It was, then, a triumphant thing to have one possession safe for all time-one thing that the inscrutable years, and failure and joy and tears, could not touch; one thing, in a world of uncertain values, that the flames of the crucible would not at all transmute.
"The Furnace"
Rose Macaulay
Very few of the graduates of high schools have learned the high art of loving literature for its beauty and ennobling thought, fewer still have learned how to dig successfully in the rich mines of wealth that literature contains, and even a smaller number have learned to transmute the revelations of literature into character and new revelations in life or richer literature for the happiness and culture of coming generations.
"Dickens As an Educator"
James L. (James Laughlin) Hughes
But religious sentiment has a miraculous power both to reject and to transmute.
"Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius"
Samuel Dill