Contrariwise, Abrams (1971a: 35, 36, 38, 39, 40) was of the opinion that Coleridge had "opium hallucinations" even while reading the very books from which he was to extract his ideas and images later to be used in the The rime of the Ancient Mariner, so much so that opium cannot be excluded as a source of inspiration in the birth of this poem, besides the other sources like the "literature of Elizabethan travellers and
alchemistic handbooks.
In this passage, which ends with the same
alchemistic trope that Hawthorne would use years later to describe Delia Bacon's interpretations of Shakespeare, the narrator complicates his earlier description of the problems created by the Custom-House, in fact finding that they are created not by the materialistic environment of the Custom-House at all but merely by his own attitude toward it.
However, Kepler, a gifted mathematician who worked at the
alchemistic Prague court of the emperor Rudolf II casting horoscopes, mixed a good dose of magic and astrology into his sci-fi dream.
You should, however, take it more as a reflection of my naturalistic education and enthusiasm for nature (in a wider context, from botany to physics) than as a wilful fixation on the inexhaustible source of a sort of, inconceivable for other people,
alchemistic inspiration.
An increasing level of purity characterizes the different stages in the
alchemistic process of transmuting matter into gold.
43) Dousterswivel attempts to capitalize on his assumption that both Wardour and Oldbuck would appreciate the value of this qualitative difference between the two materials as he invites Oldbuck to invest in his
alchemistic scheme: "If you join wid Sir Arthur, as he is put one hundred and fifty--see, here is one fifty in your dirty Fairport banknotes--you put one other hundred and fifty in de dirty notes, and you shall have de pure gold and silver, I cannot tell how much" (228).
Isaac Newton, though still strongly interested in
alchemistic studies, publishes his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, paving the way for the modern approach to establishing knowledge about nature.
alchemistic - of or relating to alchemists