Amber

Amber is fossilised tree resin. Examples have been appreciated for their colour and natural beauty since Neolithic times, and worked as a gemstone since antiquity. Amber is used in jewellery and as a healing agent in folk medicine.

Quotes

• An artist to my father’s palace came,
  With gold and amber chains, elaborate frame:
  Each female eye the glittering links employ;
  They turn, review, and cheapen every toy.
  • Homer, Odyssey, XV, as Englished by Alexander Pope

• A bracelet rich with gold, with amber gay,
  That shot effulgence like the solar ray,
  Eurymachus presents.
  • Homer, Odyssey, XVIII, as Englished by Alexander Pope

• Not the soft gold which
  Steals from the amber-weeping tree,
  Makes sorrow half so rich,
  As the drops distill’d from thee.
  Sorrow’s best jewels lie in these
  Caskets of which Heaven keeps the keys.
  • Richard Crashaw, The Weeper (ed. 1670), st. 8