"Quicksilver" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "we can make the thing more clear to her, and to ourselves, with examples; conceive water, or oil, or quicksilver; among these you will see a certain oneness, a certain connection of their parts; and this oneness is never lost, except through force or some other determining cause. Let the cause cease to operate, and at once the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Guayaquil, are great Thieves. The Mercenary Viceroys not being permitted to Trade themselves, do use the Corregidores as middle-men, and these again employ a third hand; so that ships are constantly employed carrying Quicksilver, and all manner of precious and prohibited goods, to and from Mexico out of by-ports. Thus, too, being their own Judges, they get vast Estates, and stop all complaints in Old Spain by Bribes. But now and then comes out a Viceroy ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... suggestion, and stood looking the least bit in the world like a nun, bound about with my white vestments, and had obtained only one very unsatisfactory glimpse of the effect produced upon the sensitive heart of quicksilver, when I found that that subtile heart responded to influences other than mine. What I discovered was another face, not in the most remote degree like mine,—as different as it could possibly be,—a face belonging to the carboniferous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... nothing is so likely to attract a shock of lightning as a prong carried on the shoulder with the bright steel points upwards. In the farmhouses the old folk would cover up the looking-glasses lest the quicksilver should draw the electric fluid. The haymakers will tell you that sometimes when they have been standing under a hedge out of a storm a flash of lightning has gone by with a distinct sound like 'swish,' and immediately ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... exports should be annulled, and especially the heavy export duty on coin and bullion, so as to cheapen and facilitate the purchase of imports and permit the precious metals, untaxed, to flow out freely from Mexico into general circulation. Quicksilver and machinery for working the mines of precious metals in Mexico, for the same reasons, should also be admitted duty free, which, with the measures above indicated, would largely increase the production and circulation of the precious metals, improve our own commerce and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... their own! How often in churches there are men professing to be eager for the glory of God, who are, perhaps half-unconsciously, using it as a stalking-horse, behind which they may shoot game for their own larder! A drop of quicksilver oxidises and dims as soon as exposed to the air. The purest motives get a scum on them quickly unless we constantly keep them clear by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... also from dealings with capillary forces that quicksilver is indeed very resistant to the waves which produce molecular action, and this developed a new theory of the depression of the mercury in capillary tubes. This would tend to confirm Maiorana's claim that a basin of mercury beneath ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... for a more formal summons. This man I now found to be excellent in such an emergency as the present; calm, cool, and collected; not hurrying anybody, yet, as it were, infusing his own energy and vitality into the men by the sharp, incisive tones of his voice, and putting quicksilver into them by—as it seemed—the mere exercise of his will. Under such masterful supervision the work progressed rapidly, and in something over half an hour we had the ship under her fore and main-topsails (which were ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... 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 squid ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... nothing is so good as the white of eggs and quicksilver. A thimbleful of quicksilver to the white of each egg; heat until well mixed; apply ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. The houses were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by underground pipes from flower-beds. They had baths, and libraries, and dining-halls, fountains of quicksilver and water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of dancing to the lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and gluttonous wassail orgies of their Northern neighbors, the feasts of the Saracens were marked by sobriety. Wine was prohibited. The enchanting ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... said Gluck at length, after watching the water spreading in long quicksilver-like streams over the floor for a quarter of an hour; ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... Karens are a dirty people. They never use soap, and their skins are enamelled with dirt. When water is thrown on them, it rolls off their backs like globules of quicksilver on a marble slab. To them bathing has a ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... all 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 what can ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... one she could entertain under any circumstances. She kept shaking her head, and the more she shook it, the more the glazed Jingleberry seemed to implore her to be his. Finally, Jingleberry saw his quicksilver counterpart fall upon his knees before Marian of the glass, and hold out his arms and hands towards her in an attitude of prayerful despair, whereupon the girl sprang to her feet, stamped her ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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, it had lost every characteristic ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... It is plain to see he is either on the King's errand or his own. A fair lady awaits his return in the city, or one has just dismissed him where he has been! Nothing like a woman to put quicksilver in a man's ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... with unutterable scorn, wiping his face. "Quicksilver's been solid for hours, and it's been gittin' colder an' colder ever since. Fifty? I'll bet my new mittens against your old moccasins that it ain't a notch ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... day broke beautifully clear; and, having crossed a deep valley between the hills, we toiled op the opposite slope. I hurried to the summit. The glory of our prize burst suddenly upon me! There, like a sea of quicksilver, lay, far beneath, the grand expanse of water, a boundless sea horizon on the south and south-west, glittering in the noon-day sun; and on the west, fifty or sixty miles distant, blue mountains rose from the bosom of the lake to a height ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... squinance with a stitch in your side, and the wolf in your stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize upon you, the cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into you,... and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly believe all that I shall relate unto ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... 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 manner, disturbs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... surface, which has not, I believe, been attended to, and that is to facilitate the separation of the air, which is mechanically mixed or chemically dissolved in water by their points or edges; this appears on immersing a dry hairy leaf in water fresh from a pump; innumerable globules like quicksilver appear on almost every point; for the extremities of these points attract the particles of water less forcibly than those particles attract each other; hence the contained air, whose elasticity was ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... his states. They add that Lulli gladly accepted the invitation, and had apartments assigned for his use in the Tower of London, where he refined much gold; superintended the coinage of "rose-nobles," and made gold out of iron, quicksilver, lead, and pewter, to the amount of six millions. The writers in the Biographie Universelle, an excellent authority in general, deny that Raymond was ever in England, and say, that in all these stories ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... watching while the insensately vicious intelligences within the sphere brought its every force to bear upon another and larger sphere which was now so close as to be plainly visible. Like a gigantic drop of quicksilver this second globe appeared—its smooth and highly-polished surface one enormous, perfect, spherical mirror. Watching tensely, they saw flash out that frightful plane of seething energy, with the effects of which they were all too familiar, and saw ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... 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, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... faculties, and to call forth his dormant powers. He went so far as to construct the model of a machine for the purpose. It consisted of a wooden wheel, the periphery of which was furnished with glass tubes filled with quicksilver; as the wheel rotated, the quicksilver poured itself down into the lower tubes, and thus a sort of self-acting motion was kept up in the apparatus, which, however, did not prove to be perpetual. Where he had first obtained the idea of this machine—whether from conversation ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... poems of Mr. Bowles. Well would it have been 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 ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the owner of a quicksilver mine, whose remarks shed a flood of light upon the matter. The mine yields a lean ore, and did not pay when worked by white labor costing $2 to $2.50 per day. He contracted with a Chinaman to furnish 170 men at one-half these rates. They work ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... Indies made into small plates like little ships, and in value 23 carats each[158]; large quantities of fine silk, with damasks and taffetas; large quantities of musk and of occam[159] in bars, quicksilver, cinabar, camphor, porcelain in vessels of divers sorts, painted cloth, and squares, and the drug called Chinaroot. Every year two or three large ships go from China to India laden with these rich and precious commodities. Rhubarb goes from thence over land by way of Persia, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... but only for a moment. It may sound presumptuous to you; I am very young; but there is bigger work for me ahead, and I am called. I cannot argue about this. I know. I have a sign. Look up at the mountain, yonder—high up, above the quicksilver mines. Do you see ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... plenty of quicksilver, antimony, sulphur, black lead, and orpiment red and yellow. We have also the finest alum (wherein the diligence of one of the greatest favourers of the commonwealth of England of a subject[1] hath been of late egregriously abused, and even almost with barbarous incivility) ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... "Well, tell me all 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 your trouble is, and we will talk the matter over and see what can ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... in space by a succession of subtle harmonies. As the blades struck the dark water, it flashed fire, and the tracks of the boats resembled two sea-snakes writhing with silent undulations through a lake of quicksilver. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... touch of vexation in his voice, but Theos heeded it not. His heart gave a great bound against his ribs as though pricked by a fire-tipped arrow,—something swift and ardent stirred in his blood like the flowing of quicksilver, . . the picture of the dusky-eyed, witchingly beautiful woman he had seen that morning in her gold-adorned ship, seemed to float between him and the light,—her face shone out like a growing glory-flower in the tangled wilderness ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... New England they have already progressed so far as to make castings of iron pots, 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
... 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
... sublimate; quicksilver about the size of a bean; 3 or 4 drops of muriatic acid; iodine about the size of a pea, and lard enough to form a paste; grind the iodine and sublimate fine as flour, and put altogether in a cup, mix well, then shear the hair all ...
— The Arabian Art of Taming and Training Wild and Vicious Horses • P. R. Kincaid
... ancient Roman world; at another, on its surface it floated peaceably the fir-trees of Murg and of Saint Gall, the porphyry and the marble of Bale, the salt of Karlshall, the leather of Stromberg, the quicksilver of Lansberg, the wine of Johannisberg, the slates of Coab, the cloth and earthenware of Wallendar, the silks and linens of Cologne. It majestically performs its double function of flood of war and flood of peace, having, without ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... were not,' said he, 'for the Chassediane—you are aware, Richie, poor Jorian is lost to her?—he has fallen at her quicksilver feet. She is now in London. Half the poor fellow's income expended in bouquets! Her portrait, in the character of the widow Lefourbe, has become a part of his dressing apparatus; he shaves fronting her playbill. His first real affaire de coeur, and he is forty-five! So he is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... door, outside of which hung an instrument called 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 ...
— Daddy Takes Us Skating • Howard R. Garis
... the frigidity of the air, whereby it acquireth no new form, but rather a consistence or determination of its defluency, and amitteth not its essence, but condition of fluidity. Neither doth there any thing properly conglaciate but water, or watery humidity, for the determination of quicksilver is properly fixation, that of milk coagulation, and that of oil and unctuous bodies only incrassation."—Is this written by ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... the blood of an ardent lover throbbing through his veins like quicksilver, are they not? Yet they excited not one atom of jubilation in me, for they were uttered in a tone of such coldness and indifference that I felt as certain as I could be of anything that it was wholly of herself, and not at all of me, ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... proprietary, 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 not ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... I 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
... mustn't think only of gold; silver is, after all, the chief source of the riches of Peru, and there are numbers of extraordinarily rich mines. It is calculated that three hundred millions have been produced since the first occupation by the Spaniards. Quicksilver is also very abundant; copper and lead are found too, but there is not much to be done with them at present, owing to the cost of carriage. There is good shooting in the mountains on the eastern side of the Andes, and you will find ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... cinnabar (an ore of quicksilver) are worked by the Borneo Company, but the exports of the former ore and of quicksilver are steadily decreasing, and fresh deposits are being sought for. Only one deposit of cinnabar has so far been discovered, that was in 1867. ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... more than double the amount of agricultural products and of sustaining more than twice the number of inhabitants. We have a greater extent of mines than all Europe, especially of coal, iron, gold, silver, and quicksilver. Our coal alone, as stated by Sir William Armstrong (the highest British authority), is 32 times as great as that of the United Kingdom, and our iron will ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... torture beyond the frequent omissions of food and water; the body would have crumbled. To have planned this for months, and then to be balked by something as visible yet as elusive as quicksilver! Born in the same mudhole, and still Boris Karlov the avenger could not understand Stefani Gregor the fiddler. Perhaps what baffled him was that so valiant a spirit should be housed in so weak a body. It was ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... part of Cornwall and its wonders, and rode or walked 250 miles. And so, brother David, 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 ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... colonies it was reported, that the vessel in his charge foundered at sea; others alleged that he attempted a contraband trade in the Spanish colonies, was taken prisoner, and with his companions sent to the quicksilver ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... were becoming positively enamoured of pushing their fortunes and encountering adventures—not in the least understanding, in spite of their bright wits, what the burdens, fortunes, adventures might mean. The two sisters' enthusiasm was just kept within bounds by two drags on its quicksilver quality. These laggard spirits, Dora and May, weighed upon their more enterprising companions. Neither could Annie and Rose quite shut their eyes to the increase of wrinkles on their father's face, and to their mother's red eyes when she came ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... at the corner of the blocks. After passing the first sluice box the water and gravel would be run in a bed rock sluice again, and then into another sluice box and so on for a mile, passing through several sluice boxes on the way. Quicksilver was placed in the upper sluice boxes, and when the particles of gold were polished up by tumbling about in the gravel, they combined with the ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... out into the garden. Her head was throbbing painfully, her cheeks burnt with a scarlet flush, and it was surely quicksilver and not blood which ran so ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... corn-factor—he's the man that our millers and bakers all deal wi', and he has sold 'em growed wheat, which they didn't know was growed, so they SAY, till the dough ran all over the ovens like quicksilver; so that the loaves be as flat as toads, and like suet pudden inside. I've been a wife, and I've been a mother, and I never see such unprincipled bread in Casterbridge as this before.—But you must be a real stranger here not to ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... had developed into a rich grape-producing country. Its cereals were beyond the demands of local consumption. A considerable trade had sprung up with Oregon, the Sandwich Islands, and latterly with China. The production of quicksilver was on the increase. Valuable copper mines had recently been opened. Moreover, the immense gold seams of Colorado, the vast silver deposits in Nevada, and the auriferous quartz of Idaho, were disclosed almost simultaneously, diverting population to the interior ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... departed in quest 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 ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Mercury was the other name for quicksilver—and that was lively, you bet! He had often spilt some on the floor to see it move. She must be awfully cute to have noticed it too—cuter than his sisters. He was quite ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... thermometers, though of various sizes, are in general much smaller than these; the tube too is hermetically closed, and the air excluded from it. The fluid most generally used in thermometers is mercury, commonly called quicksilver, the dilatations and contractions of which correspond more exactly to the additions, and subtractions, of caloric, than those of ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... opposite direction. I heard Bud and Bill yelling, and the angry crack and hiss of the fire. A few rods down I stopped, struck another match, and lit the grass. There was a sputter and flash. Then the flame flared up, spread like running quicksilver, and, meeting the pine-needles, changed to red. I ran on. There was a loud flutter behind me, then a crack almost like a shot, then a seething roar. Another pine had gone off. As I stopped to strike the third match there came three distinct reports, and then others that ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... give it up. He heard the gates rattling open for the next boat-load, and took his stand again, bracing himself for another rebuff. The usual vanguard, the usual quicksilver bunch of humanity, massing, separating, flowing this way and that, and in the midst of them a fair-haired, timid-looking young girl, walking quietly with down-cast eyes, as if unused to being in big New York alone at eight o'clock at night. Rex stood in front ...
— A Good Samaritan • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... women marry, and why they marry them, will always be a marvel and a mystery to the world.' Personally, I'm a bit of a fatalist regarding love. I think hearts are mated when they're fashioned, and when they get together you can no more keep them apart than you keep two drops of quicksilver from running into each other when they touch. It's as good a theory as any, for it can't ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... buy Steuer-Scheine, and has promised to get him made Court-Jeweller!' [Voltaire,—OEuvres,—lxxiv. 314 ("Letter to Friedrich, February, 1751,"—AFTER Catastrophe).], So; within a week, and before Hirsch is even gone! For men are very porous; weighty secrets oozing out of them, like quicksilver through clay jars. I could guess, Hirsch, by way of galling insolent Ephraim, had blabbed something: and in the course of five days, it has got to the very King,—this Kammerherr Voltaire being such a favorite and famous man as never was; the very bull's-eye of all kinds of Berlin ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 too? ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... secret Presence, through Creation's veins Running, Quicksilver-like eludes your pains; Taking all forms from Mah to Mahi; and They change and perish all—but ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... And he, whose thou art then, being tired before, Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think Thou call'st for more, And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink; And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie A verier ghost than I. What I will say, I will not tell thee now, Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent, I'd rather thou should'st painfully repent, Than by my threatenings ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 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
... hair over it, and Sally's voice was free to speak as soon as her little white hand had swept the black coils back beyond the round white throat. Mrs. Lobjoit's mirror has its defects apart from some of the quicksilver having been scratched off; but Rosalind can see the merpussy's image plain enough, and knows perfectly well that before she looks up she will reap the harvest of happiness she has been looking forward to. She will "clicket" off the "blob" ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... he 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 ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... not but admit, in the unquiet recesses of his own mind, that it certainly was an odd sort of chill. He felt—well, he found it hard to tell exactly how he felt—rather as though he had swallowed some ounces of quicksilver which kept flashing and running about inside him with every step he took. Suppose Cyrus's wonderful new system were actually to prove dangerous to the constitution, possibly even to the life, of his august, confiding patron? You could not always know your luck, however deserving you might be. The ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... minutes west. In our advances towards the south the wind had gradually veered round to the east and was at this time at east-north-east. The weather after crossing the Line had been fine and clear, but the air so sultry as to occasion great faintness, the quicksilver in the thermometer in the daytime standing at between 81 and 83 degrees, and one time at 85 degrees. In our passage through the northern tropic the air was temperate, the sun having then high south declination and the weather being generally fine till we lost the north-east tradewind; but such ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... gold, and they departed. That gold was the first discovered in the Sierra Nevada, which soon revolutionized the whole country, and actually moved the whole civilized world. About this time (May and June, 1848), far more importance was attached to quicksilver. One mine, the New Almaden, twelve miles south of San Jose, was well known, and was in possession of the agent of a Scotch gentleman named Forties, who at the time was British consul at Tepic, Mexico. Mr. Forties came up from San Blas in a small brig, which proved to be a Mexican ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... contented themselves with making wing-dams, turning streams from their natural courses, and scraping about the mud and gravel of the exposed beds for the pure, free gold, picking up nuggets at sight and capturing the "dust" with quicksilver, others, looking for bigger game, climbed the high mountains, tore the moss from their sides to expose the rock, and pounced upon every piece of "float" which would indicate the possible existence of a "mother lode" somewhere near at hand or ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... see children trying to bring a mass of quicksilver to a certain number of parts, the more they press and work it and endeavour to reduce it to their own will, the more they irritate the liberty of this generous metal; it evades their endeavour and sprinkles itself into so many separate bodies as frustrate all reckoning; so is it here, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... who provided the erratic equation. Her woman's mind was not only the directing intelligence, it was as eccentric as quicksilver, infinitely supple and corrupt, Oriental in its trickishness and impenetrability. Already it had conceived some project involving him which he could by no means divine or even guess at without ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... wandering about among the stars, and to one of these the witch and her faithful Harold repaired. A cloud gives quite reasonable support to magic people, and most witches and wizards have discovered the delight of paddling knee-deep about those quicksilver continents. They wander along shining and changing valleys under a most ardent sky; they climb the purple thunderclouds, or launch the first snowflake of a blizzard; they spring from pink stepping-stone to pink stepping-stone of clouds each ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... took Jinny out of her stall he went into the harness-room and hunted about on a shelf until, behind a rusty currycomb and two empty oil-bottles, he found a small mirror. It was misty and flecked with clear spots where the quicksilver had dropped away, but when he propped it against the cobwebbed window he could see himself fairly well. Staring into its dim depths he retied his necktie; then he backed the buggy out of the carriage-house. But after he had put his mare between the ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... James spooted this bloody story, that notwithstanding my sleepiness, his words whiles dirled through my marrow like quicksilver, and set all my flesh a grueing. In the middle of it, he was himself so worked up, that twice he pulled his Kilmarnock from his head, silk-napkin, bandage and all, and threw them down with a thump on the table, which once ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... 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
... the father of English entomology, never admitted camphor in his cabinet (thinking, as I do, that it conduces to grease), but used the corrosive sublimate preparation instead, to touch the underneath of the bodies of doubtful strangers. Loose quicksilver or insect powder is by some strewn amongst their insects; but the danger of the first to the pins, and the untidy appearance of the second, militate against their general use. [Footnote: It is quite true that, although camphor evaporates ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... grandfather from mere love of his cups. Nothing but a hopeless smash-up, though, would ever have let it get the best of him.... He was terribly high-strung under all that fine repose of his, and although his mind was like polished metal in a way, it was full of quicksilver. When a man like that lets go—nothing left to hold on to—he goes down hill at ten times the pace of an ordinary chap. I—I—suppose I may as well tell you the whole truth. He never drew a sober breath on the steamer and he's been drunk more or less ever since he arrived in New York. Of ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... corrosive sublimate. I washed the brown-red precipitate obtained, and dried it; then I placed it, for reduction, upon the open fire in a small retort, which was provided with a bladder empty of air. As soon as the calx began to glow, the bladder became expanded, and quicksilver rose into the neck. The fire-air obtained had some ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... your Ladyship so to impose the blame on me," answered the steward, "it is my part, doubtless, to bear it—only I submit to your consideration, that unless I nailed his weapon to the scabbard, I could no more keep it still, than I could fix quicksilver, which defied even the skill ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... now as he lay against a 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
... black curved lashes and eyebrows, which made her eyes the most beautiful feature in her face. Very soft, fine curly hair surrounded a rather pathetic-looking little face; but her movements were like quicksilver, and though all the little Stuarts were noted for their mischievous ways and daring ...
— Odd • Amy Le Feuvre
... 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 Faith of Men • Jack London
... young fellow of the present time, who aspires to take the place of a stoker? One sees occasionally in the country a dismal old drag with a lonely driver. Where are you, charioteers? Where are you, O rattling Quicksilver, O swift Defiance? You are passed by racers stronger and swifter than you. Your lamps are out, and the music of your horns ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... a great deal of quicksilver in this glass ball, and we can play with it. I'll show you how." And away they went downstairs to find ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... the 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 as flashing water in the sun, flew from the land thousands of gauze-winged insects, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... the presence of gold; and if trap-rock is found cropping up amid this quartz, and perforated with streaks of it, so much the better. Sometimes the solid quartz itself is pounded, and gold extracted by the aid of quicksilver. When the gold is found in rivers, or on their banks, prediction is vain: nothing will do but the actual trial by the wash-pan. But where there is a bar or sand-bank, the richest deposit will always be on the side of the bank presented ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... which can be either obtained pure from them, or be recognised by its smell when burning. This gave rise to the sulphur theory, while the presence of mercury was inferred doubtless from the resemblance of the more commonly molten metals, silver, tin, and lead, to quicksilver. The properties of each metal were then put down to the presence of these substances. The list of seven metals is that of the most ancient times—gold, electrum, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron; but it ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... of different kinds of tools—a lathe, an anvil, crucibles, dies, graving-implements, steel pins, hammers, chisels, tongs, scissors, &c.; and also for the purchase of brass and pinchbeck ware, copper, silver, lead, quicksilver, varnish, brimstone, borax, and other things indispensable for labour. He had also taken, without premium, an apprentice, the child of very poor people, to help him. He would have been very glad to put the rest of his money out to interest again; but he had ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... them. Such a moment was theirs, the perfect hour of moonrise on a calm and empty sea. The horizon was undefined. They seemed suspended in limitless ether, which the riding moon pierced with a swale of living brightness, like quicksilver. They heard nothing save the hidden throb and creak of the ship, mysterious yet familiar, as the night itself. It was the perfect time. Stefan turned to her. Her face and hair shone silver, glorified. They looked at each other, their eyes strange in the ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... other metals after the gods. Thus Quicksilver was called Mercury, Lead Saturn, Tin Jupiter, Copper Venus, Silver Luna, and so on; and our own language has received a colouring from the Roman nomenclature, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... Joe?"—"No, I didn't."—"Well, the doctors had ben givin' him one thing another with merc'ry in't, and he walked out down to the Post-Office and back, and when he come home he kind o' felt somethin' hard in his boots. Come to pull 'em off, they found a lump o' quicksilver in both on 'em."—"Sho!"—"Fact; it had shrunk clean down through him with the cold." This rapid power of dramatizing a dry fact, of putting it into flesh and blood, and the instantaneous conception of Joe as a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... counting its gains while another sits by a cold hearth. But in the sovereign commune all will be centralised and sensitive. When jealousy springs up, when (let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached the commune of Dorchester, irritation will run like quicksilver throughout the body politic; each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly in his diet and his dress; even the secretary, who drafts the official correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered, as a ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the fire, and the rest, may superinduce upon some metal the nature and form of gold by such mechanic as longeth to the production of the natures afore rehearsed, than that some grains of the medicine projected should in a few moments of time turn a sea of quicksilver or other material into gold. So it is more probable that he that knoweth the nature of arefaction, the nature of assimilation of nourishment to the thing nourished, the manner of increase and clearing of spirits, the manner of the depredations which spirits make upon the humours ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... paste made of these must be corrected by the mould (?) continuously, until Mercury separates itself entirely from Jupiter and Venus. [Footnote: Here, and in No. 641 Mercurio seems to mean quicksilver, Giove stands for iron, Venere for copper and ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... with Hanoi by railway. This is an important industry, the value of tin exported in 1908 being L600,000. Tin is also mined in Hai-nan and lead in Yun-nan. Antimony ore is exported from Hu-nan; petroleum is found in the upper Yangtsze region. Quicksilver is obtained in Kwei-chow. Salt is obtained from brine wells in Shan-si and Sze-ch'uen, and by evaporation from sea water. Excellent kaolin abounds in the north-eastern part of Kiang-si, and is largely used in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... that was only dispelled by the phosphorescence caused by our movements. I watched the luminous waves that broke over my hand, whose mirror-like surface was spotted with silvery rings. One might have said that we were in a bath of quicksilver. ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... 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. He dined out less, avoided his club and Christie's. Also, he kept out of love. ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... the cab of a train like this one. This valkyric journey on the back of the vermilion engine, with the shouting of the wind, the deep, mighty panting of the steed, the gray blur at the track-side, the flowing quicksilver ribbon of the other rails, the sudden clash as a switch intersects, all the din and fury of this ride, was of a splendor that caused one to look abroad at the quiet, green landscape and believe that it was of a phlegm quiet beyond ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... Squire Truncheon, and Knight of the noble order of Quicksilver Legs! just take your stand at the distance you were off me when you discharged this instrument at my head. By 'r lady! I smart a scratch to pay you in coin, and it's lucky for you the coin is small, or you might reckon on it the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... were strong, wholesome, healthy. Christopher knew the quality of that health—hearts that pumped like machines—obedient muscles under satin skins. One of the women whirled in a series of handsprings, like a blue balloon—her body as fluid as quicksilver. If he could only borrow one-tenth of that endurance for Anne—he might keep her ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... canopy of leaves above, shone down full on Mr. Trimm as he lay snoring gently with his mouth open, and his hands rising and falling on his breast. The moonlight struck upon the Little Giant handcuffs, making them look like quicksilver. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... Quicksilver is abundant from extensive veins of cinnabar in the province of Mancha. In Galicia tin has been produced from very early times. Iron ore is very abundant, and silver mines, for many centuries abandoned, are now again being reworked. Gold ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the machine are contained thirty wheels of unique work, with two brass globes and little chains which alternately wind up a counterpoise; with the aid of six brass vases, full of a certain quantity of quicksilver, which run in some pulleys, the machine is kept by the artist in due equilibrium and balance. By means, then, of the friction between a steel wheel adequately tempered and a very heavy and surprising piece of lodestone, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... 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
... own way. We have the whole menagerie within us—the tiger, the ape, the peacock, the ass, the goose, the sheep the hyena, and all the rest. And we have been letting these animals rule us. Even our Intellect is erratic, unstable, and like the quicksilver to which the ancient occultists compared it, shifting and uncertain. If you will look around you you will see that those men and women in the world who have really accomplished anything worth while have trained their minds to obedience. They have ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, 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 retains no breath that is ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... 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 in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... musical waters looking as young as if God had made it that day. The graceful mountains which pressed round the valley had the air of waiting each her turn to stoop and drink a life-giving draught from the river, which, as we neared Barmouth, opened to the sea, gleaming like a vast sheet of quicksilver. Further on, travelling through woods where young green trees shot up from gilded rocks, glimpses of the estuary came to us like a vision of some ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... replied he, laughing. "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 will do in ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... gaily to 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. ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... of the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, With juice of cursed hebenon in a phial, And in the porches of mine ears 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; So it did mine. Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand, Of life, of crown, of queen, at once despatched Cut off, even in the blossoms of my sin, No reck'ning ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... 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) ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to have been almost as much valued in certain countries of Asia as Eastern cotton and silk goods were in Italy, France, Germany, and England. Certain Western metals and minerals were highly valued in the East, especially arsenic, antimony, quicksilver, tin, copper, and lead. [Footnote: Birdwood, Hand-book to the Indian Collection (Paris Universal Exhibition, 1878), Appendix to catalogue of the British Colonies, pp. 1-110.] The coral of the Mediterranean was much ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... know what a bore it is to lose the one bit of quicksilver in the house!' said he, yawning. 'I shall only drag on my existence till ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who always liked things short, and was himself as lively as quicksilver, many times called these long-winded fellows to order; but they kept meandering on, until daybreak, when it was time to adjourn, lest the sunshine should spoil them all, and change them ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... 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 ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... that hee heard Isaac Cardozo a Jewe tell him privately that the Shipp did belong unto his father in Amsterdam, and that shee was Assigned unto him by his father from Amsterdam, and that the said Bartholomewe Martin did see the Jewes bring Quicksilver, and that hee knowes it is the same which was taken in the Blew Dove: as witness my hand this ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... are very slight, being merely the wreck of an embankment. This has at times been excavated by parties who hoped to find some deposit which would repay the trouble, but with little success, a vial of quicksilver being the only relic said to have been found. This article was doubtless to be used in discovering deposits of the precious metals by the old adventurers. While walking through the lonely forests the mind of the visitor is involuntarily ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... dancing," she said apart to Anne. "I haven't danced since I was sixteen—but I love it. The music seems to run through my veins like quicksilver and I forget everything—everything—except the delight of keeping time to it. There isn't any floor beneath me, or walls about me, or roof over me—I'm floating amid ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... threshold by which he lay, he saw pale moonlight and mist making a white haze together on the outer air. The white doe ran by, a body of silver; like quicksilver she ran. And the huntsman, the passion to slay rousing his blood, caught up arrow and bow, and tried in vain with his maimed hands to notch the shaft ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... from lodge to wayside hostel, to city hotel, embraced only a minute sector of the great advance. Neither moral nor brute force slowed the weed. It clutched the upper reaches of the Rio Grande and ran down its course to the Gulf of Mexico like quicksilver in a broken thermometer. It went through Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas; it nibbled at the forks of the Platte; it left behind the Great Salt Lake like a chip diamond ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... understood by reference to that sweet, poetic, religious worship of lovely forms, which seems to rise through contemplation of beauty to adoration of God. One man, brought into intimate relation with an attractive and gifted woman, feels as if he were a vase of fiery quicksilver; another feels as if he were a mirror of divine ideas. The latter is capable of a friendship with her as fervent as love, but without its alloy; the former is not. St. Beuve says of Maurice de Guerin, "The sympathetic friendship ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... I felt that must be the true solution of it all!" cried uncle Phaeton, squirming about pretty much as one might into whose veins had been injected quicksilver in place of ordinary blood. "The outlet! Where the surplus waters drain off ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... that 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 a dozen paces, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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 the logic in the world would not have made me move faster ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... was the exact opposite of his brother. He, on the contrary, had to be watched and tended, for his veins seemed to run quicksilver. One would have been justified in saying that he went out to meet the misfortune which was so surely awaiting him. Whenever it was possible he gave his nurses and attendants the slip. He planned dangerous games, and incited the children ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to locate her, she shifts about so much. She is a shining drop of quicksilver which you put your finger on and it isn't there. There is a paragraph in the Autobiography (page 96) which places in seemingly darkly ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... expenditures drawn from my royal exchequer for those islands are so consuming and reducing that account and fund, to such an extent, and with so injurious effect, that it hardly comes in but it must be paid out. Considering that what is carried in exchange for the quicksilver [35] is revenue derived from the same merchandise that was sent, while the receipts from the bulls for the crusade are (as you know) but moderately successful, you are accordingly informed of this ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... ought to, blow through the song that cold winter air, that fresh Northern wind which characterizes so much both the climate and the temperament of the North. But neither should the storm howl till the very quicksilver froze and all the more tender emotions ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... 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
... to which we could advance. The sun was at this time out of my reach, since the sextant would not measure double the altitude. Observations of the stars were, in like manner, uncertain, in consequence of the boisterous weather we had had, and the unavoidable agitation of the quicksilver. My last observation of Antares placed us in latitude 34 degrees 4 minutes; so that we were still 115 miles ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... the troughs and ran—anywhere, and everywhere— like spilt quicksilver. It was a most extraordinary spectacle, for men and horses were in all stages of easiness, and the carbine-buckets flopping against their sides urged the horses on. Men were shouting and cursing, and trying to pull clear of the Band which was being chased by the Drum-Horse whose rider had fallen ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of Leonardo again, at Rome in 1514, surrounded by his mirrors and vials and furnaces, making strange toys that seemed alive of wax and quicksilver. The hesitation which had haunted him all through life, and made him like one under a spell, was upon him now with double force. No one had ever carried political indifferentism farther; it had always been his philosophy to "fly ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... to make the most of available space. On a small side-table—and of course under such circumstances each article must be sizable—stood a sewing machine, in the corner was a bedstead with exquisitely clean bedding, in another a tiny cooking stove. Vases of flowers, framed pictures and ornamental quicksilver balls had been found place for, this bargewoman's home aptly illustrating Shakespeare's adage—"Order gives all things view." The brisk, weather-beaten mistress now came up, no little gratified by ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... 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 wrinkle, an immeasurable fold of green water, moving swift ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... chiefly by trade with Antwerp. "The exports from Antwerp," says Burgon, "at that time consisted of jewels and precious stones, bullion, quicksilver, wrought silks, cloth of gold and silver, gold and silver thread, camblets, grograms, spices, drugs, sugar, cotton, cummin, galls, linen, serges, tapestry, madder, hops in great quantities, glass, salt-fish, small wares (or, as they were then called, merceries), made ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... turned to look at the army. Never had I seen them so joyous. It would be impossible to convey any idea of the afflatus which buoyed them up. Every man's veins seemed to run with quicksilver, instead of blood. Every cheek was glowing. Every eye flashed with superb joy and defiance. You would have supposed, indeed, that the troops were under the effect of champagne or laughing gas. "I never even imagined ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... from the Canon's Yeoman's Tale in Chaucer, that many of those who professed to turn the base metals into gold were held in bad repute as early as the 14th century. The "false chanoun" persuaded the priest, who was his dupe, to send his servant for quicksilver, which he promised to make into "as good silver and as fyn, As ther is any in youre purse or myn"; he then gave the priest a "crosselet," and bid him put it on the fire, and blow the coals. While the priest was busy ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... humming, and through St. Marys the news ran like quicksilver. In years past there had been individual discoveries by wandering bushmen, but none of them of value. Tales were afloat that old Shingwauk down at the settlement knew of a gold bearing vein, and that the knowledge would die with him. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... his correspondence show that this union of 1847, which afterwards had such happy results, excited at the time little enthusiasm, and was entered into largely as a matter of duty. "It is," he writes, "like the union, not of two globules of quicksilver which run together of themselves, but of two snowballs or cakes of mud that need in some way very tough outward pressure. I hope that the friction will elicit heat, since this neither cold nor hot spirit ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... like manner, St. Anthony's fire burn you, Mahoom's disease whirl you, the squinance with a stitch in your side and the wolf in your stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize upon you, the cursed sharp inflammations of wild-fire, as slender and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into your fundament, and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrah, may you fall into sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly believe all that I shall relate unto you ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais |
