"Crucible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pieces; and as the company embark their reputation in every silver vessel that leaves the factory, and are always responsible for its purity, each dollar is wrenched asunder and its goodness positively ascertained before it is thrown into the crucible. The subsequent operations, by which these spoiled dollars are converted into objects of brilliant and enduring beauty, can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... suspicion. Mind and matter, duties and rights, morality and expediency, honour and interest, virtue and vice—all these words, which seemed once to express elementary and certain realities, now strike us as just the words which, thrown into the scientific crucible, might dissolve at once. It is thus not merely philosophy which is discredited, but just that homely and popular wisdom by which common life is guided. This too, it appears, instead of being the sterling product of plain experience, is the overflow of an immature philosophy, the redundance ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... to the idea of the subject of our thought; and the conceptions of reason gave no ground to maintain the contrary proposition. The advantage is completely on the side of Pneumatism; although this theory itself passes into naught, in the crucible of pure reason. ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... human life from which I had been swept to these strange shores. All its sufferings, its delusions; its baffled struggles; its wrongs, came upon me with a sense of spiritual agony in them that religion—my religion, which was their only consolation—must vanish in the crucible of Science. And that Science was the magician that was to purify and exalt the world. To live in the Present; to die in it and become as the dust; a mere speck, a flash of activity in the far, limitless expanse of Nature, of Force, of Matter in which a spiritual ideal ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... copper, 1 lb. regulus of antimony, and 10 lbs. of tin, or other similar proportions, the presence of tin being the only material condition. The copper is first melted, then the antimony is added, with a small proportion of tin-charcoal being strewed over the surface of the metal in the crucible to prevent oxidation. The bush or article to be lined, having been cast with a recess for the soft metal, is to be fitted to an iron mould, formed of the shape and size of the bearing or journal, allowing ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... withheld what Charles had so recently granted. Afterwards, when he ascertained that an interesting process was going on in Dryden's mind, tending to Popery, he perhaps thought that a little money cast into the crucible might materially determine the projection in the proper way; or perhaps the prospect produced, or at least accelerated, the process. We admire much in Scott's elaborate and ingenious defence of Dryden's change of faith; and are ready to grant that it was only a Pyrrhonist, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... 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
... across a tomb. He analyzed men and things that he might have done at once with the past, represented by history, with the present, expressed by the law, and with the future revealed by religion. He took soul and matter, threw them into a crucible, and found nothing there, and from that time ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... 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, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... his 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 beneath the gold, the red nose and sharp eyes of his old friend of ...
— The King of the Golden River - A Short Fairy Tale • John Ruskin.
... probably much the same as those which are still employed for the production of similar objects, and involved the use of similar implements, as the blowpipe, the lathe, and the graver. The materials having been procured, they were fused together in a crucible or melting-pot by the heat of a powerful furnace. A blowpipe was then introduced into the viscous mass, a portion of which readily attached itself to the implement, and so much glass was withdrawn as was deemed sufficient for the object which it was ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... physical to the spiritual, the solution of national and international problems, the solution of all the riddles of life that demand an answer or man's conquest, cannot be done by man alone. It is our task also and to the great work of building up a new world after we emerge from this crucible of fire in which the souls of the nations are being tested, the spirit of women has ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... slab, and Clarke watched him drearily as he bent over a row of phials and lit the flame under the crucible. The doctor had a small hand-lamp, shaded as the larger one, on a ledge above his apparatus, and Clarke, who sat in the shadows, looked down the great dreary room, wondering at the bizarre effects of brilliant ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... and, especially, of Huntsman, whose development of cast steel after 1740 secured an international reputation for Sheffield, had established the cementation and crucible processes as the primary source of cast steel, for nearly 100 years. Josiah Marshall Heath's patents of 1839, were the first developments in the direction of cheaper steel, his process leading to ...
— The Beginnings of Cheap Steel • Philip W. Bishop
... 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 ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... thrilling effect. The meetings were sometimes held in her own little parlor in the cottage on Dupont street, and then we always felt that we had met where the Master himself was a constant and welcome guest. She was put into the crucible. For more than fifteen years she suffered unceasing and intense bodily pain. Imprisoned in her sick chamber, she fought her long, hard battle. The pain-distorted limbs lost their use, the patient face waxed more wan, and the traces of agony were on it always; the soft, loving eyes ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... law of transmutation and acquire the throne of angelhood, get busy within the laboratory of your own mind. Take the crucible of Thought and begin to work interiorly upon the common, everyday things that present themselves in your environment. This is the only way of transmutation. Love grows by feeding upon itself, and the sacrifices and the kindnesses that are bestowed in love without ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... there are two ways of looking at existing things, two ways of handling them; and neither way is false. The scientist's way we all understand. It is the way of the microscope and the crucible. It arrives at definite physical facts. It sets forth the material constitution and physical laws of objects. But to ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... pass my sense's confines, Melt away to color or thin flame, Does it still malinger in the prism, Falsify the crucible ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... was passed by the House, but rejected by the Senate, after a heated debate which convinced Southern statesmen that there was a distinct anti-slavery sentiment at the North. The adjournment of Congress threw the whole controversy into the crucible of public opinion. The latent hostility of men and women with humanitarian sympathies was at once raised to white heat. Mass meetings in city, town, and county passed resolutions against the spread of slavery and the admission of more slave States. Yet it can ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... only to those who shall have served under your Majesty's banners, and always preferring those who shall have rendered most service. It will be proper and very consoling for the deserving citizens and residents of those islands, that the royal Council of the Indias—which, as it were a crucible for the new world, estimates services, approves merits, and deliberates as to rewards, with so much acumen, equality, and justice—allow the claims of Filipinas before those of others who, by serving in Flandes, Italia, and Alemania, try to get hold of the best posts, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... all, or in the outer world at all: a greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else. How dare we pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a crucible, that we know the limits of natural ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... now in a curious swaying attitude. He keeps repeating to himself, "This is the right thing, it is working, my feet are beginning to dissolve and my knees are getting soft." Then he reaches down and feels for his feet, and meanwhile (he does not know how) he takes his legs out of the crucible, and then again he says to himself, "That cannot be.... Yes, it must be so, it has been done correctly." Then he partially awakens, and repeats the dream to himself, because he wants to tell it to me. He is distinctly afraid ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... 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 ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... hour! for when thy soul and heart have suffered enough, when they have been weighed in the crucible of divine love and not been found wanting, then will the peace of God which passeth all understanding descend in exquisite ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... metal in a Bessemer converter after the air-blast had continued about twenty minutes. The brilliancy of the incandescent steel, nevertheless, was so blinding, that melted iron, flowing in a dazzling white-hot stream into the crucible, showed "deep brown by comparison, presenting a contrast like that of dark coffee poured into a white cup." Its temperature was estimated (not quite securely)[725] at about 2,000 deg. C.; and no allowances were made, in computing relative intensities, for atmospheric ravages ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... be seen of the blazing fire which illuminated the dark hollow through the windows, in one corner of the room was a simple cylinder shaped iron furnace which radiated a burning heat, on the top of which stood a round graphite crucible covered in at the top and ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... medical union was now in a fine attitude by act of Parliament. It could talk its contempt of medical women, and act its terror of them, and keep both its feigned contempt and its real alarm safe from the test of a public examination—that crucible in which cant, surmise, and mendacity are soon evaporated or precipitated, and only the truth ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... the greetings, the transports and bliss, Which, of course, duly followed a meeting like this, And come down to business;—for such the intent Of the lady who now o'er the crucible leant, In the glow of a furnace of carbon and lime, Like a fairy called up in the new pantomime;— And give but her words as she coyly looked down, In reply to the questioning glances of Brown: "I am taking the drops, and am using the paste, And the ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... unlike any that has preceded it, is peculiarly one of rigid, radical and fundamental examination. Everything in the Heavens above, or in the Earth beneath, is tested and retested; analyzed, synthetized and submitted to the crucible of stern reason, and the logical conclusion of experience; even to the extreme of possibility. This is true not only of the material universe, but of all mental and moral conditions, of social, political and even religious institutions. Nothing, ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... man, Dick. Dissipation is sometimes a crucible that separates the gold from the baser metals. It has done that to you. You are a good man, an honorable man. In coming to me like this you have shown yourself to be courageous as well. There was a moment when the sight of you filled my heart with murder. It ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... to him, with its beautiful and its ugly side, its good and its bad, its vices and its virtues. This idea of the school as an organism, however much it seems destined to overturn ideas of the past, will be the crucible from which will be turned out in the near future all the reforms and many ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... lead sounded its utmost depths. Listen: it is a pleasant story. The coral wall which circumscribes the isles but continues upward the deep buried crater of the primal chaos. In the first times this crucible was charged with vapors nebulous, boiling over fires volcanic. Age by age, the fluid thickened; dropping, at long intervals, heavy sediment to the bottom; which layer on layer concreted, and at length, in crusts, rose toward the surface. Then, the vast volcano burst; rent the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... in Frau 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the "right of private judgment," and our "Christian liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free;" to add fuel to the fire of investigation, and in the crucible of deep inquiry, melt from the gold of pure religion, the dross of man's invention; to appeal from the erring tribunals of a fallible Priesthood, and restore to its original state the mutilated Testament of the ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... 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
... difference of their ages. Charles wanted now to find that capitalist of shrewd mind and accessible character. His father's fortune in Costaguana, which he had supposed to be still considerable, seemed to have melted in the rascally crucible of revolutions. Apart from some ten thousand pounds deposited in England, there appeared to be nothing left except the house in Sulaco, a vague right of forest exploitation in a remote and savage district, and the San Tome Concession, which had attended ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... dry branches crackle, the crucible shines as with gold, As they carry the hot flaming metal in haste from the fire to the mould; Loud roars the bellows, and louder the flames as they shrieking escape, And loud is the song of the workmen ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... weapons in these contests Keener than the Damask blade, There are metals of such temper As no crucible e'er made; For the dross must be extracted In the furnace of the soul Till no refuse or pollution ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... the Temple; for each he set aside a thousand talents of gold, which he refined in a crucible until they were reduced to the ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... Freedom's altar. In our veins courses blood of all nations, and it is the healthy commingling of that blood which has produced a race of world conquerors. It has produced the men who have made possible this great Exposition. We have been placed in the world's crucible, have been melted in the glowing heat of a nascent life, and have been forged into a weapon which shall carve the world. Our ideals are worthy, the hopes and aspirations of the nation devoted to justice and love; ideals which shall be the steadfast inspirer of nations and individuals to uprightness, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... 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
... using an iron cathode, the anode being the graphite vessel in 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
... part of the metal in the crucible, then put it in the furnace, and this being in a molten state will assist in beginning to melt the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... laid sloaping, eight undermost, and seven above them, as it were betwixt them, that the Fire may come at them all, each having its particular Furnace or Oven. The Brimstone being dissolved by the violence of the heat, drops out at the small end of the Crucible, and falls into a Leaden-Trough or Receptacle, common to all the said Crucibles, through which there runs a continual Rivolet of cold water, conveyed thither by Pipes for the cooling of the dissolved Sulphur, which is ordinarily four hours in melting. This ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... furnace, attempts had been made to produce cast-steel without the use of a crucible—that is to say, on the 'open hearth' of the furnace. Reaumur was probably the first to show that steel could be made by fusing malleable iron with cast-iron. Heath patented the process in 1845; and a quantity of cast-steel was actually prepared in this way, on the bed of a reverberatory furnace, ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... few minutes 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 handle the ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... alter our eternal 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 religious ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... and Mazin repaired impatiently to his shop, where he had soon after the satisfaction of seeing his adopted father, who came bearing in his hands a crucible. "Welcome, son!" "Welcome, father!" was the mutual salutation; after which the Hijjemmee desired Mazin to kindle a fire: he did so, when the old man inquired of Mazin if he had any old metal, iron, brass, copper, &c. Mazin produced some pieces of an old pot of the latter metal, which ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... had been well tried in the crucible of tribulation, but as yet, it had not been subjected to the fiery ordeal of temptation; through this, for its more entire refinement it was now to pass. All at once her ordinary enjoyment of her spiritual exercises was succeeded by utter disinclination. The sweetness and patience ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... 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 ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... first tank, which is filled to the surface, after the water has been poured in, with the first crust obtained. The second crust is called the reha, which is carbonate or bicarbonate of soda. This is formed into small cakes, which are baked to redness in an oven, or crucible, to expel the moisture and carbonic acid which it contains. They are then powdered to fine dust, which is placed in another crucible, and fused to liquid glass, the reha containing in itself sufficient silica to form the ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... in 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, in realms ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... writers, with a style adapted to fix the attention of the indolent, and to win the untractable, should be his study; but candour is the brightest gem of criticism! He ought not to throw everything into the crucible, nor should he suffer the whole to pass as if he trembled to touch it. Lampoons and satires in time will lose their effect, as well as panegyrics. He must learn to resist the seductions of his own pen: the pretension of composing a treatise on the subject, rather than ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the secrets of music, the wonder of love, and the misty, undefined prayers of the soul constitute true religion. When you place a creed in a crucible and afterward study the particles on a slide encased in balsam, you are apt to get a residuum or something—a something that does not satisfy ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... exercise of acts which are an imprescriptible right of all mortals. Through the instrumentality of such an oppression, the profound counsels of the Eternal Wisdom designed so to regulate the first education of that growing people, that, refined in the crucible of adversity, it should early learn to renounce the subjection of the senses, and turn its heart and soul to God, from whom alone it could hope salvation. It was only by depriving that people of all human support, and of all extraneous influences on its ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... 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 ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... peculiar to itself. May not women as fresh recruits in a land army stamp their likes and dislikes on farm life? Their enthusiasm may put staleness to rout, and the group system of women land workers, already tested in the crucible of experience, may bring to the farm the ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... within itself, under the Almighty supervision, certain arrangements and laws by which the dead world can be again cast into the crucible and regenerated by liberation through the action of heat into its primordial state once more and go the same tremendous round of planet life, we know not. The conception of such a process, even the dream or vague possibility of it, is sufficiently sublime ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... world thought that petroleum was one simple substance. Now we find it is a thousand, mixed and fused and blended in the crucible of Time. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... mused I. Is it told By synthesis? analysis? Have you not made us lead of gold? To feed your crucible, not sold Our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... whose increasing field new worlds float daily by; the mind of that geologist is a divining-rod, forever bending toward the waters of chaos, and pointing out new places where a shaft can be sunk into periods of almost infinite antiquity; the mind of that chemist is a subtile crucible, in which aboriginal secrets lie disclosed, and within whose depths the true philosopher's stone will be found; the mind of that mathematician is a maze of ethereal stair-ways, rising higher and higher ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... 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, my plant was complete. I burned and crushed bones ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... a porcelain crucible about 6 grams (roughly weighed) of the purest sodium bicarbonate obtainable. Rest the crucible upon a triangle of iron or copper wire so placed within a large crucible that there is an open air space ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... man. Consider the many dear relations he has abroad; and then his admirable knowledge of the rates of exchange? Think of his crucible. Why, he'd melt down all the crowns of Europe into a coffee service for our gracious Queen, and turn the Pope's tiara into coral bells for the little Princess! And I ask you if such feats ain't the practical philosophy of all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... breathed between quivering lips, she dropped beside the lifeless man. The deadly forces eddying around her were not of her own making. With the going of this person, who was her father by nature, everything else had gone too. All her life's hopes had been dissolved in the crucible of death. She lay, with her hands to her mouth, pressing back the great sobs that came from the depths of her heart. She reached out and tentatively touched her father's cheek; without fear she moved his head a little to what she hoped would ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... sum up a situation, to see its possibilities at a glance, and calculate the chances in his favor. These were nothing but hazy ideas that floated over his mental horizon; they were less cynical than Vautrin's notions; but if they had been tried in the crucible of conscience, no very pure result would have issued from the test. It is by a succession of such like transactions that men sink at last to the level of the relaxed morality of this epoch, when there have never been so few of those who square their courses with their theories, so few of those ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... deathless wrath, a slave that feels No proud exemption in the blighting curse He bears, over the world wanders for ever, 680 Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream Of dark magician in his visioned cave, Raking the cinders of a crucible For life and power, even when his feeble hand Shakes in its last decay, were the true law 685 Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled, Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn Robes in its golden beams,—ah! thou hast fled! The brave, the gentle and the beautiful, The child of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... beloved child, rage with the Kaffirs who had tried to kill her, and extreme distress at the loss of most of his property—all these conflicting emotions boiled together in his breast like antagonistic elements in a crucible. ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... moods, the cloud of memories, born of the incidents which have marked our past acquaintance, form a telescopic vista. Through this vista, examined in the crucible of much correspondence, the intimate association and the mutual friendship of many months duration, I perceive that I have discovered and have learned to appreciate the sterling worth of your character. Through this ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... fourth green, the fifth blue, the sixth indigo, the seventh a violet-purple. Each of these rays, transmitted afterwards by a hundred other prisms, will never change the colour it bears; in like manner, as gold, when completely purged from its dross, will never change afterwards in the crucible. As a superabundant proof that each of these elementary rays has inherently in itself that which forms its colour to the eye, take a small piece of yellow wood, for instance, and set it in the ray of a red colour; this wood will ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... amid dust of drugs and spices made a moving mystery; the room seemed under water. Galen, stooping over a crucible with an unrolled parchment on the table within reach, was not distinguishable until he moved; when he ceased moving he faded out again, and Sextus had to go and stand where he could touch him, to believe ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... been too often brought to the test of enquiries which only reach to matter—put into the crucible, though the magnetic and electric fluid escapes from the ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... in the furnace a very hot crucible,—I am about to throw into it some zinc filings, and they will burn with a flame like gunpowder. I make this experiment because you can make it well at home. Now, I want you to see what will be the result of the combustion ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... have his way for the present. Something has disturbed 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
... day he saw 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 ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... objection to a russet attire; 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
... tears ran down upon my face. That night she came down to my laboratory, and there, with shutters bolted and barred down, with curtains drawn thick and close so that the very stars might be shut out from the sight of that room, while the crucible hissed and boiled over the lamp, I did what had to be done, and led out what was no longer a woman. But on the table the opal flamed and sparkled with such light as no eyes of man have ever gazed on, and the rays of the flame that was ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... exaggeration," replied Rodin, with feverish impatience; "all these passions are at work, but the moment is critical. As the alchemist bends over the crucible, which may give him either treasures or sudden death—I alone ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... 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 • Militia of Mercy
... 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 world ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... great respect for your opinion," I answered, "but I find it impossible to pass the ideas of another through the crucible of my mind and do them justice. Somehow or other, when I am expecting a stream of gold, it turns out a caput mortuum of lead. No, my better course is to coin my copper in my own way. But, tell me frankly, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... 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 ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... we have Balthazar Claes, a man of wealth and leisure, living in the ancient town of Douai, and married to a wife who adores him and who has borne him children. Claes' hobby is scientific research; his aim, the discovery of the origin of things which he believes can be given him by his crucible. In his family mansion, of antique Flemish style, which is admirably described by the novelist at great length, he pursues his tireless experiments; and, with less justification than Bernard Palissy, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... Caroline. You experiment with men's hearts like an old alchemist, who puts all sorts of substances into his crucible in the hope of finding something ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... 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 ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Italianate countenance of Gonzague. The brilliancy of Louis de Nevers was all external, bright as summer is bright, gay as summer is gay, cheerful as summer is cheerful. The brilliancy of Louis de Gonzague showed more sombrely, as melting gold flows in a crucible. No one who saw the picture could fail to deny its physical beauty, but many would deny it the instant, the appealing charm which caught at the heart of the spectator with the first glance he gave to the canvas that portrayed Louis de Nevers. In contrast, too, were ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Into this 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 it was this which had ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... almost to have purchased with my own. When reduced to the lowest degree of languishment by a consumption, I could not forbear looking upon her almost every hour. I saw her with the strongest mixture of anguish and delight; no chemist ever watched his crucible with greater care, when he expected the production of the philosopher's stone, than I watched her in all the various turns of her distemper, which at last grew utterly hopeless, and then no language can express the agony into which it threw me. One remarkable circumstance ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... version of 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,' ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and success of Abdurrahman has made the contrary policy that was pursued appear the acme of sound sense and high statesmanship. When Lord Ripon reached Bombay at the end of May, the fate of Afghanistan was still in the crucible. Even Abdurrahman, who had received kind treatment in the persons of his imprisoned family at Candahar from the English, was not regarded as a factor of any great importance; while Ayoob, the least known of all ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... And still, after the death of that mysteriously-destined sovereign, a halcyon sky seemed to hold its bland aspects over Russia's Sclavonian sister people, ancient Sarmatia. But ere long the scene changed, and the "seething-pot" of a universal ambition, the crucible of nations, grasped by the hand of Napoleon, began again ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... further a spirit of friendliness and good will for children of other nationalities. Respect for and an understanding of the life and customs of other races, are not only educationally valuable, but are fundamentally important in this "crucible of nations," where different races are fusing themselves together as never before in the history of the world. Tradition is a precious heritage, and the traditions of other nations should be the natural inheritance of the American child, since here as nowhere else ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... had been John Perkins's habit. At ten or eleven he would return. Sometimes Katy would be asleep; sometimes waiting up, ready to melt in the crucible of her ire a little more gold plating from the wrought steel chains of matrimony. For these things Cupid will have to answer when he stands at the bar of justice with his victims from the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world—in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... distance from the flame (Fig. 36). I will place in the centre of my flame some phosphorus which is at the present moment in a state of active burning, and observe how instantly the combustion of the phosphorus ceases so soon as it gets into the centre of the flame. The crucible which contains it is cooled down immediately, and presents an entirely different appearance within the flame to what it did outside the flame. It is a curious way, perhaps you think, to stop a substance burning by putting it into a flame. Indeed I can put a heap of gunpowder ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... nothing is reproduced to our senses directly. Not only the main conception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is brought home to us, have been put through the crucible of another man's mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of liberty and largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of things ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... silver, and copper must be fused in a crucible before the zinc is added, or else you cannot keep them in the vessel while heating. When all are completely fused, they must be well stirred, and run into bars. Solder No. 1 is for gold 16 carats ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... be honest; it is the conscience which educates history. Fact is corrupting, it is we who correct it by the persistence of our ideal. The soul moralizes the past in order not to be demoralized by it. Like the alchemists of the middle ages, she finds in the crucible of experience only the gold that she herself ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... made of abolitionism, Maine liquor-lawism, and what there was left of northern Whiggism, and then the Protestant feeling against the Catholic, and the native feeling against the foreigner. All these elements were melted down in one crucible, and the result is ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... of the "powder of projection" into the crucible to turn the melted metal into gold ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... contortion, contravene, contumacious, contumacy, contumelious, convergent, conversant, convivial, correlate, corrigible, corroborate, corrosive, cosmic, covenant, crass, credence, crescent, criterion, critique, crucial, crucible, cryptic, crystalline, culmination, culpable, cumulative, cupidity, cursive, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... measures in height 7 metres 63 centimetres, and in width 4 metres 10 centimetres, giving it a superficial area of 34 metres 24 centimetres. It is 12 millimetres thick, and weighs 940 kilogrammes. This enormous glass was cast from a single crucible, containing 1,600 kilogrammes of vitreous matter. To have seen this operation would have been worth a very much longer journey than that from New York to St.-Gobain, for the colour and glow of such a ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... in London before he started upon his life-work, and he entered the arena of the playwright at the age of twenty-seven. His methods were his own. The stories and legends that other men had set down, often crudely, in form of chronicle, or even of a play, he melted in the crucible of his own brain and gave back in a new and beautiful form. The play can be traced to its source, whether that source be a novellino of Masuccio, or Holinshed's "Chronicles," or Plutarch's Lives in ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... might expect that it would be a vain task to seek anywhere in nature for evidence of Divine action, such that no one could sanely deny it. God will not allow Himself to be caught at the bottom of any man's crucible, or yield Himself to the experiments of gross-minded and irreverent inquirers. The natural, like the supernatural, revelation appeals to the whole of man's mental nature and not ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... when the aspiring soul, raised to the different spheres of Nirvana by steps of ascending sanctity, receives increasing peace and satisfaction from gradual absorption into the Infinite. No creed passes unaltered through any crucible of national thought; Indian Buddhism borrowed both form and colour from races which, in accepting the new faith, retained their own individuality and modes of assimilation. They gave as well as received, and the value of the gift depended on the character ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... true. There was a time when the astrologer sought to read in the stars the fate of men and nations. The astrologer has faded from the world, but the astronomer has taken his place. There was a time when the poor alchemist, bent and wrinkled and old, over his crucible, endeavored to find some secret by which he could change the baser metals into purest gold. The alchemist is gone; the chemist took his place; and, although he finds nothing to change metals into gold, he finds something that covers the earth with wealth. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the labor of one minute, with a lathe or hand-buff with dry charcoal, or rather, prepared lampblack, will perfectly polish the surface ready for indexing, etc. This lampblack also requires some care in preparing. Take a small-size crucible, properly temper it by a slow fire, that it may not be cracked after which, fill it with common lampblack, cover it over with a piece of soap-stone, and again replace it in the fire. Build a good hard coal fire around ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... have their foundations in hallucination, crumble like dust under the rude band of the assayer; that the most sublimated doctrines, when they lack the substantive quality of rectitude, evaporate under the scrutiny of the sturdy examiner, who tries them in the crucible; that it is not by levelling abusive language against those who investigate sophisticated theories, they will either be purged of their absurdities, acquire solidity, or find an establishment to give them perpetuity; that moral obliquities, can never be made rectilinear ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... understand these words, and derived but little comfort therefrom. She could not see how Emma's bluntness was to be refined, save by putting her into fashion's crucible; and this she more than once resolved to do, at any risk. With this resolution, however, there always came a fearfulness, which seemed a warning voice from the tomb, bidding her "beware;" and to this voice of ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... incongruous qualities are, in the human crucible, so mingled, proportioned, and refined, as to form a seeming simple and transparent whole. We may feel the presence of a spirit weighty, strong, deep, without understanding the how and why of impression. Only at critical ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... wherein we grope blindly, He, seeing the end from the beginning, is well content with his own handiwork, and with the final outcome of the souls of his earthly children. Many of the imperfections and individual shortcomings of people are laid aside in the dark crucible of physical death and the grave. Such of these tendencies as are carried over into the next plane of being, persisting in the spirit, are there dealt with as disease or ignorance, the results of malformation or bad environment. God is love, not hate, and "rejoiceth not in the death of the wicked," ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... are told of Albertus Magnus or the great Leonardo da Vinci, served by airy forms; and no brazen image, the invention of magic mechanism, communicated to him the influences of the stars. None of the apparatus of the alchemist—the crucible and the metals—gave solemnity to his chambers, or accounted for his wealth; nor did he even seem to interest himself in those serener studies which might be supposed to colour his peculiar conversation ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that the dross in her character should be burned away, and your two lives fused, there are in His providence just the fiery trials, just the circumstances that will bring it about." (Was she unconsciously uttering a prophecy?) "The crucible of affliction, the test of some great emergency, will often develop a seemingly weak and frivolous girl into noble life, where there is real gold of latent ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... this ill-famed name wants to keep him back, but ere she can detain him, he has fled. With hurried steps Max approaches the Wolf's-glen, where Caspar is already occupied in forming circles of black stones, in the midst of which he places a skull, an eagle's wing, a crucible and a bullet-mould. Caspar then calls on Samiel, invoking him to allow him a few more years on earth. To-morrow is the day appointed for Satan to take his soul, but Caspar promises to surrender Max in exchange. Samiel, who appears through the cleft of a rock, agrees to let him ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Captain was an alchemist, and the dross of outer events turned to gold in the marvellous crucible of his mind. Fortune should have known this and abandoned the vain attempt to torment him. He had failed, but no other man could have come so near success. He was alone, therefore free: poor, therefore independent; desirous of hiding, therefore of importance: ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... 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 comparison. All opponents dreaded him in ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the "Form" of Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will—essential Calvinist or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist, practical Absolutist, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Our effort has been to raise our program from the plane of the emotional to the plane of the scientific. Any social progress, it is my belief, must purge itself of sentimentalism and pass through the crucible of science. We are willing to submit Birth Control to this test. It is part of the purpose of this book to appeal to the scientist for aid, to arouse that interest which will result in widespread research and ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... 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 ornaments of rare and curious carving.[3] It is, however, at a period subsequent ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... fellows . . . was a nobody, a son of the left hand! Those who owed the Chevalier money or gratitude now recollected with no small satisfaction that they had not paid their indebtedness. Truly adversity is the crucible in which the quality ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... for a while with philosophical doubts. But though he read widely and speculated diffusely on the problems of the universe, he failed to pierce below the surface of the questions which he handled. His own beliefs had been tested in no red-hot crucible, before he recoiled with terror from their analysis. The man, to put it plainly, was incapable of honest revolt against the pietistic fashions of his age, incapable of exploratory efforts, and yet too intelligent to rest satisfied with ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... an examination of the vessel. "What has he engraved on his crucible? Och! och! the word which expels fleas! That Marc Cenaine is an ignoramus! I verily believe that you will never make gold with this! 'Tis good to set in your bedroom in ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... it 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 ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... calamity. Dumfounded, stunned, aghast, Sabre would not have believed that conspiracy against him of all the powers of darkness could conceivably worsen his plight. They had shot their bolt. He was stricken amain. He was in the crucible of disaster and in its heart where the furnace ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... admired. The matter is of the familiar, practical kind, that "comes home to men's bosoms." The thoughts are weighty, and even when not original have acquired a peculiar and unique tone or cast by passing through the crucible of Bacon's mind. A sentence from the Essays can rarely be mistaken for the production of any other writer. The short, pithy sayings have become popular mottoes and household words. The style is quaint, original, abounding in allusions and witticisms, and rich, even to gorgeousness, with piled-up ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various |
