For instance, there's the Powder of Life, and my Liquid of Petrifaction, which is contained in that bottle on the shelf yonder--over the window."
"What does the Liquid of Petrifaction do?" inquired the boy.
This table looks to you like wood, and once it really was wood; but I sprinkled a few drops of the Liquid of Petrifaction on it and now it is marble.
No answering spark of kindness, no awakening penitence, but an unappeasable ill-humour, and a spirit of tyrannous exaction that increased with indulgence, and a lurking gleam of self-complacent triumph at every detection of relenting softness in my manner, that congealed me to marble again as often as it recurred; and this morning he finished the business:- I think the
petrifaction is so completely effected at last that nothing can melt me again.
Here, too, the bride's aunt and next relation; a widowed female of a Medusa sort, in a stoney cap, glaring petrifaction at her fellow- creatures.
For, Medusa, besides unmistakingly glaring petrifaction at the fascinating Tippins, follows every lively remark made by that dear creature, with an audible snort: which may be referable to a chronic cold in the head, but may also be referable to indignation and contempt.
Esther, whose eyes had come alive and her cheeks flushed during these last words, relapsed in a second into a state of
petrifaction. She remained without motion during his absence, and when he returned suffered herself to be put back into the phaeton, and driven off on the return journey like an idiot or a tired child.
Choice old water too, decanted into stout six-barrel-casks, and two pints of which is allowed every day to each soul on board; together with ample store of sea-bread, previously reduced to a state of
petrifaction, with a view to preserve it either from decay or consumption in the ordinary mode, are likewise provided for the nourishment and gastronomic enjoyment of the crew.
The trees, burdened with the last infinitesimal pennyweight of snow their branches could hold, stood in absolute
petrifaction. The slightest tremor would have dislodged the snow, and no snow was dislodged.
Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were then in their seeming
petrifaction.
In these architectures it seems as though the rigidity of the dogma had spread over the stone like a sort of second
petrifaction. The general characteristics of popular masonry, on the contrary, are progress, originality, opulence, perpetual movement.
Among his topics are
petrifaction and wave power, anti-memorial elegy on a raised beach, dilapidation and singing stones, and on the tip of the tongue.