From WB Yeats: The Trembling of the Veil

[Paul Ferguson]

“Has your alchemical research had any success?” I said. “Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour” (the alchemist may have been Eliphas Levi, who visited England in the ’sixties, and would have said anything) “but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might have made a mistake and that nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I meant to drink it when I was an old man, but when I got it down the other day it had all dried up.”

https://www.livelib.ru/book/14501773/rea...-yeats/~18

https://archive.org/details/tremblingofv...ried+up%22