless, the wounded wasting malady Is her unexorcised sad sovran still. Oh! that alembic fever of interwed Desire and dream and sense, rapture and rue! As soon as my sincerest words are said And heard they seem apostate and untrue. For only speech more richly dubious Than shoaling water, or a ringdove's breast, Than lighted incense more miraculous With fumes of strange ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... to prepare soups and stews? These are precisely the articles in which a French kitchen excels. The soup-kettle, made with a double bottom, to prevent burning, is a permanent, ever-present institution, and the coarsest and most impracticable meats distilled through that alembic come out again in soups, jellies, or savory stews. The toughest cartilage, even the bones, being first cracked, are here made to give forth their hidden virtues, and to rise in delicate and appetizing forms. One great law governs all these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... reduced to powder and then mixed. His favorite liquid dentifrice contained the following ingredients,—half a pound each of sal ammoniac and rock salt, and a quarter of a pound of sacharin alum. All these were to be reduced to powder and placed in a glass alembic and dissolved. The teeth should be rubbed with it, using a little scarlet cloth for the purpose. Just why this particular color of cleansing cloth was ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh |
