Careful Words

liquid (n.)

liquid (adj.)

The chariest maid is prodigal enough,

If she unmask her beauty to the moon:

Virtue itself'scapes not calumnious strokes:

The canker galls the infants of the spring

Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,

And in the morn and liquid dew of youth

Contagious blastments are most imminent.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Hamlet. Act i. Sc. 3.

  Call things by their right names. . . . Glass of brandy and water! That is the current but not the appropriate name: ask for a glass of liquid fire and distilled damnation.

Robert Hall (1764-1831): Gregory's Life of Hall.

Liquid lapse of murmuring streams.

John Milton (1608-1674): Paradise Lost. Book viii. Line 263.

Sparkling and bright in liquid light

Does the wine our goblets gleam in;

With hue as red as the rosy bed

Which a bee would choose to dream in.

Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806-1884): Sparkling and Bright.

Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day.

John Milton (1608-1674): Sonnet to the Nightingale.