Bees have this property by nature to find and suck the mildest and best honey out of the sharpest and most eager flowers.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals, p. 43.
Now on the eager razor’s edge for life or death we stand.
Chapman, Homer’s Iliad, b. x.
Asproso, full of sowrenesse or eagernesse.—Florio, New World of Words (A.D. 1611).
Ebb. Nothing ‘ebbs,’ unless it is figuratively, except water now. But ‘ebb,’ oftenest an adjective, was continually used in our earlier English with a general meaning of shallow. There is still a Lancashire proverb, ‘Cross the stream where it is ebbest.’
Orpiment, a mineral digged out of the ground in Syria, where it lieth very ebb.—Holland, Pliny, vol. ii. p. 469.
This you may observe ordinarily in stones, that those parts and sides which lie covered deeper within the ground be more frim and tender, as being preserved by heat, than those outward faces which lie ebb, or above the earth.—Id., Plutarch’s Morals, p. 747.
It is all one whether I be drowned in the ebber shore, or in the midst of the deep sea.—Bishop Hall, Meditations and Vows, cent. ii.
Ecstasy. We still say of madmen that they are beside themselves; but ‘ecstasy,’ or a standing out of oneself, is no longer used as an equivalent to madness.
This is the very coinage of your brain;