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More "Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... urged, granting that organic beings in a state of nature present some varieties,—that their organisation is in some slight degree plastic; granting that many animals and plants have varied greatly under domestication, and that man by his power of selection has gone on accumulating such variations until he has made strongly marked and firmly inherited races; granting all this, how, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... the first impression she had made; then her dark, troubled gaze and the sullen droop of her mouth returned to give the lie to what he could but feel to be a possible misjudgment. In the end, he concluded wisely enough that, like the most of us, she was probably but plastic matter for the mark of circumstance—that her development would be, after all, according to the events she was called upon to face. The possibility that Destiny, which is temperament, should have already selected her as one of those who come into their spiritual heritage only through defeat, did ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... plastic period of your lives, with the world before you, and the mightier world within to mould as you will; and you can be almost anything you like, I do not mean in regard to externals, or intellectual capacities, for these are only partially in our control, but in regard to the far more important ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to arouse curiosity. Foul speech I never heard from them nor a trace of profanity. What I did hear was a liberal education in the humanities—as time passes I rate more and more highly the sense of values it fixed in a plastic mind. I think it must have been because our Mammys saw all things from the elemental angle, they were critics so illuminating of manners ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... evil hour, To show to man the empire of thy power, If fortune, at thy wild impetuous sway, The blossoms of my fame must drop away, Then was the time the obedient plant to strain When life was warm in every vigorous vein, To mould young nature to thy plastic skill, And bend my pliant boyhood to thy will. So might I hope applauding crowds to hear, Catch the quick smile, and HIS attentive ear. But ah! for what has thou reserv'd my age? Say, how can I expect the approving stage; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... other, allow itself to be fettered to the dulness of every-day decorum, her opportunity would be lost; but if she could hold the delicate equilibrium where she stood,—self-poised, and yet swaying to the influences which must work on every soul for its highest development, plastic yet firm,—then he believed, firmly believed, that there might lie in her a power for which the world would be the better and ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the Reformation" found its twin lighting up the dark ravines of Bohemia, and when they twain arose the day had begun to break. The Reformation did not begin with Luther. The elements had been made plastic to his touch; all was ready for his skilful hand to mould them into the symmetry of the Great Reformation. The armies of the Lord had enlisted man by man before he came; it was for his clarion blast to marshal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... personality, the New Testament would be to a great extent a dead letter. It owes its significance to the quickened spirit which is brought to the reading of it. The personality of Christ could not be, through a plastic sympathy, moulded out of the New Testament records, without the ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... have, it is true, been frequently stated with regard to the plan of educating youths in the public grammar schools of our own country; that some of the most precious years of their lives, when the faculties were in growing vigour, and the plastic mind most susceptible of receiving and retaining impressions, are wasted in poring over the metaphysics of a Latin Grammar, which they cannot possibly comprehend; and in learning by heart a number of declinations, conjugations, and syntax rules, which serve ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... strange pranks with snow; snow is the most plastic medium it has to mould into images and symbols of its moods. Here one of these promontories would slope down, and the very next one would slope upward as it advanced across the open space. In every case there had been two walls, as it were, of furious blow, and between the two ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... ritual grew in mediaeval times into full-fledged drama we shall see in the next chapter; here let us consider that cult of the Christ Child in which the scene of Bethlehem is represented not by living actors but in plastic art, often ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... him, although he was not able at the moment to assign the precise source of his blissful tranquillity. Like a true musician, he was satisfied to seize the sentiment of the scenes he visited, while he seemed to give but little attention to the plastic material, the picturesque frame, which did not assimilate with the form of his art, nor belong to his more spiritualized sphere. However, (a fact that has been often remarked in organizations such as his,) as he was removed in time ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... it with a small, intense girl named Sylvia Shouff, if you believed the little plastic sign on her desk. There was barely room for it in the welter of paper, files, notebooks, phones, calendars and other junk she had squirreled. She was much too busy banging at a typewriter and handling the phone to pay any attention to me. Her pert, lively manner said ...
— The Trouble with Telstar • John Berryman
... that this was what fate had in reserve for him—to be propelled in his career by a young lady who would perhaps attempt to talk to the Kaiser as he had heard her the other night talk to the President. Would she consent to discontinue relations with her family, or would she wish still to borrow plastic relief from that domestic background? That her family was so impossible was to a certain extent an advantage; for if they had been a little better the question of a rupture would be less easy. He turned over these questions in spite of his security, or ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... manifestations. Thus it is clear that man, in the personification of this type or specific conception, is no longer bound to the actual form of the special object which first represented it, but he may be said to mould a more indefinite and plastic substance into which he can with spontaneous or facile art incarnate his whole person. Hence this substance will assume an anthropomorphic form, and will issue, not in a mysterious being of extrinsic and indefinite form, but in a person ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... an arm-sized opening at waist height. Inside was a hand grip. A two-foot plastic globe a quarter full of chips hung in the center. Apparatus was mounted at the top ...
— Gambler's World • John Keith Laumer
... expectation of the Jews for their Messiah or of the Portugueze for St. Sebastian more extravagant? But Lord G. ought to know that such a military POWER does already exist upon the Peninsula, formless indeed compared with what under our plastic hands it may become, yet which has proved itself capable of its giving employment during the course of three years to at least five hundred thousand of the enemy's best troops. An important fact has ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... I who had sent Kagig a message, I who five minutes ago was on the verge of being hanged in the greasy noose that still swung above the ladder through the hole in the roof—I who therefore ought to be thoroughly plastic-minded and obedient to demands. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... nodded. Tomasite, a revolutionary plastic which Mr. Swift had developed, possessed amazing insulating properties against both heat and radiation. One of its secret ingredients came from certain plants found only in Far Eastern waters. Mr. Swift ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... arm held out to endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then, with her master hand, she would roll it thin and cut out the small round disks ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... and outcome of a soul like that of Jesus, into which a supernatural influx of light and life had descended. They are not more wonderful than nature; they are not so wonderful as the change of heart by which a bad man becomes a good man. But they will find their proper place as evidence how plastic the lower laws are to the influence ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... to give a history of the development of the plastic art, but to show the great excellence it attained in ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... of the wife, and another of a neighbor's child; visible also in a couple of water colors of flowers and birds; an ambitious unfinished portrait of his wife in oils: some paint decorations on the pine mantel; and an excellent human ear, done in some plastic material at 16. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Westmoreland family to which the sisters belonged. Her father had been an Evangelical scholar and headmaster; the one slip of learning in a rude and primitive race. She had been trained by him; and in spite of her seven years of married life beside a nature so plastic and sensitive as Elsmere's, and of her passionate love for her husband, it was the early influences on her character which had in the end proved ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... James Melville, whose plastic nature and gentle spirit retained through life the impressions then made, supplements in his Diary the notices in Bannatyne's Memorials, and, in a passage which has been often quoted, gives a very fresh and vivid ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... deeply from these strange springs. It may be that, after the crisis of the year 68 (the date of the Apocalypse) and of the year 70 (the destruction of Jerusalem), the old apostle, with an ardent and plastic spirit, disabused of the belief in a near appearance of the Son of Man in the clouds, may have inclined toward the ideas that he found around him, of which several agreed sufficiently well with certain Christian doctrines. ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... geometrically defined and describable as a period of fluidity, corresponding to the possibility of a continuous deformation under the constant action of the same strain. This particular condition is only realized with very malleable or plastic bodies; and it may even be regarded as characteristic of such bodies, since its absence is noticeable in all non-malleable or fragile bodies, which break without being deformed. It is already known that the period of altered ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... true of the pictorial art holds equally true of the plastic art. As Prof. Veblin of the University of Chicago has scathingly declared, our ideals of the beautiful are so mingled with worship of expense that few of us can see the genuine beauty in any object apart from its expensiveness. For this reason ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... conjectures concerning the history of Egypt, we may suppose some of the following to be started. 'As the banks of the Nile have been so recently colonized for the first time, the curious substances called mummies could never in reality have belonged to men. They may have been generated by some PLASTIC VIRTUE residing in the interior of the earth, or they may be abortions of Nature produced by her incipient efforts in the work of creation. For if deformed beings are sometimes born even now, when ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... Room was an open patio in front of an artificial waterfall. The Sultan was pacing back and forth, wearing dusty khaki puttees, brown plastic boots, a yellow polo shirt. He carried a twig which he used as a riding crop, slapping his boots as he walked. He turned his head as Murphy appeared, pointed his twig ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... no ray was reflected to show their form or colours, appear a new creation rising to the sight, catching life and beauty from every increasing beam. The scene still enlarges, and the horizon seems to widen and expand itself on all sides; till the sun appears in the east, and with his plastic ray completes the mighty scene. All appears enchantment; and it is with difficulty we can believe we are still on earth. The senses, unaccustomed to such objects, are bewildered and confounded; and it is not till after some time that they are capable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... The difference between plants, the variegation of colors, their relations to the air, the sunshine, the dew, the rain; the habits of plants, some erect, some creeping, some climbing, the seasons of flowering, fruitage, and seed, are impressed with ease upon the plastic mind of childhood. ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... puppets, kingdoms but his stage,— Faint shadows they without his plastic art,— He waves his wand, and lo! they live again, And in his world perform ...
— Ballads • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... it lasted, but which was never mastered in any real sense of the term, and which could have but the most superficial influence upon their future conduct. But, worst of all, he permitted bad and inadequate habits to be developed at the most critical and plastic period of life. His pupils had followed the lines of least effort, just as he had followed the lines of least effort. The result was a well-established prejudice against everything that was not superficially ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... these lakes were. All the lakes appeared about the same, the bed white and glistening in the sun, which made it very hard for the eyes, and so that a man in passing over it made no visible track. It looked as if it one time might have been a smooth bed of plastic mortar, and had hardened in the sun. It looked as if there must have been water there sometime, but we had not seen a drop, or a single cloud; every day was clear and sunny, and very warm, and at night no ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... stands apart; By years of toil you've learned the trick (Like PHEIDIAS with his plastic art) Of slapping mortar on a brick; Touched too the summit Of science with your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... periodicals, including newspapers; (c) lectures, sermons, addresses prepared for oral delivery: (d) dramatic or dramatico-musical compositions; (c) musical compositions; (f) maps; (g) works of art; models or designs for works of art; (h) reproductions of a work of art; (i) drawings or plastic works of a scientific or technical character: (j) photographs; (k) prints ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... stable surroundings enclosing an environed object which is to be changed at their demand. No such state of things exists. There is no fixed environment. It is always fixable. Every environment is plastic and derives its character, at least partially, from the environed object. Each stone sends out its little gravitative and chemical influence upon surrounding stones, and they are different through being in its neighborhood. The two become mutually affected, and it ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... speculation—so the tow'ring mind, By inward oracle inspired and taught, The lofty and the excellent in mind adores. Then, Saviour! what a paragon art Thou Of all that Wisdom in her hope creates— A model for the universe—Though God Be round us, by the shadow of His might For aye reflected, and with plastic hand Prints on the earth the character of things— Yet He Himself,—how awfully retired Depth within depth, unutterably deep! His glory brighter than the brightest thought Can picture, holier than our holiest awe Can worship,—imaged only in I ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... steadily maintained, before bad habits were formed; if firm resolution on the part of the parents had taken the place of indulgent laxity, if, instead of being left to chance, character had been moulded during the time when it was plastic—these might, with God's blessing, have grown up to be wise, pure-hearted, courageous followers of Christ—who would not only have sweetened the atmosphere of home, but would have done something to purify and illumine society, as ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... rules of the social game. It is my hope that this honest confession of my own feelings, due directly to lack of training, may help other women, and particularly other mothers whose children are now in the plastic years. ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... literal development out of the actual contents of the first apple seed. No: but the truth is this. There was a power in the first apple seed to secure certain conditions; that is, to organize a certain status in which the plastic vegetative life of nature would posit new and similar powers and materials. So not all souls were latent in Adam's, but only an organizing power to secure the conditions on which the Divine Will that first began, would, in accordance with His creative plan, forever ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... her grandmother's, open to the influence of music, though she never knew how profound that influence was. She was impervious to all the other arts: probably she had never looked at a picture in her life: she seemed to have no sense of plastic beauty, for she was lacking in taste, owing to her proud and wilful indifference; the idea of a beautiful body only awoke in her the idea of nakedness, that is to say, like the peasant of whom Tolstoy speaks, a feeling ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... had listened to the songs of the sirens. No siren Isaura! She was defending her own cause, though unconsciously—defending the vocation of art as the embellisher of external nature, and more than embellisher of the nature which dwells crude, but plastic in the soul of man: indeed therein the creator of a new nature, strengthened, expanded, and brightened in proportion as it accumulates the ideas that tend beyond the boundaries of the visible and ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... light and discoursed upon by critics from two to four centuries ago, represent but a single phase of Greek feeling; and that the Greeks, even in what we choose to call their most characteristic period, had a distinctly "romantic" tendency which their more recently discovered plastic art betrays. But even if we had all the lost statues, plays, poems, and orations, all the Greek paintings about which we know so little, and the Greek music about which we know still less, does anybody suppose that this wealth of artistic expression would ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... their own profession which has no practical relation to the strength of the ground on which they are enabled to stand. Toward any unfair and flippant criticism of the "military mind" they react with resentment, instead of with buoyant proof that their own minds are more plastic and more receptive to national ideals than those of any other profession. Where they should approach all problems of the national security with the zeal of the missionary, seeking and giving light, they treat this subject as if it were a private ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... to see brought together the work of so many really great sculptors. America has a very large number of talented men expressing themselves on the plastic side ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... mysterious craft, if that is what they were, were spread out in an arc around Washington from Herndon, Virginia, to Andrews AFB. This time there was no hesitation in following the targets. The minute they appeared on the big 24-inch radarscope one of the controllers placed a plastic marker representing an unidentified target near each blip on the scope. When all the targets had been carefully marked, one of the controllers called the tower and the radar station at Andrews AFB—they also ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... will be content with our Asa San," he said; "the character is still plastic. In England it is different; but in France and in Japan we say it is the husband who must make the character of his wife. She is the plain white paper; let him take his brush and write on it what he will. Asa San is a very sweet girl. She is very easy to manage. She has a beautiful ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... are easily to be set aside. Similarly some atheists derive all things from dead and unintelligent matter; others from matter living and energetic but without sense or will: others from matter with forms and qualities generable and conceptible; and others from a plastic and methodical nature. Thus the Vishnu Swamis of the world have invested the subject with some confusion. The simple, that is to say, the mass of mortality, have confounded that confusion by reproachfully applying the word atheist to those whose opinions differ ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... So plastic are organisms, and so great is the number of living things in the earth, that it is not surprising that very similar forms should sometimes arise independently and in different parts of the globe. Several instances of this fortuitous resemblance are cited in Beddard's Animal Colouration; ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... The negro is a plastic human creature, and is thoroughly domesticated and thoroughly anglicized. The same cannot be said of the Indian, for instance, between whom and us there can never exist any fellowship, any community of feeling ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... was neatly bound in thin, tough, plastic tangle-cord, swathed from chin to boot-bottoms, my arms imprisoned, my feet caught. And tangle-cord is about as easy to get out of as a spider's web is for ...
— The Hunted Heroes • Robert Silverberg
... the same kind look of compassion in his eyes. He was fond of telling his fellow-artists that he had a "plastic" face,— and this quality served him well just now. He might have been a hero and martyr, from the peaceful and patient expression of his features, and he so impressed by his manner a lay-brother who presently entered ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... them. On this score, however, few indulged serious anxiety. Once the Hebraic shoals and snags were safely passed, both examiner and examined could disport themselves with a jaunty self-confidence born of a thorough acquaintance with the Shorter Catechism received during the plastic ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... place of the old and feeble ones; it has nerves and brain more developed than before; it has wings for flight instead of mere creeping little feet to crawl with? What seemed like chaos was really nothing more than the necessary kneading up of all component parts into a plastic condition which precedes every fresh departure in evolution. The old must fade before ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... poison, with unprofitable toil, A life too void of solace to confirm 130 The very chains that bind him to his doom. Nature, impartial in munificence, Has gifted man with all-subduing will. Matter, with all its transitory shapes, Lies subjected and plastic at his feet, 135 That, weak from bondage, tremble as they tread. How many a rustic Milton has passed by, Stifling the speechless longings of his heart, In unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... well within constructional expediency—were doubtless covered with a coating of plaster where they occurred inside of the rooms. At Tusayan and Cibola, on the other hand, the tendency has been rather to elaborate the plastic element of the masonry. The nearly universal use of adobe is undoubtedly largely responsible for the more slovenly methods of building now in vogue, as it effectually conceals careless construction. It is not to be expected that walls would be carefully constructed of banded stonework ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... is from this view of things that the best legislators have been often satisfied with the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government,—a power like that which some of the philosophers have called a plastic Nature; and having fixed the principle, they have left it ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... melted into a face of plastic contour, rich full lips, soft interfused outlines, intense purple eyes, and heavy waving hair, dark indeed, but harmonized curiously with the narrow gold fillet that bound it. "It is no pain to die for love," said the low, deep voice, with an echo of rolling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... it is indeed a day of darkness and reproach—a day when the high principle of human equity constrained by the remorseless sweep of physical and armed force, must for the moment, succumb under the plastic forms of soft diplomacy" (Russell Papers. Lyons to Russell, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... BRAIN.—The plastic brain of the foetus is prompt to receive all impressions. It retains them, and they become the characteristics of the child and the man. Low spirits, violent passions, irritability, frivolity, in the pregnant woman, leave indelible marks ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... principles of action to altered circumstances, there can be no doubt that it is by considerations of well-being, half conscious though the process of application may be, that the change is directed. The plastic power by which men accommodate their actions and even their maxims of conduct to modifications in surrounding circumstances is one of the advantages which they gain by the progress of civilisation. In ancient society ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... maintaining the Balance. Each had its niche in the ecological architecture, as Dodeth liked to think of it. The trouble was that the Balance was a shifting, swinging, ever-changing thing. Living tissues carried the genes of heredity in them, and living tissues are notoriously plastic under the influence of the proper radiation or particle bombardment. And animals ...
— The Asses of Balaam • Gordon Randall Garrett
... difference by calling the first Romantic and the other Classic. Yet these appellations are only uncertain rubrics, and have led hitherto to the most discouraging, wearisome entanglements, which become worse since we give to antique poetry the designation of "Plastic," instead of "Classic." From this arose much misunderstanding; for, justly, all poets should work their material plastically, be it Christian or heathen; they should set it forth in clear outlines; in short, plastic form should be the main desideratum in modern Romantic art, quite as much ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... South Gardens. (See p. 23.) These form an animated and effective foreground for the Exposition palaces. Except for their fountains, the gardens and the structures in them are less notable for sculpture than the central courts of the Exposition. Most of the plastic work here is purely decorative. The gardens are formal, French in style, laid out with long rectangular pools, each with a formal fountain, and each surrounded by a conventional balustrade with flower receptacles and lamp standards. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... hatred of humbug, and a scorn for cant. A genial warmth and whole-souledness, a beautiful fancy, a fertile imagination, and a native feeling for the picturesque and a fine eye for color have afforded the basis of a style which has become more and more plastic ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... veil, and throw away Thy robe that flows discordantly! With nature only match thy form, With nature match thy plastic image. Loosen thy girdle! Cross Thy hands upon thy heart! Thy hair is purple royal, A ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... of this century referring to a century earlier, and a promiscuous date upon one chapel, can carry but little weight. I shall assume, therefore, henceforward, that we have here groups designed in a plastic material by Tabachetti, and reproduced in wood by the best local wood-sculptor available, with the exception of a few figures cut ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... lot, for the first few minutes, as they watched the ground receding under them through the transparent plastic nose. Then, when nothing serious seemed to be happening, exhilaration took the place of fear. By the time they set down on the tip of the island, the eight ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... and jolted under her weight, began skidding, then held firm to the two guy ropes remaining. A horde of gray creatures hurled themselves on those lines as a hatchway opened above and a ladder dropped down. The men scurried up the ropes just as the plastic dome of the Control Tower ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... completely broken. No work of Art of a more chilling, disenchanting character was ever produced. For the striking individuality of the first part, we have here nothing but abstractions; for its deep poetry, symbolism; for its glow and thrilling pathos, a plastic finish, hard and cold as marble; for its psychological truth, a bewildering mysticism. All the fine thoughts and reflections, and all the abundance of poetical passages, scattered like jewels through the thick mist of the whole work, cannot compensate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... different, survivals perhaps of a time when their words and superstitions were the ways of a ruder England. The lanes and the gateways in the fields, as they say, are 'slubby' enough in November, and those who try to go through get 'slubbed' up to their knees. This expresses a soft, plastic, and adhesive condition of the mud which comes on after it has been 'raining hop-poles' for a week. The labourer has little else to do but to chop up disused hop-poles into long fagots with a hand-bill—in other counties a bill-hook. All his class bitterly resent the lowering ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... wallflower. That is to say, she had early in life rid herself of the admiration of the many, by refusing to supply an unlimited amount of small talk. In feature she was as plain as George Eliot. A boy is plastic, and even a modest wallflower can woo him; but a man, for her, inspires awe—with him she takes no liberties. And the wallflower woos the youth unwittingly, thinking the while she is only using her influence the better ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... prejudices, likes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies, tastes and feelings, in common with all human nature. The sooner he perceives this fact, and adapts himself accordingly, the easier will be his journey among the several races of the interior. The more plastic his nature, the more ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... to a stop in front of them, the plastic blister was thrown back, and another Solar Guard messenger climbed ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... process of disintegration; Kirchhoff's theorem visibly needs to be modified; Clerk Maxwell's medium no longer figures as an indispensable factotum; "absolute zero" is known to be situated on an asymptote to the curve of cold. Ideas, in short, have all at once become plastic, and none more completely so than those relating to astronomy. The physics of the heavenly bodies, indeed, finds its best opportunities in unlooked-for disclosures; for it deals with transcendental conditions, and what is strange to terrestrial ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... his attention was called to an unusual method of burial by an ancient race of Indians in that vicinity. In numerous instances burial places were discovered where the bodies had been placed with the face up and covered with a coating of plastic clay about an inch thick. A pile of wood was then placed on top and fired, which consumed the body and baked the clay, which retained the impression of the body. This was ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... over to examine the sign. Sure enough, it was the track of a man's knee; and the plastic mud exhibited on its surface a print of fretted lines, which must have been made ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... "The children were plastic in body and mind. Their faces and pinafores clean; And persons scholastic, in accents refined. With eloquence ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... most remarkable quality of brickwork is that it can be thrown into almost any shape. It is in this respect almost like a plastic material, and this peculiarity it owes chiefly to the very small size of each brick as compared with the large masses of the brickwork of most buildings. Stone is far less easily dealt with than brick in this respect. Think for a moment of the great variety ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... from these necessarily heroic measures is not so great as might be expected, and can be further diminished by plastic operations, which should be undertaken before cicatricial contraction ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... of the plastic age, my ancestor was observed to betray strong feelings of compassion at the sight of charity-children, nor was he ever known to pass a child, especially a boy that was still in petticoats, who was crying with hunger in the streets, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... sand and silt, not only in size of particles, but also in properties and formation. It is said that clay particles reach a degree of fineness equal to 1/2500 of an inch. Clay itself, when wet and kneaded, becomes plastic and adhesive and is thus easily distinguished from sand. Because of these properties, clay is of great value in holding together the larger soil grains in relatively large aggregates which give soils the desired degree of filth. Moreover, clay is ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... infinitely rich abundance of early Christian views and perceptions. That presupposition is simply a proclamation of the one God and of Christ transferred to Greek soil, fixed merely in its leading features and otherwise very plastic, accompanied by a message regarding the future, and demands for a holy life. At the same time the Old Testament and the early Christian Palestinian writings with the rich abundance of their contents, did certainly exercise ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... directly above the long power tubes of the Ceres. The lock door hung open, making an improvised landing porch fifty feet above the charred ground. Lord paused for a moment at the head of the runged landing ladder. Below him, in the clearing where the ship had come down, he saw the rows of plastic prefabs which his crew had thrown up—laboratories, sleeping quarters, a kitchen, and ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... groove suture proposed by Professor Pancoast, and recommended by Professor Gross, is said to be specially suitable for such plastic operations. It is very complicated, as it requires one edge to be bevelled to a wedge shape, the other being grooved to include the wedge, thus opposing four raw surfaces, which are retained in contact by being ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... point where three major shipping routes of the Federation of the Hub crossed within a few hours' flight of one another, the Seventh Star Hotel had floated in space, a great golden sphere, gleaming softly in the void through its translucent shells of battle plastic. The Star had been designed to be much more than a convenient transfer station for travelers and freight; for some years after it was opened to the public, it retained a high rating among the more exotic pleasure resorts of the Hub. The Seventh Star Hotel was the place to have ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... that the character and lot of man are indefinitely modifiable for good, was the indispensable antecedent to any general and energetic endeavour to modify the conditions that surround him. The omnipotence of early instruction, of laws, of the method of social order, over the infinitely plastic impulses of the human creature—this was the maxim which brought men of such widely different temperament and leanings to the common enterprise. Everybody can see what wide and deep-reaching bearings such a doctrine possessed; how it raised ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... bony legs, in trousers too wide and too short, break off at the bottom in long and mournful shoes, with hillocks, and resembling crocodiles; and their soles, being soaked in paraffin, leave oily footprints, rainbow-hued, in the plastic mud. ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... What are mouldings and frets and carvings but a roughening of otherwise smooth surfaces? Artists of all kinds seek to remove even the appearance of an unbroken plane, and nature abhors a flat exterior, never allows one, even in the most plastic material, if it can be broken. See the waves of the ocean, the mimic billows on a snow-covered plain, the rugged grandeur of the everlasting hills. Fancy a pine, an oak, or an elm tree with trunk and limbs smoothly polished! What if the outside of your walls are somewhat uneven? Let them be so. ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... permit it to pass the features of its occupant were seen, who, perceiving the young girl on the road—the shawl, half-fallen from her shoulder revealing the plastic grace of an erect figure—gazed at her with surprise, then thrust his head from the window and bowed with smiling, if somewhat exaggerated, politeness. The next moment carriage and traveler vanished down ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... soil or air layering. The writer(14) while experimenting with aerial layering in 1945 found one instance of root production on a hickory where the branch was girdled at the base of the one-year wood. This method offers possibilities, especially now that polythene plastic is available for retaining moisture in the moss about the girdle or wound on ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... as we now see, came down through successive generations of Hebrews, from a remote antiquity in which this race had not been thrown off from the common Semitic stock. On the baked clay tablets of Babylonia we read to-day the same stories. The Hebrews worked them over, under the plastic power of their religious genius, into the lofty ethical and theistic forms in which they stand in Genesis; forms which, rightly read, are parables fresh and inspiring now, as when, twenty-five hundred years ago, Jewish children ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... affinities and inner consciences:—whereas the old idea of education was that the baby material of you, however accidentally or inevitably born, was at least to be by external force, and ancestral knowledge, bred; and treated by its Fathers and Tutors as a plastic vase, to be shaped or mannered as they chose, not as it chose, and filled, when its form was well finished and baked, with sweetness of sound doctrine, as with Hybla ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... faster! The roar became a whining hum. Then for Madeline sound ceased to be anything—she could not hear. The wind was now heavy, imponderable, no longer a swift, plastic thing, but solid, like an on-rushing wall. It bore down upon Madeline with such resistless weight that she could not move. The green of desert plants along the road merged in two shapeless fences, sliding at her from the distance. Objects ahead began to blur ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... attitude and gesture which the mystery of their setting enhanced, conveyed a thrilling impression of the sacred scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the sculptured image is still a mysterious half-sentient thing, denizen of some strange borderland between art and life. It seemed to him, as he gazed through the chapel gratings, that those long-distant ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... when applied to Mercury. The effectiveness of the sun's attraction in slowing down the rotation of a planet through the braking action of the tides raised in the body of the planet while it is yet molten or plastic, varies inversely as the sixth power of the planet's distance. For Mercury this effectiveness is nearly three hundred times as great as it is for the earth, while for Venus it is only seven times as great. While we may admit, then, that Mercury, being relatively close to the sun and ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... easy to imagine ourselves victorious in circumstances where things are all going rightly and are bending according to our own desires, but when we come to the grim world, where there are things that resist and people are not plastic, it is a very different matter. You do not yet understand, as you will some day, the fatal limitations of power that hem us all round and the obstinate way that circumstances have of not falling in with ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... pot-maker knows quite well how matters stand. She takes good care not to close the top with the plastic earth which supplied her with the walls. At some distance from the tip of the nipple, the clay ceases to play its part and makes way for fibrous particles, for tiny scraps of undigested fodder, which, arranged one above the other with a certain order, form a sort of thatched ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... an entirely adequate and dignified house at 6 Grosvenor Square, and soon found that the American Ambassadorship had compensations which were hardly suggested by his first glimpse of the lugubrious Chancery. He brought to this new existence his plastic and inquisitive mind, and his mighty gusto for the interesting and the unusual; he immensely enjoyed his meetings with the most important representatives of all types of British life. The period of his arrival marked a crisis in British history; Mr. Lloyd George was supposed to be taxing the aristocracy ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... round our world, behold the chain of love. Combining all below and all above; See plastic nature working to this end, The single atoms each to other tend; Attract, attracted to, the next in place Formed and impelled its neighbor to embrace, See matter next, with various life endued, Press to one center still the gen'ral good. See dying vegetables ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... the personification of each of his heroes with the greatest possible amount of clearness, perfection, and fidelity, according to that perfect incorporation already typified by the music of drama. Following this leader, the eye of the plastic artist will ultimately behold the marvels of another visible world, which, previous to him, was seen for the first time only by the creator of such works as the Ring of the Nibelung —that creator of highest rank, who, like AEschylus, points the way to a coming art. Must not jealousy ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Smiting the mother like a funeral knell. High rode the sun in heaven next day before The stricken mother found along the shore The object of her unremitting quest. The cooling wave whereon she lay at rest Had stilled the tumult of Winona's breast Along that shapely ruin's plastic grace, And in the parting of her braided hair, The hopeless mother's glances searching there The Thunder-Bird's mysterious mark ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... policy. It must therefore be softened, modified, qualified, made to sound less harsh to the ears of men in power, and to assume a plausible, polished, inoffensive character. It was accordingly put into the plastic hands of friends of the executive to be moulded and fashioned, so that it might have the effect of ridding the country of the obnoxious order, and yet not appear to question executive infallibility. All this did not answer. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... melted sulphur, at a temperature above that of the viscous state, be let fall into water, the drops will be solidified in the effort to form the ring, and the circular button, thick in the rim and thin in the center, may be regarded as a solidified vortex ring of plastic sulphur. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... These carbonates are freely soluble and contribute potash and soda to soils and river waters. By the removal of the soluble ingredients of feldspar there is left the silicate of alumina, united with water or hydrated, in the condition of a fine plastic clay which, when white and pure, is known as KAOLIN and is used in the manufacture of porcelain. Feldspathic rocks which contain no iron compounds thus weather to whitish crusts, and even apparently sound crystals ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... the finest Burgundian Romanesque. The Norman genius was, I think, really for Gothic, and not for what we in England call "Norman" because it happened to come to us through Normandy. Without going to Rouen it is enough to look at many a church here. The Normans had a peculiar plastic power over stone which Gothic alone could give free scope to. Stone became so malleable in their hands that they seem as if working in wood. Probably it really was the case that their familiarity with wood-carving influenced ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... is thy influence, which thou exercisest, in thy apparently limited sphere, over the human race. Thy tender hand moulds the plastic mind of childhood; thy gentle rebuke checks the wayward impulses of impetuous youth; thy loving sympathy and voice counsel, cheer, and stimulate manhood; and to thee age and infirmity look up with confidence and delight, assured that thy unwearied care will not be wanting to smooth their ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... this little world there was no life except for the handful of hardy Martian and Terran prospectors who searched for minerals. Later on, a few rude mining communities sprang up under plastic airdromes, but never came to much. Argon City ...
— B-12's Moon Glow • Charles A. Stearns
... bias is to cut across the texture, or incline to one side; in figurative use always with an unfavorable import. Mold is a stronger work than bend; we may bend by a superior force that which still resists the constraint; as, a bent bow; we mold something plastic entirely to ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... similitude of "dreams," he indulged in conceptions, hypotheses, and metaphysical imaginations which were voluntarily rash and infinitely seductive. As always happens, he possessed the style of his mind, supple, sinuous, undulating, astonishingly plastic, insatiable, and charming, evoking the comment, "That is admirably done and it is impossible to know with ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... necessary aversion of a perfectly pure and holy love from that which does not correspond to itself. So, though sometimes the two may be set against each other, yet at bottom, and in reality, they are one, and the 'anger' is but a mode in which the 'favour' manifests itself. God's love is plastic, and if thrown back upon itself, grieved and wounded and rejected, becomes the 'anger' which ignorant men sometimes seem to think it contradicts. There is no more antagonism between these two ideas when they are applied to God than when they are applied to you parents in your relations ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... world, but this should surpass them all. It should contain specimens of what every country could produce in raw materials, in machinery and mechanical inventions, in manufactures, and in the applied and plastic arts. It should not be merely useful and ornamental; it should teach a high moral lesson. It should be an international monument to those supreme blessings of civilisation—peace, progress, and prosperity. For some time past the Prince ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... and close above him the roof was blazing, but he held another flour-bag in his hands, and his comrades, who had reasonably steady nerves, were almost appalled when he poised himself to throw it. There was only a thin strip of cotton fabric between the flying sparks and the plastic yellow rolls of powder. Still, the bag was thrown, and Saunders set off with it, while Weston stood gasping a moment and ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... medium height, fairly stout, and with a good-natured look. His head (very similar to those found in many Italian paintings of the sixteenth century), without being beautiful in the plastic sense of the word, gave an impression of great strength of character, power and intelligence. Short hair stood up straight on the high, well-developed forehead. A straight nose stopped short, as if cut off suddenly above the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... must be spoken of now. The third lies in the fact that the English language was still plastic. It had not fallen into such hard forms that its words were narrow or restricted. The truth is that from the point of view of pure literature the Bible is better in English than it is in Greek or Hebrew. That is, the English of the King James ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... result is, I think, tolerably clear. From biological truths it is to be inferred that the eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan race forming the population, will produce a finer type of man than has hitherto existed; and a type of man more plastic, more adaptable, more capable of undergoing the modifications needful for complete social life. I think that whatever difficulties they may have to surmount, and whatever tribulations they may have to pass through, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... will not call the labours of the biographer final. So great a character will challenge reconstruction. In the coming time some sympathetic spirit, with the requisite strength, knowledge, and solvent power, will, I doubt not, render these materials plastic, give them more perfect organic form, and send through them, with less of interruption, the currents of Faraday's life. 'He was too good a man,' writes his present biographer, 'for me to estimate rightly, and too great a philosopher for me to understand ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... venison that formed their breakfast. Over the vast forest a brilliant sun was rising and here the leaves and grass were not burned much by summer heat. It looked fresh and green, and the wind sang pleasantly through its cool shadows. It appealed to Robert. With his plastic nature he was all for the town when he was in town, and now in the forest he was all for ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and play for ever round her knees. And has not the elect soul a father, too, whom it knows not? Hector, he who is without—unconfined, unconditioned by Nature, yet its husband?—the all-pervading, plastic Soul, informing, organising, whom men call Zeus the lawgiver, Aether the fire, Osiris the lifegiver; whom here the poet has set forth as the defender of the mystic city, the defender of harmony, and order, and beauty throughout the ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... Zwinglius never uttered the word Consubstantiation they would have gained multitudes to the cause they both loved so dearly. Many other questions, which unfortunately occupied so much public attention, caused minute divisions among those who should have stood firm and united in that plastic period of the great movement. But it is to the numerous confessions of faith that we must attribute most of these controversies. Perhaps the grave character of the master-points at issue with Romanism demanded these closely-succeeding ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... temperament which does not mount from the senses to the heart. Accustomed to regard the human form from a certain point, they find in beauty, which would appear to us simply animal, principles of plastic emotion which at times suffice for their amorous requirements. They are only more deeply touched by it, when to that rather coarse intoxication is joined, in the woman who inspires them, the refined graces of mind, the delicacy of elegance and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... everything they are supposed to be, why did I not do this often when I had the chance? I stay till my oxygen is nearly gone, then come out and sadly press the button that collapses the boat into a thirty-pound package of plastic hoops and oxygen cans. I sling it on my back and head for the chalet B and I hired among the ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... when you come to think of it, it is absurd to expect a child to talk sensibly and rationally on the mental diet of 'moo-moos' and 'choo-choos' served out to them. Our Professor of Metaphysics and Ideology in our Child Study Course says that nothing is so receptive and plastic as the Mind of a Little Child, and that it is perfectly appalling how we fill it with trivial absurdities that haven't even the virtue of being accurate. So that's why we're trying to be so careful with Baby. You didn't mind my speaking, I know, ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... the defects of his predecessors, succeeded, by virtue of his "plastic energy and power of harmonious modulation" in recreating the measure. He found it "monotonous, monosyllabic, and divided into five feet of tolerably regular alternate short and long [i. e., unstressed and stressed]. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... guessed that in Roger Mildred might discover more docility and plastic readiness than she desired. Only old Mr. Atwood and Jotham seemed incorrigible material; but she did not despair even of them, and resolved to set about reclaiming this ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... the black box on the desk top and released the lid. Like a jack-in-the-box, two small white plastic spheres popped out and began chasing each other about in the air six inches above the box. Presently a third sphere rose up from the box and joined ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, soap, cigarettes, flour), agricultural products processing; oil refining, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... from Phoenicia, ultimately from Babylonia; they appear only in the great public cult, probably did not enter into the religious life of the people at large, and there is no evidence that they ever received divine worship.[2012] The Hebrews had no plastic art of their own, seem to have had small disposition in their earlier history to make images, and later such forms were excluded by the antagonism of the prophets to foreign cults and by refined ideas of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... in arm, pronounced the name of the great enchantress, and hummed one of her triumphant airs. The features expressed health, humour, power, every fine animal faculty. Genius was on the forehead and the plastic mouth; the forehead being well projected, fair, and very shapely, showing clear balance, as well as capacity to grasp flame, and fling it. The line reaching to a dimple from the upper lip was saved from scornfulness ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... upon the aesthetic poverty of the New England Puritans; that their rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic literature of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; that they had little poetry or music and no architecture and plastic art. But we must never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of human passion in its intensest ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... pictured raiment! As I say, it is a very gracious, tender type. She has her brother with her, who is a beautiful, fair-haired, gray-eyed young Englishman. He is purely objective; and he, too, is very plastic. ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... behaviour in special accommodation to special circumstances is of survival value; it depends upon acquired characters; it is correlated with increase in size and complexity of the cerebrum; under natural selection therefore the larger and more complex cerebrum as the organ of plastic behaviour has been the outcome of natural selection. We have thus the biological foundations for a further development ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... and that this should commence from the earliest period, before the features, form, and organization had received the first approaches of enduring outline, since then all would be in a malleable or plastic state, ready to take any impressions caused by accident or design, whether tending to good or evil, to beauty ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... incidentally to our sense of the beautiful, and requiring always nice literary skill in its management. It should be borne in mind always that literary description must not usurp the office of representations of the material in the plastic arts. It should not be employed as an end in itself, but only ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... individuality, and consequently denoting the free volition of individuals. Here, then, is the union of the moral with the subjective will, or the kingdom of beautiful freedom, for the idea is united with a plastic form. It is not yet regarded abstractly, but intimately bound up with the real, as in a beautiful work of art; the sensible bears the stamp and expression of the spiritual. The kingdom is consequently true harmony; it is a world of the most charming but perishable, or quickly passing, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... sand could bear such traces, and tell such tales, who shall say that the plastic aether was destitute of the story of the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... to acknowledge that the logical faculty has infinitely more to do with poetry than the young and the inexperienced, whether writer or critic, ever dreams of. Indeed, as the materials upon which that faculty is exorcised in poetry are so subtle, so plastic, so complex, the application of it requires an adroitness which can proceed from nothing but practice, a discernment which emotion is so far from bestowing that at first it is ever in the way of it. Here I must stop: only let me advert ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the conjunction of two antagonistic substances. Gunpowder for instance is germane to a thunderbolt. As to calling forth a creation, and a sudden one, all creation demands time, and time neither recedes nor advances at the word of command. So, in the world without us, plastic nature obeys laws the order and exercise of which cannot be interfered with by the hand of man. But after fulfilling, as it were, the function of Matter, it would be unreasonable not to recognize within us the existence of ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... even so hinted as to arouse curiosity. Foul speech I never heard from them nor a trace of profanity. What I did hear was a liberal education in the humanities—as time passes I rate more and more highly the sense of values it fixed in a plastic mind. I think it must have been because our Mammys saw all things from the elemental angle, they were critics so ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... speech to be different, survivals perhaps of a time when their words and superstitions were the ways of a ruder England. The lanes and the gateways in the fields, as they say, are 'slubby' enough in November, and those who try to go through get 'slubbed' up to their knees. This expresses a soft, plastic, and adhesive condition of the mud which comes on after it has been 'raining hop-poles' for a week. The labourer has little else to do but to chop up disused hop-poles into long fagots with a hand-bill—in ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the rolls, after being softened by annealing, is folded on itself on a glass rod into a roll or cornet. It should be so plastic that it will retain the shape thus given it and not spring open on removing the pressure of the fingers. About 50 c.c. of the first parting acid are placed in a 6-ounce conical flask and heated to boiling; the flask is then withdrawn, and tilted a little to ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... (Conf. Acosta, lib. 6, cap. 19; lib. 7, cap. 2. - Ondegardo, Rel. Prim., Ms.) The story of the deluge is told by different writers with many variations, in some of which it is not difficult to detect the plastic ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... the German is the most easily denationalized. Unwittingly the soul of Christophe had already begun to assimilate from Latin art a clarity, a sobriety, an understanding of the emotions, and even, up to a point, a plastic beauty, which otherwise it never would have had. His David was the proof ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... occurring in our domestic productions, and, in a lesser degree, in those under Nature, be borne in mind, as well as the strength of the hereditary tendency. Under domestication, it may be truly said that the whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... very much in earnest about doing her duty, not because it was her duty, but as a means toward an end, Psyche fell to work with a will, hoping to serve both masters at once. So she might have done, perhaps, if flesh and blood had been as plastic as clay, but the live models were so exacting in their demands upon her time and strength, that the poor statues went to the wall. Sculpture and sewing, calls and crayons, Ruskin and receipt-books, didn't work well together, and poor Psyche found duties and desires desperately ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... "in these lines Virgil, or rather the poet of the Alexandrine age who was his model, has anticipated Laplace's great hypothesis and Charles Lyell's theories. He shows cosmic matter, that negative something from which everything must come, condensing to make worlds, the plastic rind of the globe consolidating; then the formation of islands and continents; then the rains ceasing and first appearance of the sun, heretofore veiled by opaque clouds; then vegetable life manifesting itself before animal, because the latter cannot maintain itself and endure save ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... at a glance perceives the inmost. Hence she becomes, as it were, the soul of his thought; she is the will and he the intellectual principle; she is governed and guided by him, while he in all things is modified by her will, and scarce recognises his own crude thought in her plastic feminine representation of it; hence he thinks oftentimes that he acts from her wisdom, forgetting that she has no ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... first Romantic and the other Classic. Yet these appellations are only uncertain rubrics, and have led hitherto to the most discouraging, wearisome entanglements, which become worse since we give to antique poetry the designation of "Plastic," instead of "Classic." From this arose much misunderstanding; for, justly, all poets should work their material plastically, be it Christian or heathen; they should set it forth in clear outlines; in short, plastic form should be the main desideratum ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... where others have passed is immutable, but freedom of action or individual desire dies with the malleable, plastic ends of the foraging columns. Again and again came to mind the comparison of the entire colony or army with a single organism; and now the home, the nesting swarm, the focus of central control, seemed like the body of this strange ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... beauty flows ever towards him who is initiated. If now a true genius slumbers in the young aspirant, no doubt his modesty will at first receive a shock; but soon the consciousness of real talent will embolden him for the trial. If nature has endowed him with gifts for plastic art, he will study the structure of man with the scalpel of the anatomist; he will descend into the lowest depths to be true in representing surfaces, and he will question the whole race in order to be just to the individual. If he is born to be a poet, he examines humanity ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... is a plastic human creature, and is thoroughly domesticated and thoroughly anglicized. The same cannot be said of the Indian, for instance, between whom and us there can never exist any fellowship, any community of feeling or interest; or is there any doubt but the Chinaman will always remain to us the same ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... restricted and painful. There is swelling corresponding to the distended capsule of the joint, and on palpation the bodies moving under the fingers yield a sensation as of grains of rice shifting in a bag. If the bodies are so numerous as to be tightly packed together, the impression is that of a plastic mass having the shape of the synovial sac. The stiffness and the cracking on movement may suggest arthritis deformans, but the X-ray appearances make the diagnosis an easy one. We have observed two cases ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... invisible spurs at their heels, or, as is not infrequently the case, are standing or hung on nothing, as though they were graven of some bewitched magnetic stone. Here for the first time is seen, in the sculptured figures of the three great portals, the plastic forms which were to add so greatly to the Gothic architecture: male and female saints, Evangelists, and Apostles in great array, all somewhat more than life-size. Only one adverse impression is cast: that of petrifaction. The figures, almost without exception, appear ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... growing late, the long, hot day declining. There had been nine hours of fighting. "Nine hours—ninety hours—ninety minutes?" thought Edward. "Time's plastic like everything else. Double it, fold it back on itself, stretch it out, do anything with it—" He took the cartridges from a trunk of a man, crept on to a soldier shot through the hip. The latter clutched him with ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Now begins a new life as well for yourselves as for all of us. May this voice penetrate to you through all the surroundings which normally make you inaccessible! With proud self-reliance it dares to say to you: You rule nations, faithful, plastic, and worthy of good fortune, such as princes of no time and of no nation have ruled. They have a feeling for freedom and are capable of it; but, because you so willed, they have followed you into sanguinary war against that which to them seemed freedom. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... of some Passaic joy-riders, and my friend discussed with enthusiasm the probable outcome of the expedition, I realized that, after all, I could not expect him to share my burden. For good or ill the writer must carry with him for ever the problem of the human soul. The plastic artist has his own problems of light, and mass, and the like. And from this I came back circuitously to Mr. Carville. I was puzzled to find a name for the deliberate rejection of his responsibilities as an artist. One could not call him a renegade or a ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... vegetable and animal kingdoms. Nor is this theory essentially confined to organic matter. A scientific coArdination of its several known parts, or alleged functions, extends the operations of this infinitessimal whirligig to the plastic or uniformly diffused state of all matter, from which has been evolved, in an infinite duration of past time, not only life in its highest manifestations, but a universe so stupendously grand that no amount ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... dove, that he may flee away and be at rest,' with much more in the same fanciful vein. We now know that there can be no cavities more than a few miles below the crust of a planet, simply because, under the enormous pressures which would exist, the most solid matter would be perfectly plastic. But while Whewell's general objection to the theory that Jupiter or Saturn is in the same condition as our earth thus acquires new force, the particular explanation which he gave of the planet's small density is open to precisely the same ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... jealousies, their crude and misguided instincts, their irrational traditions, no Socialist State can exist, no better State can exist, than the one we have now with all its squalor and cruelty. Every change in human institutions must happen concurrently with a change of ideas. Upon this plastic, uncertain, teachable thing Human Nature, within us and without, we have, if we really contemplate Socialism as our achievement, to impose guiding ideas and guiding habits, we have to co-ordinate all the Good Will that is active or latent in our world in one constructive ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... on toward Mars in their tiny plastic-bubble spacecraft. They were on the alert—it didn't pay to take anything for granted in ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... apprehended Christ as the revealer and bringer of the great mercy of God, and have so been led in some measure to put your confidence in Him for your salvation and deliverance. But have you apprehended Him as the mould into which your life is to be poured, that life having been made fluent and plastic by the warmth of His love? You have apprehended Him as your refuge; have you apprehended Him as your inward sanctity? You have gone to Him as the source of salvation from the guilt and penalties of sin; have you gone to Him, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... a very important part. A child born with a tendency to some vice or intellectual trait, may have this tendency entirely overcome, or at least modified, by training. So, also, virtues implanted by nature may be lost during the plastic days of youth, in consequence of bad associations ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... and various plastic cement materials are used for modeling mouths, of which papier mache is probably the best; plaster paris is often used in an emergency but is brittle and heavy. For modeling use finely ground paper pulp mixed with glue and plaster or whiting. Only practice and experiment will ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... bitterness in it.... When I was young, my imagination was always in the advance, picturing out the future, and building castles in the air; now memory comes in the place of imagination, and I look back over the region I have traveled. Thank God, the same plastic feeling, which used to deck all the future with the hues of fairyland, throws a soft coloring over the past, until the very roughest places, through which I struggled with many a heartache, lose all their asperity in ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... however, that the field of English slang verse and canting song, though not altogether barren, has yet small claim to the idiomatic and plastic treatment that obtains in many an Argot- song and Germania-romance; in truth, with a few notable exceptions, there is little in the present collection ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... years of the plastic age, my ancestor was observed to betray strong feelings of compassion at the sight of charity-children, nor was he ever known to pass a child, especially a boy that was still in petticoats, who was crying with hunger in the streets, without sharing his own crust with him. ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... perhaps as a thin layer of the planet's original surface; so that when in due course the whole of the meteor-swarm had been captured, Mars had acquired its present mass, but would consist of an intensely heated, and either liquid or plastic thin outer shell resting upon a cold ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of sculpture in clay may be summed up under the word "Plastic," and all of those in stone, under the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... religion were little felt by either of the two generous-minded and ardent young men who were pacing the deck of the Montauk. The gentle and the plastic admit the most readily of the divine influence; and of all on board the devoted vessel at that moment, they who were the most resigned to their fate were those who by their physical force were the least ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... a vehicle rolls over a road surface, both the wheel and the surface are distorted. If the wheel has steel tires and the road surface is plastic, there will be considerable distortion of the road surface and very little of the wheel. A soft rubber tire will be distorted considerably by a brick road surface. Between these extremes there are innumerable combinations of tire and road surface encountered, ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... faith and sorrow that makes Christ the very life-blood of our being and doing? And has not James Marvyn also his lesson to be taught? We foresee him drawn gradually back by Mary from his recoil against Puritan formalism to a perception of how every creed is pliant and plastic to a beautiful nature, of how much charm there may be in an hereditary faith, even if it have ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... nature's plastic pains Would seem to've fashioned for those Eastern reigns When eunuchs flourisht, and such nerveless things As men rejected were the chosen of kings;—[12] Even he, forsooth, (oh fraud, of all the worst!) Dared to assume the patriot's ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... head. And, after all, it was not quite her fault. Life, for her, had been so hard and so busy that he ought not to grudge her the consolation she had been able to dig up out of the accumulated debris of the ancestral trick of sermonizing. In a more gracious, plastic existence, she would have taken it out in Browning and the Russians; yet she was not necessarily more narrow because her literary artists were pre-Messianic. Neither was it the fault of those same artists that they were quoted in and out of season, and always for the purpose ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Ganganelli called the "beautiful" Braschi, well deserved that epithet. No nobler or more plastic beauty was to be seen; no face that more reminded one of the divine beauty of ancient sculpture, no form that could be called a better counterfeit of the Belvedere Apollo. And it was this beauty which liberal Nature ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... the late plastic mass of living form that had flowed into shape at the will and law of the music. Broken into individuals, the common transfusing spirit withdrawn, they stood drenched, cold, and benumbed, with clinging garments; light, order, harmony, purpose departed, and chaos restored; the issuings ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... panes are not made of a brittle substance like glass, but resemble mica, except that they are more tough and durable. These Moonites are wiser than we in roofing their houses. They have discovered a mineral composition which in its plastic state is daubed over the roof. This, upon hardening, is proof against all conditions of weather and never ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... comic writer, as the example of Moliere proves, need not be a poet. But the mere overflow of careless poetic power which is manifested by Aristophanes would have sufficed to set up any ordinary tragedian or lyrist. In plastic mastery of language only two Greek writers can vie with him, Plato and Homer. In the easy grace and native harmony of his verse he outsings all the tragedians, even that Aeschylus whom he praised as the man who had written the most exquisite songs of any poet of the time. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... compare it with the locomotive-engine. As the iron horse performs its work, it gradually wears out its pistons, its rods, its wheels, its boiler-tubes, all of which have to be made good from time to time. The founder and the smith repair it, supply it, so to speak, with 'plastic food,' the food that becomes embodied with the whole and forms part of it. But, though it have just come from the engine-shop, it is still inert. To acquire the power of movement it must receive from the stoker ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... possibility of being molded into form. By the musical builders of the past they have been carefully considered, mathematically calculated, and have finally resolved themselves into a recognized scale, composed of tones and half tones. These are the composer's plastic resources. He shapes them precisely as the sculptor fashions the pliable clay with which he strives to bring his ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... Christ. "But God be thanked, that ye have obeyed from the heart that pattern of doctrine to which ye were delivered," writes the apostle (Rom. 6: 17). The pattern, as the context shows, is Christ dead and risen. If the church truly lives in the Spirit, he will keep her so plastic that she will obey this divine mold as the metal conforms to the die in which it is struck. If she yields to the sway of "the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience," she will be stereotyped according to the fashion of the world, and they ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... or novels, ever seemed to affect Caroline; and to the romantic descriptions of love she was so indifferent that it might have appeared to a common observer as if she was, and ever would be, a stranger to the passion. By the help of the active and plastic powers of the imagination, any and every hero of a novel could be made, at pleasure, to appear the exact resemblance of each lady's different lover. Some, indeed, professed a peculiar and absolute exclusive attachment, founded on unintelligible ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... the several oil horizons. Large blocks of coal, representing the different veins of Kentucky, several full lines of broken coals, and a very complete display of coke were also displayed. A very elaborate display of kaolin—plastic, vitrifying, and ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... includes travelling for six years in foreign countries under private tutors, studying human history, ethnic, social, political, industrial, aesthetic, religious; gems of poetry; the elements of geometry; mechanics; art, plastic, and graphic; reading Confucius, Sakya-muni, Themistocles, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Paul, Mahommed, Charlemagne, Alfred, Gregory VII., St. Bernard, St. Francis, Savonarola, Luther, Queen Elizabeth, Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Homer, Virgil, ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... of the period of alteration of elasticity, a third state, geometrically defined and describable as a period of fluidity, corresponding to the possibility of a continuous deformation under the constant action of the same strain. This particular condition is only realized with very malleable or plastic bodies; and it may even be regarded as characteristic of such bodies, since its absence is noticeable in all non-malleable or fragile bodies, which break without being deformed. It is already known that the period of altered elasticity for hard or tempered steel is much less than ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... he said jerkily, "had electronic base-measuring instruments. Some of their elements had to be buried in plastic because otherwise they ionized the air and leaked current like a short. If I had that instrument now—No. I'd have to take the plastic away and it couldn't be ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... motives and morals and passions and ambitions and to make a picture of them with your own body—your face and hands and voice—compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush to do it, or ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... roots of things, in the very making of the universe. Art arises, he tells us, from the conflict of the two creative spirits, symbolised by the Greeks in the two gods, Apollo and Dionysus; and he names the one the Apollonian spirit, which we see in plastic art, and the other the Dionysiac spirit, which we see in music. Apollo is the god of dreams, Dionysus the god of intoxication; the one represents for us the world of appearances, the other is, as it were, the voice of things in themselves. The chorus, then, which arose out of the hymns to Dionysus, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... haven't answered, have I? No, Mr. Booth, I've never posed for a portrait. It is a new experience for me. You will have to contend with a great deal of stupidity on my part. But I shall try to be plastic." ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... their Creator and Fashioner? Is the expectation of the Jews for their Messiah or of the Portugueze for St. Sebastian more extravagant? But Lord G. ought to know that such a military POWER does already exist upon the Peninsula, formless indeed compared with what under our plastic hands it may become, yet which has proved itself capable of its giving employment during the course of three years to at least five hundred thousand of the enemy's best troops. An important fact has been proved, that the enemy cannot drive ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Building was a soaring, chastely white structure of silicoid plastic, dazzling in the hot morning sun. It crossed Allen's mind fleetingly that everything built nowadays would long outlast the builders. That seemed right, but he didn't ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage
... that a third person had been in the house last night; but if so, one of the two men had lied. The bit of candle found by me on the rear stairs had adhered to somebody's shoe while still plastic; if either Burke or Maillot had used these stairs at or about the time of the murder, then both had studiously kept the fact from me. It was possible that one of the two could have made fast the front door behind ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... the child an orderly sequence of development of mental traits. While these powers are in their earlier, so to speak embryonic, stages of development, they can be fostered and increased or retarded. They are still plastic. Very early in a child's life acquisitiveness shows itself; he begins to say "I," and "mine," and desires things to be his "very own." And this can be fostered so that the child will grow up a "covetous machine." Or he may be ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... out in his accustomed frank fashion: "He sits too high." It was true. Dohnanyi's touch is as hard as steel. He sat over the keyboard and played down on the keys, thus striking them heavily, instead of pressing and moulding the tone. Pachmann's playing is a notable example of plastic beauty. He seems to dip his hands into musical liquid instead of touching inanimate ivory, and bone, wood, and wire. Remember this when you begin your day's work: Sit so that your hand is on a level with, never below, the keyboard; and don't waste your morning freshness on dull finger gymnastics! ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... have been a miracle indeed if these primitive conceptions, wrought out with so much poetic vigour in that earlier civilization on the Tigris and Euphrates, had failed to influence the Hebrews, who during the most plastic periods of their development were under the tutelage of their Chaldean neighbours. Since the researches of Layard, George Smith, Oppert, Schrader, Jensen, Sayce, and their compeers, there is no longer a reasonable doubt that this ancient ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... bivouacked regularly before the theatre, to obtain a ticket. Jenny Lind appeared still greater than ever in her art, because they had an opportunity of seeing her in many and such extremely different parts. Her Norma is plastic; every attitude might serve as the most beautiful model to a sculptor, and yet people felt that these were the inspiration of the moment, and had not been studied before the glass; Norma is no raving Italian; she is the suffering, sorrowing woman—the ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... and nature, and delighted in their portrayal by voice or pen. Strange to relate, however, his first thought of adopting the histrionic profession contemplated tragedy as his forte. He had inherited a wondrous voice, deep, sweet, and resonant, from his father, and had a face so plastic that it could be moulded at will to all the expressions of terror, malignity, and devotion, or anon into the most grotesque and mirth-provoking lines of comedy. His early love for reciting passages from "Spartacus," referred to by the Rev. Mr. ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... microprocessors, food processing, medical equipment, textiles and clothing, construction materials, fertilizer, plastic products ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of mysteries. The occurrence of an event out of the line of common causation, the advent of a person not plastic to the common moulds of society, causes a great commotion in this little ant-hill of ours. There is perplexity, bewilderment, a running hither and thither, until the foreign substance is assigned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... isolated, but joined to his fellows by links stronger than iron, by bands no steel can sever. The nation stands waiting for him. In some shape, with some development of national life, but always essentially the same, the nation takes him, plastic at his birth, into its great hands, and moulds and fashions him, by felt and unfelt influences, whether he will or no, into ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to a type which Nietzsche did not altogether dislike, but which he would fain have rendered more subtle and plastic. It is the type that takes life and itself too seriously, that never surmounts the camel-stage mentioned in the first discourse, and that is obdurately sublime and earnest. To be able to smile while speaking of lofty things and NOT TO BE OPPRESSED by them, is the secret of real ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... one person should have found it out long ago, and there should then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure or ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... become too obtrusive I can keep them at a distance by vigorous words of authority and also by a lash of the whip. This perhaps sounds strange to you, dear reader, but you must in truth understand that even in the senseless sphere, thought alone is not efficacious without a certain plastic expression in shape of a visible, audible or palpable form. If this spectral company becomes too much for me I must loudly command them, even shout at them, "begone," and if that does no good I must wish for a whip - which forthwith appears - and give them a sound thrashing. And I assure ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... peculiar doctrines constitute the center to which he gravitates! the very sun of his system! the soul of the world! the origin of all that is excellent and lovely! the source of light, and life, and motion, and genial warmth, and plastic energy! Dim is the light of reason, and cold and comfortless our state, while left to her unassisted guidance. Even the Old Testament itself, though a revelation from Heaven, shines but with feeble and scanty rays. But the blessed ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... the diary of the same sublimated old gossip, Goncourt, Zola speaks: "After the rarefied analysis of a certain kind of sentiment, such as the work done by Flaubert in Madame Bovary; after the analysis of things, plastic and artistic, such as you have given us in your dainty, gemlike writing, there is no longer any room for the younger generation of writers; there is nothing left for them to do, ... there no longer remains a single type to portray. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... thought transforms itself into the shape, colour, and other characteristics of the thing which has been made its object. Thought could not have copied the matter, if the matter did not possess some of the essential substances of which the copy was made up. But this plastic entity (sattva) which is so predominant in thought is at its lowest limit of subordination in matter. Similarly mass is not noticed in thought, but some such notions as are associated with mass may ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... cooling earth, for these three wonderful elements have a unique ensemble of properties—ready to enter into reactions and relations, making great diversity and complexity possible, favouring the formation of the plastic and permeable materials that build up living creatures. We must not pursue the idea, but it is clear that the stones and mortar of the inanimate world are such that they built a friendly ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... i.e. ending in stone), statues of a transition period in the history of plastic art, in which the trunk of the figure was of wood, and the head, hands and feet of marble. The wood was concealed either by gilding or, more commonly, by drapery, and the marble parts alone were exposed. Acroliths are frequently mentioned by ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... has only an incomplete control, and which, therefore, so far from having been called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently of Him. Had He really created the raw material from which He was to frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still to answer the question, What is that real First Cause, the Urgott who created ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... untrammeled by any sense of the limitations of material, his quick imagination peoples his world with creatures of his fancy, which to him are more real than the things he is able actually to see and touch. For him the external world is fluid and plastic, to be moulded into forms at will in obedience to his creative desire. In the tiny bundle of rags which mother-love clasps tight to her heart, a little girl sees only the loveliest of babies; and a small ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... it. Nothing now can prevent Congress, should it choose to do so, from issuing paper money of any description whatever, even if of absolutely no value. The disaster that might be brought upon the country by a rising tide of repudiation among debtors, taking its effect through a facile and plastic Congress (as in the case of the silver coinage in 1878), is appalling to ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... and Clays. Middle Eocene of England. Shells, Nummulites, Fish and Reptiles of the Bracklesham Beds and Bagshot Sands. Plants of Alum Bay and Bournemouth. Lower Eocene of England. London Clay Fossils. Woolwich and Reading Beds formerly called "Plastic Clay." Fluviatile Beds underlying Deep-sea Strata. Thanet Sands. Upper Eocene Strata of France. Gypseous Series of Montmartre and Extinct Quadrupeds. Fossil Footprints in Paris Gypsum. Imperfection of the Record. Calcaire Silicieux. Gres de Beauchamp. Calcaire ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... his mellow bass. "How are you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia's approach, where woman, das ewig Weibliche, enters into conflict with ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... himself been a distinguished singer, and his finishing lessons placed Angelica in a position to rank with the most brilliant vocalists of the age. It was somewhat unfortunate that she did not learn under Marchesi, who taught her when her voice was in the most plastic condition, to control that profuse luxuriance of vocalization which was alike the greatest glory and greatest defect in ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... British patent-office publications from the British imperial authorities; the Rau models of plows from Hohenheim; the Brendel plant models from Breslau; the models of machine movements from London, Darmstadt, and Berlin; the plastic models of Auzoux from Paris; and other apparatus and instruments from all parts of Europe, with diagrams and drawings from every institution where I could find them. During three months, from funds furnished ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... value of explanations and schemas of this sort. Chemists have pointed out that even in the organic—not to go so far as the organized—science has reconstructed hitherto nothing but waste products of vital activity; the peculiarly active plastic substances obstinately defy synthesis. One of the most notable naturalists of our time has insisted on the opposition of two orders of phenomena observed in living tissues, anagenesis and katagenesis. The role of the anagenetic energies is to raise the inferior energies ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Massachusetts colonists found the Pequot Indians surly, revengeful and in the words of Cotton Mather unable to "endure the Yoke."[137] The Negro, on the contrary, proved himself much more tractable and therefore more profitable as a slave. These plastic race traits, in fact, have enabled the Negro to survive while the less adaptive Indian has disappeared. Thus the bonds of a servile status hardened from decade to decade about the Negro, being determined partly by economic needs, partly by religious ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... seasons that followed Marcia's stroke of independence (for which he was not without a secret admiration at times), Jocelyn threw into plastic creations that ever-bubbling spring of emotion which, without some conduit into space, will surge upwards and ruin all but the greatest men. It was probably owing to this, certainly not on account of any care or anxiety for ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... limbs; whilst the heavy and gross resist her by their weight. So women that take physic during their pregnancy, have slighter children indeed, but of a finer and more delicate turn, because the suppleness of the matter more readily obeys the plastic power. However, these are speculations which we ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... had drunk had rendered him more plastic still to jealousy. The day was not so long past when Purdee's oath would have been esteemed a poor dependence against the word of so zealous a brother as he—a pillar in the church, a shining light of the congregation. He noted the significant ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... willingly have pursued the argument in relation to all the subtler results of civilization. As before we showed that the law of progress to which the organic and inorganic worlds conform, is also conformed to by Language, the plastic arts, Music, &c.; so might we here show that the cause which we have hitherto found to determine progress holds in these cases also. Instances might be given proving how, in Science, an advance of one division presently ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... could since the day they'd set foot on Hirlaj. Manning was hard and ambitious—a leader of men, Rynason thought sardonically as he surveyed the tables in the dim interior. The floor of the bar was a dirty plastic-metal alloy, already scuffed and in places bloodstained. The tables were of the cheap, light metals so common on the spacer-supplied worlds of the Edge, and ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... was the exact opposite of Zhukovsky, being the first to grasp the real significance of the mood of the ancient classical poets, and to appropriate not only their views on life and enjoyment, but even their plastic and thoroughly artistic mode of expression. While Zhukovsky removed poetry from earth and rendered it ethereal, Batiushkoff fixed it to earth and gave it a body, demonstrating all the entrancing charm of tangible reality. Yet, in language, point of view, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... skies! Thus 'tis with life—it is not dubious hope In early youth—'tis joy—joy unalloy'd; Joy blooms within, all objects take the tint, And glowing colors paint the vista's length. Not long, life dances on the plastic scene, Care's haggard form invades each flow'ry path; Disease, with pallid hue, leads on her train, And Sorrow sheds her tears in wasting showers! But Pain and Grief pass on, and harrowing Care Awhile put on some pleasing, treacherous shape; ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... to tea." For, to speak in better words than my own, "It is the books we read before middle life that do most to mould our characters and influence our lives; and this not only because our natures are then plastic and our opinions flexible, but also because, to produce lasting impression, it is necessary to give a great author time and meditation. The books that are with us in the leisure of youth, that we love for a time ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... not have been possible for the living stream of energy which is utilized by mind-stuff cannot be confined if it would advance to more complex integrations. Hence the products of mind in evolution are more plastic—more subtle and more changing. They are to be found in the myths and the folk-lore of ancient peoples, the poetry, dramatic art, and the language of later races. From age to age however the strivings continue ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... physiologically. The rest assume his classification without reserve, and work from the axiom that heat-making, carbonaceous and non-nitrogenous foods (e.g. fat and sugars), necessary to support life in the arctic and polar regions, must be exchanged for the tissue-making, plastic or nitrogenous (vegetables), as we approach the equator. They are right as far as the southern temperates, their sole field of observation; they greatly err in all except the hot, dry parts of the tropics. Why, a Hindoo will drink at a sitting a tumbler ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... human laws he knew to be often only blinds for the concealment of plastic iniquity, and were secretly purchased by the few who ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... broken a surgeon is needed to set it, that is, to bring the broken parts into their natural position, and retain them by proper appliances. Nature throws out between and around the broken ends of bones a supply of repair material known as plastic lymph, which is changed to fibrous tissue, then to cartilage, and finally to bone. This material serves as a sort of cement to hold the fractured parts together. The excess of this at the point of union can be felt under the skin for some time ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... to be always with her: he would be her "comic." It was a new system which had come into fashion: the most plastic performances spoiled by the juxtaposition of their caricatures; acrobats, Olympian gods, parodied by a merry-andrew in a ridiculous coat: just as though Nunkie Fuchs, for instance, had taken it into his head to appear with his Three ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... The plastic on the outside of the building was delivered by the sculptor Othmar Schimkowitz. The figurate frieze in the library was the work of the painter Josef Engerhart. The painter Ferdinand Andri executed the frescoes on the facade and Meinrich Tomec ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... order to remodel them, you would see at once that an old Greek had no more exclusive right to them than a modern Yankee has. They are the common property of the world, and of all time. The ancient poets remodelled them at pleasure, and held them plastic in their hands; and why should they not be plastic ...
— The Three Golden Apples - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... process by which systems of means are formed, organised, and established for the attainment of various ends of felt value. The establishment of these systems of means is only possible because in the human infant the nervous system is relatively unformed at birth, is relatively plastic, and so is capable of being organised in such and such a definite manner. On the other hand, in many animals the nervous system of each is definitely formed at birth; it is so organised that experience does ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... of the debates and lectures that sapped his vitality. What really got right in amongst him was the torture of seeing Adeline's adoration of Raymond Parsloe Devine. The man seemed to have made the deepest possible impression upon her plastic emotions. When he spoke, she leaned forward with parted lips and looked at him. When he was not speaking—which was seldom—she leaned back and looked at him. And when he happened to take the next seat to her, she leaned sideways and looked at him. One glance at Mr. ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... work which, for originality, delicacy, and the most extraordinary elaboration of design, is a perfect marvel of stone-carving. The foliations are so flowing and delicate, that it has given rise to a popular tradition that Krafft was possessed of some secret for making stone plastic. We have nothing so delicate in this country, unless it be some of the leaflets on the Percy shrine, and screen of Beverley Minster. Krafft's leaves are as thin and delicate, as crisp and free, as if moulded from nature in plaster of Paris, while the grand curves of his ornamental adjuncts ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... this point is only important within certain limits and that the real basis on which to judge material of this description is, from the boiler man's standpoint, the quality of plasticity under a given load. This tendency of a brick to become plastic occurs at a temperature much below the melting point and to a degree that may cause the brick to become deformed under the stress to which it is subjected. The allowable plastic or softening temperature will naturally ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... temple of art is an emanation from that Divine Spirit who fills it with Himself. It is the plastic evolution of the idea which man has of Him, of His nature, of His ways, as manifested in the universe. From its central sanctuary in which He, the unseen, dwells, this temple projects, extending itself in space in every direction; but by ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... her dark, troubled gaze and the sullen droop of her mouth returned to give the lie to what he could but feel to be a possible misjudgment. In the end, he concluded wisely enough that, like the most of us, she was probably but plastic matter for the mark of circumstance—that her development would be, after all, according to the events she was called upon to face. The possibility that Destiny, which is temperament, should have already selected her as one of those who come into their spiritual heritage only through defeat, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... LINCRUSTA WALTON, a plastic material invented by Walton, capable of being moulded into raised patterns for decorating ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... had filled the house with fragrant suggestions of good things coming, in honor of Mr. Lindsay, who was to be her guest at tea. And chiefly the genteel form of doughnut called in the native dialect cymbal (Qu. Symbol? B. G.) which graced the board with its plastic forms, suggestive of the most pleasing objects,—the spiral ringlets pendent from the brow of beauty,—the magic circlet, which is the pledge of plighted affection,—the indissoluble knot, which typifies the union of hearts, which organs were also largely represented; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... to gold. One statue of Henri IV. with his flowing plume, and his rich romantic dress, was quite striking. It was the very plume that had won at Ivry, and yet was nothing more than a sheet of paper cut and twisted by the plastic ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... asked in succession, "Am I objectionable to you?" There was a dead silence until it came to my friend and myself, to each of whom it gave a most rappingly emphatic "Yes." Accordingly, we rose and left the field to those whose greater gullibility rendered them more plastic objects for working upon. Never in my life did I witness greater humbug; and yet so intense was the anxiety of the Boston public to witness the miracle, that during all the day and half the night the spirit was being invoked by the witch, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... which, during the plastic years of boyhood and youth, went to shape the outlook of the future Chief Justice high rank must be accorded his pioneer life. It is not merely that the spirit of the frontier, with its independence of precedent and its audacity of initiative, breathes through his great constitutional decisions, ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... means of securing morality in the tribe is the education of the young. This includes not only deliberate instruction, encouragement, and warning, but various symbolic rites and customs, whose value in impressing the plastic minds of the boys and girls of the tribe is only half realized. Initiation into manhood is accompanied in many races of men by solemn ceremonies, which instill into the youth the necessity and glory of courage, endurance, self-control, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... and well should the elephant know it. He had the best chance of all. Wiser even than the lion, or the wisest of apes, his wisdom furthermore was benign where theirs was sinister. Consider his dignity, his poise and skill. He was plastic, too. He had learned to eat many foods and endure many climates. Once, some say, this race explored the globe. Their bones are found everywhere, in South America even; so the elephants' Columbus may have found some ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... been awarded the refuel rights for two years because of our orbital position. The servos themselves were beautiful pieces of machinery and just about as close as science had come so far to producing the pure android. Every one of them was plastic hand-molded and of course they were equipped with rationaloid circuits. They had to be to ferry those big cargoes back and forth from the rock belt to Frisco. As rationaloids, Minor Planets had to pay them wages under California ...
— The Love of Frank Nineteen • David Carpenter Knight
... these domestic occupations. The Attic divinities, Athene Ergane and Aphrodite Urania, as well as the Argive Here, Ilithyia, the protecting goddess of child-bearing, Persephone, and Artemis, all these plastic art represents as goddesses of fate, weaving the thread of life, and, at the same time, protecting female endeavors; in which two-fold quality they have the emblem of domestic activity, the distaff, as their attribute. Only ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... object to give a history of the development of the plastic art, but to show the great excellence it attained in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... linguistic treasury Shakespeare shall be proved to have inherited ready-made—whatever scraps he may have stolen at the feast of languages—it is clear that he was an imperial creator of language, and lived while his mother-tongue was still plastic. Having a mint of phrases in his own brain, well might he speak with the contempt he does of those "fools who for a tricksy word defy the matter;" that is, slight or disregard it. He never needed to do that. Words were "correspondent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... instruction, in which astronomical, archaeological, geological, palaeontological, physical, historical, geographical, natural history—in short, all conceivable scientific lectures were delivered, illustrated by the most comprehensive display of plastic representative art. The lectures are written by the most talented specialists, delivered by the most eloquent orators, and placed on the stage by the most skilful engineers and decorators. This kind of theatre ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... The other man retreated. His uniform made a loose rainbow splash across metal and plastic. Coffin alone, of all the fleet's company, held to the black garments of a space service ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... activity is a broad one, including cooking, nursing, housekeeping, sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving and basketry; drawing and color work, brush and plastic work; bench work with tools, making useful articles; sports and games, including folk-dancing for girls and ball for boys. The primary and kindergarten classes offer a delightful round of song, story, games, excursions, paper work and other forms of construction. For the girls who have to take ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... the puddlers for a little while, and then through the rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black, half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between the wheels, "Come on," said Horrocks in Raut's ear; and they went and peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyeres, and saw the tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left one eye blinded for ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... stood with the light full on his face and the paper grasped in his hand. The angle of his clean-cut jaw seemed to harden from the plastic texture of flesh to the hardness of granite, and in his narrowed eyes spurted jets of those blue-and-white fires ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... opposite side of the court, in a gap between the stable and the byre, the men had heaped up the snow from the rest of the yard, and in the heap Cosmo had been excavating. For snow-balling he had little inclination, but the snow as a plastic substance, a thing that could be compelled into shapes, was an endless delight to him, and in connection with this mound he had conceived a new fancy, which, this very night, but for the interruption of their visitors, he would already have put ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... is necessary to mention a different suggestion which was also rejected by Captain Gemmell. It was put to him during cross-examination that he had carried back from McMurdo a blue plastic envelope containing personal property recovered from the accident site. In evidence given later by First Officer Rhodes the envelope was supposed to have been entrusted to Captain Gemmell by Mr Chippindale for delivery in New Zealand since Captain Gemmell was about to depart from the base ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... "plastic clay" to be moulded, or a "block of marble" to be hewn according to the will ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... Algonkin, the Aztec, and the Qquichua, attests how sedulously their resources have been cultivated. Father Olmos, in his grammar of the Aztec, gives many examples of twenty and thirty synonymous expressions, all in current use in his day. A dictionary, in my possession, of the Maya, one of the least plastic of American tongues, gives over thirty thousand words, and scarcely a hundred of them of ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... from the broils of that one plain; Rome was most vigorous before it could speak. So a man's verse, and all he has, are but the last outward appearance, late and already rigid, of an earlier, more plastic, and diviner fire. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... badly-scared lot, for the first few minutes, as they watched the ground receding under them through the transparent plastic nose. Then, when nothing serious seemed to be happening, exhilaration took the place of fear. By the time they set down on the tip of the island, the eight men ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... consists in the union and harmonious melting down, and fusion of the sensual into the spiritual,—of man as an animal into man as a power of reason and self-government. And this we have represented to us most clearly in the plastic art, or statuary; where the perfection of outward form is a symbol of the perfection of an inward idea; where the body is wholly penetrated by the soul, and spiritualized even to a state of glory, and like a transparent substance, the matter, in its own nature darkness, becomes altogether ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... girlhood she had followed her father into the solemn mysteries of Greek Tragedy; and in that vast white temple dedicated to the inexorable Fates, where predestined victims moved like marble images to their immolation, her own plastic nature had been moulded in unison with the classic cult. Among the throng of Attic types, an immortal statue of filial devotion and sisterly love had attracted her irresistibly, and to Antigone she rendered the homage of a boundless ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... what he expressed. It is possible to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told. He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and plastic form,—feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power, exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... whose velvet smoothness is like the Venus flower, half in bloom, that new-born flesh which palpitates softly with desire and voluptuousness, that hand which you press so delicately, those round thighs, those plastic buttocks, that voice sweet and touching,—what comparison can be made between all this and pronounced features, rough beard, hard breast, hairy body, and the strong disagreeable voice of man? Juvenal has wonderfully expended ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... best of all was when he could get in a corner by himself, with no one to disturb him, and build castles and things out of some abandoned clay or mortar, or wet sand if there was nothing better. The plastic material took strange shapes of beauty under his hands. It was as if life had been somehow breathed into it by his touch, and it ordered itself as none of the other boys could make it. His fingers ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... wheel as the big tractor lumbered up another rise, and the huge plastic bubble of Sun Lake City came into view far ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... a sigh of content. She had had her troubles over this affair. Dear Reggie, usually so plastic in her hands, had displayed an unaccountable reluctance to offer his agreeable self to Maud—in spite of the fact that never, not even on the public platform which she adorned so well, had his step-mother reasoned ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... And look at the faces of us—what atrocious mockeries most of them are of any kind of image! But we know our bodies change—age, sickness, thought, passion, fatality. It proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a theory it is not in the least untenable that by force of some violent convulsive effort from outside one's body might change. It answers with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of Nature, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... clay the Chinese call kaolin, and it is to the discovery of veins of the soft white plastic material in England that the wonderful strides in our china ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... enters merely as a caretaker or ignorant and improvident steward in the absence of the rightful owner. Again, some of our ornamental species, which are fast diminishing, are fitted from their peculiar structure and life habits to occupy places in nature which no other kinds, however plastic they may be, can even partially fill. The wryneck and the woodpecker may be mentioned; and a still better instance is afforded by the small, gem-like kingfisher—the only British bird which can properly be described as gem-like. When the goldfinch goes—and we know that he is going ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... Terrestrial's every sense wilted under the impact. He did not faint, he did not lose consciousness—he simply lost all control of every nerve and fiber as his entire brain passed into the control of the immense mentality of the First of Psychology and became a purely receptive, plastic medium upon which to impress the knowledge of the ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... characteristics of the Andalusian. His lyrical genius is not only at odds with that of Southern Spain, but also with his own inclination for the plastic arts, says Blanco Garcia. "How could a Seville poet, a lover of pictorial and sculptural marvels, so withdraw from the outer form as to embrace the pure idea, with that melancholy subjectivism as common in the gloomy regions bathed by the Spree as it is unknown on the banks of the ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... in a painting-jacket and slippers, he still preserved his sense of differences, and his appreciation of graces he had no time to cultivate. During the preparations for the Brys' TABLEAUX he had been immensely struck by Lily's plastic possibilities—"not the face: too self-controlled for expression; but the rest of her—gad, what a model she'd make!"—and though his abhorrence of the world in which he had seen her was too great for him to think of seeking her there, he was fully alive ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... as the big tractor lumbered up another rise, and the huge plastic bubble of Sun Lake City came into view far down ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... evangelisation. But opposed as he was to prevailing influences, he was yet a man of his time. We can hardly fancy the John Wesley whom we know living in any other century than his own. Spending the most plastic, perhaps also the most reflective period of his life in a chief centre of theological activity, he was not unimpressed by the storm of argument which was at that time going on around him. It was uncongenial to his temper, but ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... expansion.... Or was there ever a time when these immense masses of calcareous matter were drown into fermentation by some adventitious moisture; were raised and leavened into such shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs into the sky so much above the less animated clay ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... only preserved to us such masterpieces as the Capitoline Venus, the Dying Gaul, the Laocoon, the Dancing Faun, the so-called Narcissus, and the Resting Mercury, we should realise something of the exquisite skill in plastic art which had been attained in antiquity and has never been attained since. But we might perhaps imagine that these were altogether exceptional pieces and the choicest gems possessed by the world of the time. Yet the preservation of these is but an accident, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... and his wife, once Lady Rose Chantrey, the favorite daughter of Lord Lackington. They were not a happy couple. She was a woman of great intelligence, but endowed with one of those natures—sensitive, plastic, eager to search out and to challenge life—which bring their possessors some great joys, hardly to be balanced against a final sum of pain. Her husband, absorbed in his military life, silent, narrowly able, and governed by a ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... work on the crate, its gray plastic material giving in readily to the application of their tools. But when it was opened, they stood aside in ...
— The Delegate from Venus • Henry Slesar
... criminal, with his nervous movements, his restless lowered eyes, and his faint, hard voice that he could scarcely fetch up from his throat. Nervousness lined with resentment forms excellent material for the plastic art of a cross-examining counsel, and Pennington, K.C., itched to be at work. Crepitude, K.C., Oxford's counsel, was in less joyous mood. Priam was Crepitude's own witness, and yet a horrible witness, a witness who had consistently and ferociously declined to open his ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... are thin, vapid, inconclusive. They are important solely on account of their numbers. For them the census enumerator labours; they form majorities; they crowd voting booths; they make the money; they do the ordinary work of the world. They are valuable when well officered. They are plastic matter to be shaped by a workman's hand; and are built with as bricks are built with. In the aggregate, they form public opinion; but then, in every age, public opinion is the disseminated thoughts of some half a dozen ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... in as your simple opportunities had made you; how you shaped coming out depended upon what was hidden in the core of you. You could not in any case be the same as your father before you; education in a new country is too powerful a stimulant for that, working upon material too plastic and too hypothetical; it is not yet a normal force, with an operation to be reckoned on with confidence. It is indeed the touchstone for character in a new people, for character acquired as apart from that ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... hadn't told—him definitely that I was in danger of having my work rejected, but I was vexed at his not having felt the catastrophe in the air, read with me the moral of our fruitless collaboration, the lesson that in the deceptive atmosphere of art even the highest respectability may fail of being plastic. ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... of some sort. Webber hooted. It was a soft reassuring sound, repeated over and over, but it was not a word. The rattle of stones diminished, then stopped. Webber continued to make his hooting call. Presently it was answered. Webber turned and nodded at Paula, smiling. He reached into the plastic container and drew forth a handful of brownish objects that smelled to Kieran like dried fruit. Webber tossed these out onto the sand. Now he made a different sound, a grunting and whuffling. There was a silence. Webber made ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... exquisite scenery around him, although he was not able at the moment to assign the precise source of his blissful tranquillity. Like a true musician, he was satisfied to seize the sentiment of the scenes he visited, while he seemed to give but little attention to the plastic material, the picturesque frame, which did not assimilate with the form of his art, nor belong to his more spiritualized sphere. However, (a fact that has been often remarked in organizations such as his,) as he was removed in time and distance from the scenes in which emotion ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... over the stupendous solitudes of the northern Rockies, the soul of man, with all its complex impulses, is but so much plastic material which it shapes to its own inscrutable ends. For the man whose lot is cast in the heart of these wilds, the drama of life usually moves with a tremendous simplicity toward the sudden and sombre tragedy ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... are the cowed,—we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is for a parent or teacher to ruin a child's constructive ability, to change a naturally, positive creative mind to a negative, non-producing one, by chilling the child's enthusiasm, by projecting into his plastic mind the idea that he is stupid, dull, lazy, a "blockhead" and good-for-nothing; that he will never amount to anything; that it is foolish for him to try to be much, because he has not the ability or physical stamina to enable him to accomplish what many others ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... from having been called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently of Him. Had He really created the raw material from which He was to frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still to answer the question, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... in the matter which it draws round it. Only thought-forms of this third class can usefully be illustrated, for to represent those of the first or second class would be merely to draw portraits or landscapes. In those types we have the plastic mental or astral matter moulded in imitation of forms belonging to the physical plane; in this third group we have a glimpse of the forms natural to the astral or mental planes. Yet this very fact, which makes them so interesting, places an insuperable barrier in ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... Holy One, Thy care Wrought us from the plastic clay, Made us Thine own image bear, And for our perfection fair Did ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... curiosity. Foul speech I never heard from them nor a trace of profanity. What I did hear was a liberal education in the humanities—as time passes I rate more and more highly the sense of values it fixed in a plastic mind. I think it must have been because our Mammys saw all things from the elemental angle, they were critics so illuminating of manners ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... is, as in Asia, a principle, but it is morality impressed on individuality, and consequently denoting the free volition of individuals. Here, then, is the union of the moral with the subjective will, or the kingdom of beautiful freedom, for the idea is united with a plastic form. It is not yet regarded abstractly, but intimately bound up with the real, as in a beautiful work of art; the sensible bears the stamp and expression of the spiritual. The kingdom is consequently true harmony; it is a world of the most charming but perishable, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... debates and lectures that sapped his vitality. What really got right in amongst him was the torture of seeing Adeline's adoration of Raymond Parsloe Devine. The man seemed to have made the deepest possible impression upon her plastic emotions. When he spoke, she leaned forward with parted lips and looked at him. When he was not speaking—which was seldom—she leaned back and looked at him. And when he happened to take the next seat to her, she leaned ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... sisters belonged. Her father had been an Evangelical scholar and headmaster; the one slip of learning in a rude and primitive race. She had been trained by him; and in spite of her seven years of married life beside a nature so plastic and sensitive as Elsmere's, and of her passionate love for her husband, it was the early influences on her character which had in the end proved the ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was taking longer rides and getting her pep back, which was what she had come here for. And having failed to reform anything on the Arrowhead, she looked abroad for more plastic corruption as you might say. She rode in one night and said she was amazed that this here community didn't do something about Dave Pickens. That's the place we stopped this morning. She said his children were neglected and starving, his wife worked ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... Osmond's artistic, the plastic view, as it somehow appeared, of Pansy's innocence—her own appreciation of it being more anxiously moral. She was perhaps not the less pleased when he told her a few days later that he had communicated the fact to his daughter, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... necessity, some one person should have found it out long ago, and there should then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure or to alleviate; so that we are left to infer that the person ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... natural scenery of the present day that it is impossible to imagine that these pictures belong to a former age. In the startling contrasts of powerful, often rough, forms and extreme tones, a species of natural beauty is created that has equally little in common with the plastic dignity of a mountain prospect by Poussin or with the quiet peacefulness of a forest thicket by Ruysdael. In what a very different manner from that of Calame was this same Swiss scenery treated by the numerous artists who painted Alpine views at the beginning of this century! They ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... unconsciously put upon facts, imagination concerning them, reflexions upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naive, and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic statement could achieve.' ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... screamed to a stop in front of them, the plastic blister was thrown back, and another Solar Guard messenger climbed out, ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... than it did Vittoria; fevered her and distracted her sympathies. Being herself a plaything at the time, she could easily play a part for others. Vittoria had not grown, probably never would grow, to be so plastic off the stage. She was stringing her hand to strike a blow as men strike, and women when they do ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... incomplete, not final. And man's immense difference from Him, that sense of the immeasurable space between creator and created, is strangely contracted. The gulf between holiness and guiltiness tends also to disappear. For our life would appear to be plastic and indefinite, a process rather than a state, not open then to conclusive moral estimates; incomplete, not fallen; life an orderly process, hence not perverse but defensible; without known breaks or infringements, hence relatively normal ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... of the lunar craters there has been much discussion. Some have considered them to be evidence of violent volcanic action in the dim past; others, again, as the result of the impact of meteorites upon the lunar surface, when the moon was still in a plastic condition; while a third theory holds that they were formed by the bursting of huge bubbles during the escape into space of gases from the interior. The question is, indeed, a very difficult one. Though ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... dwelling stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler's door. The Main Street is still youthful; the coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life in our ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... refined manners have been in large proportion among the banished Poles, and the exiles of 1825 included many of Russia's ablest minds. The influence of these exiles upon the intelligence, habits, and manners of the Siberians, has left an indelible mark. As a new civilization is more plastic than an old one, so the society of Northern Asia may have become more polished than that ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... and sense of his own prophetic mission to the exclusion of that of his predecessors and compeers, made him often unconscious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, who impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he disposed adequately to acknowledge them. Outside the Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been wholly unaffected by the writings and traditions of the East, which exercised so marked an influence on his New England ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... artistic sensibility pervading every form of life like the nervous structure of the huge frame—a sensibility so delicate, alert and universal that it seemed to leave no room for obtuseness or error. In such a medium the faculty of plastic expression must develop as unconsciously as any organ in its normal surroundings; to be "artistic" must cease to be an attitude and become a natural function. To Claudia the significance of the whole vast revelation was centred in the light it shed on one tiny spot of consciousness—the ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... unfreezable oil, less sensitive to percussion, friction, and increase of temperature, and to possess a greater solvent power for collodion-cotton than ordinary nitro-glycerine. It can thus be used for the preparation of explosives of high stability, which will maintain their plastic nature even in winter. The di-nitro-glycerine is a solvent for tri-nitro-glycerine, it can therefore be mixed with this substance, in the various gelatine explosives in order to lower the ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... landfills. These days householders may be offered incentives (or threatened with penalties) by their municipalities to separate organic, compostable garbage from paper, from glass, from metal or from plastic. Individuals who pay for trash pickup by volume are finding that they can save considerable amounts of money by recycling their own organic wastes at ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... unrestricted course, Though Fancy followed with immortal force? There's not a blossom fondled by the breeze, There's not a fruit that beautifies the trees, There's not a particle in sea or air, But nature owns thy plastic influence there! With fearful gaze, still be it mine to see How all is fill'd and vivified by Thee; Upon thy mirror, earth's majestic view, To paint Thy Presence, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... us from our shelter to "Lay the book down, dear, and come to tea." For, to speak in better words than my own, "It is the books we read before middle life that do most to mould our characters and influence our lives; and this not only because our natures are then plastic and our opinions flexible, but also because, to produce lasting impression, it is necessary to give a great author time and meditation. The books that are with us in the leisure of youth, that we love for a time not only with the enthusiasm, ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... colourless and lifeless—sort of plastic stuff—until we get hold of them. We twist them to the best shapes we can. Nothing happens to us that isn't exactly like ourselves. Even what people call accidents. Even a man's diseases. I've seen that in the Wards. People die as they ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... Hale is much less academic than the other sculptures arranged in this gallery. Compared with the high standard of American small plastic art his works are somewhat dry, though always ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... used a special set of tongs, and extracted a tiny block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial of glass was embedded. It frosted instantly he took it out, and when the storage box was closed again the block was covered with a thick and opaque coating ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... history has its time, and the order of Jesuits can never rise to any great eminence in an age in which knowledge is so rapidly spreading. We think differently. A society so capable of adaptation to any circumstances, whether political, religious, or social, plastic in nature to meet every desired impression, talented, highly learned, wealthy, and among others, embracing in its order some men of such pure and admirable life as to be cited as examples of virtue and Christian character, with the protection the American flag throws around all under its folds, ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... materials such as clays, peats, and other soft or plastic materials, it is idle to assume that these do not possess pressure-resisting and arching properties. For instance, a soft clay arch of larger dimensions, under the condition described early in this paper, would undoubtedly stand ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... many primitive people, and so consider themselves above all laws but their own. She was captured many years ago in an attempt to overthrow the rule of Wananda upon a small satellite planet. Wananda did not kill her, but placed her in suspended animation within the protective crystal plastic. Our queen intends to revive her and study her mind for her wisdom, but we have not had time because of the press of events. Soon, now, she will become a tool in our hands to build greater the ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... he, Cliffe, persuaded her—there would be no doubt a first shock of wrath and pain—then a sense of deliverance. For her, too, deliverance! It excited his artist's sense to think of all the further developments through which he might carry that eager, plastic nature. There would be a new Kitty, with new capacities and powers. Wasn't that justification enough? He felt himself a sculptor in the very substance of life, moulding a living creature afresh, disengaging it from harsh and hindering ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thinks of the tremendous forces of the upper and the nether world which play for the mastery of the soul of a woman during the few years in which she passes from plastic girlhood to the ripe maturity of womanhood, he may well stand in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... men," said the De Goncourts. A Great Musician is a paradox, a miracle, a multiple-sided man—stern, firm, selfish, proud and unyielding; yet sensuous as the ether, tender as a woman, innocent as a child, and as plastic as potters' clay. And with most of them, let us frankly admit it, the hand of the Potter shook. When people write about musicians, they seldom write moderately. The man is either a selfish rogue or an angel of light—it all depends ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... unquestionable. They, generally speaking, believed in the eternity of matter, and conceived some of its qualities to be so essentially necessary to its existence that no divine agency could alter them. They ascribed to the Deity a plastic power, a power not of creating or annihilating, but only of moulding, disposing and moving matter. So over mind they generally give him the like power, considering it as a kind of emanation from his own greater mind or essence, and destined to be ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... jolted under her weight, began skidding, then held firm to the two guy ropes remaining. A horde of gray creatures hurled themselves on those lines as a hatchway opened above and a ladder dropped down. The men scurried up the ropes just as the plastic dome of the Control Tower ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... no longer absolute. Sudden crises threaten the stability of nations and civilizations. Safety lies alone in the ability to go forward, to progress. Psychology teaches us that if authoritative opinions, convictions, or "complexes" are stamped upon the plastic brain of the youth they tend to harden, and he is apt to become a Democrat or Republican, an Episcopalian or a Baptist, a free trader or a tariff advocate or a Manchester economist without asking why. Such "complexes" ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "We are appealed to, or at least 'the young and rising naturalists with plastic minds,* [On the Nature of the Limbs, page 482] are adjured." It will be seen that the inverted comma after "naturalists" is omitted; the asterisk referring, in a footnote (here placed in square brackets), to page 482 of the "Origin," seems to ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... my thought, And swift along the past it strays, And much of strange event surveys, What history's faithful tongue has taught, Or fancy formed, whose plastic skill The page with fabled change can fill Of ill to ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... in which the reaction against plastic beauty in poetry has reached such a height that it is almost vain to appeal against it. There is scarcely a single English poet of consequence in the younger school who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though he were preluding with ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... antipathies, tastes and feelings, in common with all human nature. The sooner he perceives this fact, and adapts himself accordingly, the easier will be his journey among the several races of the interior. The more plastic his nature, the more prosperous will ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... and of the Germanic tribal organizations. Military type of society on the Continent. Old Aryan self-government happily preserved in England. Strategic position of England favourable to the early elimination of warfare from her soil. Hence the exceptionally normal and plastic political development of the English race. Significant coincidence of the discovery of America with the beginnings of the Protestant revolt against the asiaticizing tendency. Significance of the struggle between Spain, France, ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... white clay the Chinese call kaolin, and it is to the discovery of veins of the soft white plastic material in England that the wonderful strides in our china manufactures ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... this—that she had been writing to an old friend, and her manner for the time, as well as her expression, was affected by her mental proximity to that friend;—so plastic—so fluent even—was her whole nature. Indeed Alec was not long in finding out that one of her witcheries was, that she was never the same. But on this the first occasion, the alteration ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... but, between ourselves, isn't classic art sometimes rather a bore? Caricature, burlesque, la charge, as the French say, has hitherto been confined to paper, to the pen and pencil. Now, it has been my inspiration to introduce it into statuary. For this purpose I have invented a peculiar plastic compound which you will permit me not to divulge. That's my secret, signore! It's as light, you perceive, as cork, and yet as firm as alabaster! I frankly confess that I really pride myself as much on this little stroke of chemical ingenuity as upon the other element ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... domestication on the action of the reproductive system{195}. It would appear as if the reproductive powers failed in their ordinary function of producing new organic beings closely like their parents; and as if the entire organization of the embryo, under domestication, became in a slight degree plastic{196}. We shall hereafter have occasion to show, that in organic beings, a considerable change from the natural conditions of life, affects, independently of their general state of health, in another and remarkable manner ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... and pale; her bold features, almost emaciated, displayed the framework of departed beauty, and if her high white forehead and waxen face were free from lines and wrinkles, it must have been because time and grief could find no plastic material there in which to trace their story. She was a very tall woman, too, and carried her head erect and high, walking with a firmness and elasticity of step such as would not have been expected in one whose outward appearance conveyed so little impression of ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... grow to the dignity of having an art of its own, and that in sculpture (as in painting and architecture) new problems might arise. Even in his own work (although he professed but one ideal, the Athenian) he came at last to include the plastic value of the red man, and to find in the expression of the Sioux or Omaha a certain sorrowful dignity which fell parallel with his own grave temperament, for, despite his smiling face, his best work remained somber, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... dreamily as in his fiery youth he had listened to the songs of the sirens. No siren Isaura! She was defending her own cause, though unconsciously—defending the vocation of art as the embellisher of external nature, and more than embellisher of the nature which dwells crude, but plastic in the soul of man: indeed therein the creator of a new nature, strengthened, expanded, and brightened in proportion as it accumulates the ideas that tend beyond the boundaries of the visible and material nature, which is finite; for ever seeking in the unseen and the spiritual the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from heav'n Yet threatens, when his mutt'ring thunder rolls. Of one already I descried the face, Shoulders, and breast, and of the belly huge Great part, and both arms down along his ribs. All-teeming nature, when her plastic hand Left framing of these monsters, did display Past doubt her wisdom, taking from mad War Such slaves to do his bidding; and if she Repent her not of th' elephant and whale, Who ponders well confesses her therein Wiser and more discreet; for when brute force And evil will are back'd with ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... his predecessors, succeeded, by virtue of his "plastic energy and power of harmonious modulation" in recreating the measure. He found it "monotonous, monosyllabic, and divided into five feet of tolerably regular alternate short and long [i. e., unstressed and stressed]. He left it various in form and structure, sometimes redundant ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... dance; they do not merely shamble to and fro in a crowd, crumpling their clothes and ruffling their tempers, and call it a set of quadrilles. They have ample space for the sweeping movements and complicated figures of all the orthodox ball dances, and are generally gifted with sufficient plastic grace to carry them out in style. They carefully cultivate dances calling for a kind of grace which is almost beyond the reach of art. The mazurka is one of the finest of these, and it is quite a favorite at balls on the banks of the Neva. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... if our aims in Poetry be of a grand and elevated character, we must transport ourselves from the actual to a possible stage. It is the privilege of Art to furnish for itself whatever is requisite, and the accidental deficiency of auxiliaries ought not to confine the plastic imagination of the Poet. He aspires to whatever is most dignified, he labors to realize the ideal in his own mind-though in the execution of his purpose he must needs accommodate ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... and shrill quaverings of factory girls, ill-nourished and untrained, and with the raucous shriekings from gin-cracked throats of the women of the seaport towns. She enjoyed singing and playing to him. In truth, it was the first time she had ever had a human soul to play with, and the plastic clay of him was a delight to mould; for she thought she was moulding it, and her intentions were good. Besides, it was pleasant to be with him. He did not repel her. That first repulsion had been ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... formations of millstone grit and limestone that rest upon the shale have generally avoided crumpling or distortion, and thus give the mountain views the appearance of having had all the upper surfaces rolled flat when they were in a plastic condition. Denudation and the action of ice in the glacial epochs have worn through the hard upper stratum, and formed the long and narrow dales; and in Littondale, Wharfedale, Wensleydale, and many other parts, one may ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... be invented before anybody can be bored with it. And I do not believe, although I find it stated in a ten-volume Science-History of the Universe, that 'language is an internal necessity, begotten of a lustful longing to express, through the plastic vocal energy, man's secret sense of his ability to interpret Nature.' An internal necessity, yes—except in the case of the Bore Negative, who prefers to listen; but quite as likely begotten of man's anything but secret sense of ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... jurisdiction was merely concurrent; but the greater certainty of conviction and the greater severity of punishment rendered it incomparably more formidable than the ordinary benches of justice. The law of libel grew up in this unwholesome atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of successive judges and attorneys-general. Prosecutions of this kind, according to Hudson, began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when Coke was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture what kind of interpretation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... jerkily, "had electronic base-measuring instruments. Some of their elements had to be buried in plastic because otherwise they ionized the air and leaked current like a short. If I had that instrument now—No. I'd have to take the plastic away and it couldn't be ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and that the contemporaries who mention him would not have preserved a profound silence as to his artistic talent[28]; yet Men['e]ndez y Pelayo himself speaks of Vicente's alma de artista[29] and of the plastic character which the most fantastic allegorical figures receive at his hands[30]. If we were assured that the dreamy Bernardim Ribeiro had fashioned the Belem monstrance we might well remain sceptical, but Vicente stands out from among the vaguer poets of Portugal ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... Mathematics will soar into its highest regions; while the high peaks of philosophy may be scaled by those whose aptitude for abstract thought has been awakened by elementary logic. Finally, schools of pictorial and plastic art, of architecture, and of music will offer a thorough discipline in the principles and practice of art to those in whom lies nascent the rare faculty of aesthetic representation, or the still rarer powers of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... colon when filling it up. It also helps to make sure that the stomach is empty of any fluid for one hour prior to the colonic. Resume drinking after the colonic sessions is completed. If you are one of these rare people who 'toss their bile', just keep a plastic bucket handy and some water to rinse out the mouth after, and carry ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... propagated by any method of either soil or air layering. The writer(14) while experimenting with aerial layering in 1945 found one instance of root production on a hickory where the branch was girdled at the base of the one-year wood. This method offers possibilities, especially now that polythene plastic is available for retaining moisture in the moss about the girdle or wound on ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... the pot-maker knows quite well how matters stand. She takes good care not to close the top with the plastic earth which supplied her with the walls. At some distance from the tip of the nipple, the clay ceases to play its part and makes way for fibrous particles, for tiny scraps of undigested fodder, which, arranged one above the other with a certain order, form a sort of thatched ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the "Orlando Furioso." Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... peas, carrots, and fried potatoes—they weren't labeled at all but you could generally guess the contents from the shape of the can. Eggs that heated when you touched them and were soft-boiled evenly and barely firm by the time you had the shell broke. And small plastic bottles of strong coffee that heated up hospitably too—in this case the tops did a five-second hesitation in the middle of ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... his plastic nature caused him to imitate to a certain extent, and almost unconsciously, the manners and customs of those around him. He became stoical, he pretended to an indifference which often he did not feel, and he never spoke of the friends who had disappeared ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... her eyes, her head still lowered. He was working, darkly absorbed as usual in the plastic mass under his fingers. ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... scientist nodded. Tomasite, a revolutionary plastic which Mr. Swift had developed, possessed amazing insulating properties against both heat and radiation. One of its secret ingredients came from certain plants found only in Far Eastern waters. Mr. Swift ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... I laid aside bow and quiver, and cutting divers lumps of clay (the which seemed very proper to my purpose) I fell to kneading these lumps until I had wrought them to a plastic consistency, and so (keeping my hands continually moistened) I began to mould and shape a pot to her directions. And now, since I was about it, I determined to have as many as need be and of different sizes. My first was ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... half-sister, who was keeping house for the marquis, provided the introduction), and, calling each other "cousin" and "gossip," these two shared rooms together in perfect simplicity of soul and held several conversations which reflect, I suppose, Mr. BERNARD CAPES' views on the plastic arts and life in general. And why, in passing, he should continue to heap ridicule on staid Victorian respectability I cannot for the life of me imagine. The plucky and unorthodox thing nowadays surely is to make game ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... rethreaded with great cables. Up these there climb to us a crowd of young men, clinging to the ropes and flinging their bodies sideways on aerial trapezes. My heart trembles with keen joy and terror. For nowhere else could plastic forms be seen more beautiful, and nowhere else is peril more apparent. Leaning my chin upon the utmost verge, I wait. I watch one youth, who smiles and soars to me; and when his face is almost touching mine, he speaks, but what ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... merges itself in another—a panorama of tall, pleasant, beautiful people, placed in becoming attitudes, in charming gardens, in luxurious rooms, so that I can scarcely tell which is the more definite, the impression satiric or the impression plastic. ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... subject-matter and momentum to arts and modes of appreciation which are aesthetic. Thus comprehension of the passion of love is necessary to the appreciation of numberless songs, plays, and novels, and not a few works of musical and plastic art. ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... employer so much as that he has a restless temperament and craves change. His disposition is full of mirth and sunshine, and not a little of the fine flavor of Southern wit and humor is due to his influence. His nature is plastic, and while he is easily molded into a monster, he is also capable of a high degree of culture. Many Negroes are thoroughly honest, notwithstanding their bad environment and hereditary disposition to steal. Negro servants are trusted with the keys to households to an extent that, probably, is not ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... his hands, and his comrades, who had reasonably steady nerves, were almost appalled when he poised himself to throw it. There was only a thin strip of cotton fabric between the flying sparks and the plastic yellow rolls of powder. Still, the bag was thrown, and Saunders set off with it, while Weston stood gasping a moment ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light—it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... most useful instruction. The difference between plants, the variegation of colors, their relations to the air, the sunshine, the dew, the rain; the habits of plants, some erect, some creeping, some climbing, the seasons of flowering, fruitage, and seed, are impressed with ease upon the plastic mind of childhood. ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... recognised as good sense, contemptuous of much till then applauded as good taste. In a word, he was the Hugo of the hundred volumes we know: an artist, that is, endowed with a technical imagination of the highest quality, the very genius of style, and a sense of the plastic quality of words unequalled, perhaps, since Milton. The time was ripe for him: within France and without it was big with revolution. In verse there were the examples of Andre Chenier and Lamartine; in prose the work of Rousseau and Diderot, of Bernardin ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... expressions imposed upon the antique, artistic imaginings instead of historical reproductions. The so-called fascination of the past depends in part upon these expressions of ours, which we weave into historical expressions. Thus in hellenic plastic art has been discovered the calm and serene intuition of life of those peoples, who feel, nevertheless, so poignantly, the universality of sorrow; thus has recently been discerned on the faces of the Byzantine saints "the terror of the millennium," ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... may interest the critic, but we are only concerned with Mr. Ruskin here, for one reason. His disparagement of Coleridge as 'useless' is a survival of the belief that art should be 'useful.' This is the savage's view of art. He imitates nature, in dance, song, or in plastic art, for a definite practical purpose. His dances are magical dances, his images are made for a magical purpose, his songs are incantations. Thus the theory that art is a disinterested expression of the imitative faculty is scarcely warranted by the little we know of art's beginnings. ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... fry. One could "see life" there too, though, as usual, most of the artists were very respectable people. It was a respectable art then in vogue in England. Frith was the giant of the day, and from the wax figures at Madame Tussaud's to pictures such as the "Rake's Progress" the plastic arts had a moral tendency. Even the animals of Sir Edwin Landseer were the most decorous of all four-footed creatures; Killigrew blasphemed by calling the admired paintings still-life studies of animals. But then Killigrew was from Paris and chanted the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Greece and Rome, as yet little affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts, by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Lucilius, who stand out amidst a number of more or less mediocre writers just as in a similar epoch of French literature Courier and Beranger stand out amidst a multitude of pretentious nullities. In the plastic and delineative arts likewise the production, always weak, is now utterly null. On the other hand the receptive enjoyment of art and literature flourished; as the Epigoni of this period in the political field ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... up wholeheartedly to social chit-chat. Usually he liked his time to himself and resented the intrusion of the outer world, for he who had chosen jugglery for his walk in life must neglect no opportunity of practising: but so favourable was the impression which Sally had made on his plastic mind that he was delighted to converse with her as long as ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... confidently they might believe in the final success of their struggle, they could not fail to see the immense odds and fearful obstacles against which they would have to contend. The debauched masses who had been molded and kneaded by the plastic touch of slavery into such base uses, were the only possible material from which recruits could be drawn for a great party of the future, which should regenerate our politics and re-enthrone the love ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... probably the most painful experience in their lives. Barbara had come to it softened and ready to meet him half way. The right kind of humility in Monty would have found her plastic. But she had very definite and rigid ideas of his duty in the premises. And Monty was too simple minded to seem to suffer, and much too flippant to understand. It was plain to each that the other did not expect to talk, but they both realized that they owed ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... into the wall of the small garden of the Villa Albani in Rome, only here it is in still closer conformity with the Hebrew tradition, as a huge serpent is coiled round the trunk of the tree beneath which the two mortals are standing. It is this plastic type that was imitated and reproduced by the earliest Christian artists, when they attempted the representation of the fall of our first parents, which formed so favourite a subject with them, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... outside the wide-open gap in the Shed's wall. Something went shrieking by the doorway. It looked like the magnified top half of a loaf of baker's bread, painted gray and equipped with an air-scoop in front and a plastic bubble for a pilot. It howled like a lost baby dragon, its flat underside tilted up and up until it was almost vertical. It had no wings, but a blue-white flame spurted out of its rear, wobbling from side to side for ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... materials for a dozen better books. It has a number of individual sketches that are admirably drawn. We might quote a variety of isolated passages that impress us deeply with the vigor of the writer, and which, if wrought up with as much plastic skill as is usually connected with such inventive talents, would secure his rank among the elite of American authors. He has not yet done justice to his remarkable gifts, not even in the inimitable Margaret—the poem Philo we regard as ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the more did I perceive, while developing the scenes and music of Young Siegfried, that I had only increased the necessity for a clearer presentation of the whole story to the senses. I now see that, in order to become intelligible on the stage, I must work out the whole myth in plastic style. It was not this consideration alone which impelled me to my new plan, but especially the overpowering impressiveness of the subject-matter which I thus acquire for presentation, and which supplies ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... gives a fine proportion to the limbs; whilst the heavy and gross resist her by their weight. So women that take physic during their pregnancy, have slighter children indeed, but of a finer and more delicate turn, because the suppleness of the matter more readily obeys the plastic power. However, these are speculations which ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... character of the form and these spasmodic movements, could be expressed the peculiar restiveness, fitfulness, and waywardness of thought and feeling that characterise Chopin's individuality. To these unclassical qualities—for classical art is above all plastic and self-possessed—combined as they are with a high degree of refinement and delicacy, his compositions owe much of their peculiar charm. The absence of scorn distinguishes the fourth "Scherzo," Op. 54, from the other three; but, like ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... a young person is plastic, easy to take impressions, strong to retain them. And the "old man" or the "governor," whether he is father, friend, or employer, or all three, has infinitely more influence than either he or the young man ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... strengthen his grasp of it and develop it to an indefinite and unforeseen degree. One actual method of the use of thought is to use it, creatively, for the immediate future. The time that is just before one is plastic to any impress. It has not yet taken form in events or circumstances, and it can, therefore, be controlled and determined. One may sit quietly and alone for a little time at night, calling up all his thought force, and by means of it create the next ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... stepped confidently out into the topsy-turvy corridors of the Niccola. He was about the size of a ten-year-old human boy, and features which were definitely not grotesque showed through the clear plastic of his helmet. His pressure suit was, engineering-wise, a very clean job. His whole appearance was prepossessing. When he spoke, very clear and quite high sounds—soprano sounds—came from a ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... will know we mean business," he said, gesturing toward the heap of metal and plastic that had once been the pride of the Carron City police force. Then he signalled to the others and they all ...
— Robots of the World! Arise! • Mari Wolf
... highest sense, but the tresses and the drapery were most skillfully arranged to look like the work of the chisel. It is significant of the measure of Miss Anderson's art, that in her animated moments subsequently she should not have excelled the plastic grace of this first picture. At the same time, to her credit it must be said, that she never fell much below it. Her movements on the stage, her management of her drapery, her attitudes were full of classic beauty. Actresses there ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... ever seemed to affect Caroline; and to the romantic descriptions of love she was so indifferent that it might have appeared to a common observer as if she was, and ever would be, a stranger to the passion. By the help of the active and plastic powers of the imagination, any and every hero of a novel could be made, at pleasure, to appear the exact resemblance of each lady's different lover. Some, indeed, professed a peculiar and absolute exclusive ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... march is played. Father Hudson resumes the plastic, immobile, and almost invisible attitude which he occupied at the opening of the play. The Choruses file silently out, one on each side ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... the concrete was mixed not quite wet enough to be plastic. If mixed too wet the charge was liable to be "lost," and if dry it would choke the chute. An excess of gravel permitted water to ascend in the tube; and an excess of sand tended to check ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of my generation. I was a dweller under roofs: the gull of that which we call civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic arts; a cit; and a prop of restaurants. I had a comrade in those days, somewhat of an outsider, though he moved in the company of artists, and a man famous in our small world for gallantry, knee breeches, and dry and pregnant ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... certain period of life beyond which the plastic mind of man becomes incapable of acquiring any new impressions. He merely elaborates and displays the stores he has garnered up in his youth. There are indeed some rare exceptions to the rule; but few, very few, can learn a language after the age ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... persistently. Herein lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... thoughts too fast to be tabulated, and his accent was slightly English. She divined from this he had been out of the country—possibly had returned to New York on a British ship. How well she knew his plastic intelligence! It was so characteristic and easy for him—this little affectation.... She was quite cold to him. Bedient had put him away upon the far-effacing surfaces ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... her dead brother. Her eyelashes had been clipped; the line of her brows altered. And now, in the light of my ray tube as it shone upon her earnest face, I could remark other changes. Glutz, the little beauty specialist, was in this secret. With plastic skill he had altered the set of her jaw with his wax—put ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... burst into a cloud of rapidly-moving, evanescent forms, has already been described; we have now to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish. The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a living being of appropriate form—a being which when once thus created is in no way under the control of its creator, but lives out a life of its own, the length of which is proportionate to the intensity of the thought or wish which called ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... necessary. Antique art has frequently treated these domestic occupations. The Attic divinities, Athene Ergane and Aphrodite Urania, as well as the Argive Here, Ilithyia, the protecting goddess of child-bearing, Persephone, and Artemis, all these plastic art represents as goddesses of fate, weaving the thread of life, and, at the same time, protecting female endeavors; in which two-fold quality they have the emblem of domestic activity, the distaff, as their attribute. Only a few representations ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... if we have a surface that retains our successive stampings we may change the substance from wax to plaster and from plaster to bronze, and the effects of our labour will survive and be superimposed upon one another. It is the actual plastic form in both mind and body, not any unchanging substance or agent, that is efficacious in ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... extraordinary increase in the number of educational institutions and the conceited tribe of teachers originated thereby. These very people, using these very means, are fighting against the natural hierarchy in the realm of the intellect, and destroying the roots of all those noble and sublime plastic forces which have their material origin in the unconsciousness of the people, and which fittingly terminate in the procreation of genius and its due guidance and proper training. It is only in the simile of the mother that we can grasp the ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... system. On the contrary he endows him with a good many disagreeable qualities; he makes him bright, sharp, and full of vitality, with a strong bent for mischief. He is high-tempered, quarrelsome, and disobedient, and yet in the hands of one who understands his mental peculiarities plastic as dough. It is the aim of the author to show how utterly useless it is to treat such boys—and our schools are full of them—in exactly the same manner as those of different character and temperament, and to demand that teachers have the right to adapt ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... flesh." He thinks Reynolds "would have acknowledged the supremacy of beautiful nature, uncontrolled by the severe line of mathematical exactness," had he lived to see the Elgin marbles. "The outline of life, which changes under every respiration, seems to have undulated under the plastic mould of Phidias." This is well expressed. He justly animadverts upon the silly fashion of the day, in lauding the vulgar imitation of the worsted stockings by Thom. The subjects chosen were most unfit for sculpture,—their only immortality must ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... their progress inevitable and easy. The importance of wholesome domestic influences cannot be exaggerated. Their part in the formation of character is greater than that of all others, because they touch the powers and faculties of the child during those years in which it is most plastic. Neither the school nor the university can ever entirely counteract the effect of the home. The whole period of childhood is one in which the soul is under tutelage, and in which more is done for it by others than ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... essence could admit the infinite variety of distinct and successive ideas which compose the model of the intellectual world; how a Being purely incorporeal could execute that perfect model, and mould with a plastic hand the rude and independent chaos. The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties, which must ever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold modification—of the first cause, the reason, or Logos, and the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... inclination toward criminal adventure, her supreme self-confidence, all her bravado, were but the superficial though strong tendencies developed by her unfortunate environment; that within that cynical, worldly shell there were the vital and plastic ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... drink. They had no difficulty in finding the spoor of the lost jaguar, indeed it was the first thing to attract their attention upon stepping ashore, and as Earle gazed down upon the deep indentations in the plastic mud he execrated the thieving alligator afresh, for the prints were as big as the palm of his hand, indicating that the beast must have been a particularly ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... by flattening the first pill of clay upon the intended site (say the corner of a room); she then spreads it in a thin layer over a surface of about two inches, and retires for another ball of clay. This she dabs upon the plastic foundation, and continues the apparently rude operation until some twenty or thirty pills of clay are adhering at equal distances. She then forms these into a number of neat oval-shaped cells, about the size of a wren's egg, and in each cell she deposits one egg. She then flies ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the owner of Woodbine Lodge with every enticement she could offer; but he saw not her charms; felt not the strong attractions with which she sought to win his admiration. Far away his thoughts were wandering, and in the dim distance Fancy was busy with half-defined shapes, which her plastic hand, with rapid touches, moulded into forms that seemed instinct with a purer life, and to glow with a more ravishing beauty than any thing yet seen in the actual he had made his own. And as these forms became more and more vividly pictured in his imagination, the pace ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... of their essence dull, but they must sometimes be submitted to, and the truism as to a book's possible influence on the young and impressionable cannot here be avoided. What it is that decides if the book is to stamp itself on the plastic mind, or if the mind is to assert itself and stamp on the book, is a detail that admits less easily of dogmatism. The Companionage of Finn remained in being for but two periods of holiday. Before the boys had returned to school, it had seen its ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... admitted. "Yes, it is true. But after all," he added cheerfully, "I believe that our disagreements are mainly upon the surface. The Countess is a woman of wide culture and understanding. Her mind, too, is plastic. She has few prejudices." ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... circumstances be departed from, and which could only be modified in their operation by legal quibbles that left to them their nominal integrity. The new law could therefore only be administered by a class of men trained specially for the purpose, of which the plastic customary law borne down the stream of history from primitive times, and insensibly adapting itself to new conditions but understood in its broader aspects by all those who might be called to administer it, had little need. The Roman law, the study of which was started at ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... perceives the inmost. Hence she becomes, as it were, the soul of his thought; she is the will and he the intellectual principle; she is governed and guided by him, while he in all things is modified by her will, and scarce recognises his own crude thought in her plastic feminine representation of it; hence he thinks oftentimes that he acts from her wisdom, forgetting that she has no ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... here is the orator rising to plead the cause of the savage, and of the slave, before men who feel no sympathy, and are as castles locked and barred. But the love for the poor shines in Wendell Phillips' eyes, trembles in his voice, pleads in his thinking, until the multitude become all plastic to his thought, and his smile becomes their smile, his tear their tear, the throb of his heart the throb of the whole assembly. Here is the Scottish girl, in love with truth, standing midst the sea, within the clutches of the incoming tide. She is bound ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... James, "but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literateness, wiped out." One of our latter day philosophers tells us that "happiness is a matter of habit; and you had better gather it fresh every day or you will ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... complete mental and emotional expression of the singer, to the development of all his powers. This life or vital force is to the singer a definite, controllable power. "Various terms have been applied to this mysterious force. Plato called it 'the soul of the world.' Others called it the 'plastic spirit of the world,' while Descartes gave it the afterward popular name of 'animal spirits.' The Stoics called it simply 'nature,' which is now generally changed to 'nervous principle.'" "The far-reaching results of so quiet and yet so tremendous a force may be seen in the lives of ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... thenceforth cleaves, more tenaciously (for there are Names that have lasted nigh thirty centuries) than the very skin. And now from without, what mystic influences does it not send inwards, even to the centre; especially in those plastic first-times, when the whole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the invisible seedgrain will grow to be an all overshadowing tree! Names? Could I unfold the influence of Names, which are the most important of all Clothings, I were a second greater Trismegistus. Not ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... repeat, is expressing mental phenomena by the play of the physical organs. It is the translation, the plastic form, the language of human nature. But man, the image of God, presents himself to us in three phases: the sensitive, intellectual and moral. Man feels, thinks and loves. He is en rapport with the physical world, with the spiritual world, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Industries: small-scale consumer goods (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, soap, cigarettes, flour), agricultural products processing; oil refining, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... our vote, Who stood the scorching when we wrote; And paler than the milky way, We'll bake the plastic face of CLAY. ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... to see from the life-story of such insects, that the course of the story is not rigidly fixed; the creature in its various stages is plastic, open to influence from its surroundings, capable of marked change in the course of generations. And so the seasonal changes in the history of the individual from egg to imago point us to changes in the age-long history ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... thee 'mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... realize that just as, in the period of childhood, the plastic state of life, changes of structure and appearance are more rapid than in the mature man, after {70} traits and characters have become more fixed, so by analogy we may assume that this was the way of the human race and that in the earlier period changes were more rapid than they are to-day. ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Gusty, ever plastic to a stronger will, had succumbed to the potent combination of absence and ardor, and given her half-hearted consent for Mr. Opp to speak to her mother. Upon that lady's unqualified ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... she lay in the utility bed, the squeaking of the springs became the sound of turning wheels. The plastic walls and ceiling of the eightieth-floor apartment turned to billowing canvas, and the thunder of the passing jets transformed itself into the drumming hoofbeats of ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... in poetry or novels, ever seemed to affect Caroline; and to the romantic descriptions of love she was so indifferent that it might have appeared to a common observer as if she was, and ever would be, a stranger to the passion. By the help of the active and plastic powers of the imagination, any and every hero of a novel could be made, at pleasure, to appear the exact resemblance of each lady's different lover. Some, indeed, professed a peculiar and absolute exclusive attachment, founded ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... the ruler; there they grow, Weak as they are, on cliffs that few can climb. None to thy steps are inaccessible, Theodosia! wakening Italy with song Deeper than Filicaia's, or than his, The triple deity of plastic art. Mindful of Italy and thee, fair maid! I lay this sear, frail garland at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... of civilizations, seems to grow abundant as a nation gets older, individuality fades, and education spreads; that is, his brain had extraordinary receptive powers, and no great creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he saw around him, and having a plastic adaptability more common in woman than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the society he found himself in assumed a higher and more artificial tone. He had not many original ideas, and yet there was scarcely ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... invited him to consult the wants of the Norwich festival and to write in the cantata style. In the first act, however, there is little to praise outside of the settings of the two Anacreonic odes and the song to the shell. There is much striving, but a paucity of plastic ideas. What might have been an unconstrained lyrical outpouring, the prologue, mere thundering in the index, because of the composer's mistaken impression that it ought to be tragic, and in the "Ercles vein." When the rites begin and a swelling paean is expected, there is much making ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... vision of the pre-Christian civilisation in Greece and Rome, as yet little affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts, by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well to follow the example, in this ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the other hand, we fear it likely to be studied to little effect by such as receive with indiscriminate and phlegmatic avidity all that is handed down to them in the shape of experience or time-sanctioned rule. But plastic art claims not merely our sympathy, in its highest capacity to emit thought and sentiment; but as form, colour, light, life, and beauty; and who shall settle the claims between thought and beauty? But art has beauties of its own, which neither impair nor contradict ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... pointed sticks, a thin-bladed knife, and squares of white muslin of various degrees of fineness. She talked and modelled, and we listening watched the fascinating process; saw her take the plastic substance, fashion a duck with ducklings on a pond, a lamb curled up asleep, and a couched lion with shaggy head resting upon his fore-paws. We watched her press beads of proper size and color into the eye sockets; skilfully finish the base upon which each figure lay; then twist ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... modern home owners want to stop sending yard wastes to landfills. These days householders may be offered incentives (or threatened with penalties) by their municipalities to separate organic, compostable garbage from paper, from glass, from metal or from plastic. Individuals who pay for trash pickup by volume are finding that they can save considerable amounts of money by recycling their own ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... slavery to prominence, the many trials encountered along the road has ripened the always sympathetic nature of Dr. Buckner into a responsive suffer among a suffering people. He has hope that proper influences and sympathetic advice will mould the plastic character of the Afro-American youths of the United States into proper citizens and that their immortal souls inherit the promised reward of the redeemed ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... better way. The stingaree poses for his picture. The picture is used as a model for making a kite, probably of black plastic. The kite gets ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... direct. It was deemed a pointed and ungracious attack on executive policy. It must therefore be softened, modified, qualified, made to sound less harsh to the ears of men in power, and to assume a plausible, polished, inoffensive character. It was accordingly put into the plastic hands of friends of the executive to be moulded and fashioned, so that it might have the effect of ridding the country of the obnoxious order, and yet not appear to question executive infallibility. All this did ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... freight runs and we'd been awarded the refuel rights for two years because of our orbital position. The servos themselves were beautiful pieces of machinery and just about as close as science had come so far to producing the pure android. Every one of them was plastic hand-molded and of course they were equipped with rationaloid circuits. They had to be to ferry those big cargoes back and forth from the rock belt to Frisco. As rationaloids, Minor Planets had to pay them wages under California law, but I'll bet it wasn't half ...
— The Love of Frank Nineteen • David Carpenter Knight
... various influences which, during the plastic years of boyhood and youth, went to shape the outlook of the future Chief Justice high rank must be accorded his pioneer life. It is not merely that the spirit of the frontier, with its independence of precedent and its audacity of initiative, breathes through his great constitutional ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... a much smaller number of dicotyledonous plants. (a) Clay and tertiary sandstone with lignites; plastic clay; mollasse and nagelfluhe, sometimes alternating where chalk is wanting, with the last beds of Jura limestone; amber. (b) Limestone of Paris or coarse limestone, limestone with circles, limestone of Bolca, limestone of London, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... inclines to the didactic and the allegorical; but here, also, the same power of personification comes to his aid, and as, in the one case, he finds a soul for his bodies, so, in the other, he finds a body for his souls. As the ancient poets, and others who have been developed through a plastic sentiment for Art, introduce loftier spirits, related to the gods,—such as nymphs, dryads, and hamadryads,—in the place of rocks, fountains, and trees: so the author transforms these objects into peasants, and countrifies [verbauert] the universe ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... could trace Thine unrestricted course, Though Fancy followed with immortal force? There's not a blossom fondled by the breeze, There's not a fruit that beautifies the trees, There's not a particle in sea or air, But nature owns thy plastic influence there! With fearful gaze, still be it mine to see How all is fill'd and vivified by Thee; Upon thy mirror, earth's majestic view, To paint Thy Presence, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... But these things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty. For this, Art is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word, Life is Art's best, Art's only pupil.—The Decay ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... recognition, never disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the divine message which he felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a slow and serious person, a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain rigidity, not to say narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament which we associate with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess, or it hardened early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his sympathies. He {231} touched life at fewer points than Byron and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... a mere babe of three or four years learn in Sabbath-school? sneers the critic. Not much, I grant you, of justification by Faith, or Effectual Calling; but certain elementary precepts can be impressed upon the mind while it is still in a plastic condition that never can be wholly obliterated, come what may in after life. Prime among these elementary precepts is this: "Always bring ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... in the causes of plasticity of clay and in its manner of hardening when dried. In general these phenomena have been found to be due to content of colloidal substances of a clayey nature, which serve not only to hold the substance together during plastic flow but to bind it during drying. The part played by colloids in the formation of clays, as well as of many other mineral products, is now a question ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... for the folly of the over-production—and its consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood—of yesterday. To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our surplus children of to-day. The child-laborer of one or two decades ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, stunted, underfed, illiterate, unskilled, unorganized and unorganizable. "He ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... bent over to examine the sign. Sure enough, it was the track of a man's knee; and the plastic mud exhibited on its surface a print of fretted lines, which must have been ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Socialist State can exist, no better State can exist, than the one we have now with all its squalor and cruelty. Every change in human institutions must happen concurrently with a change of ideas. Upon this plastic, uncertain, teachable thing Human Nature, within us and without, we have, if we really contemplate Socialism as our achievement, to impose guiding ideas and guiding habits, we have to co-ordinate all the Good Will that is active ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... walk,—often pausing,—often leaning over his staff,—and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler's door. The Main Street is still youthful; the coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forget her in the pursuit of glory, she would have us while away our prime within the harem, and play for ever round her knees. And has not the elect soul a father, too, whom it knows not? Hector, he who is without—unconfined, unconditioned by Nature, yet its husband?—the all-pervading, plastic Soul, informing, organising, whom men call Zeus the lawgiver, Aether the fire, Osiris the lifegiver; whom here the poet has set forth as the defender of the mystic city, the defender of harmony, and order, and beauty throughout the universe? Apart ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... temperature above that of the viscous state, be let fall into water, the drops will be solidified in the effort to form the ring, and the circular button, thick in the rim and thin in the center, may be regarded as a solidified vortex ring of plastic sulphur. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... believe the stories I have got from his family connexions (such as his wife’s sisters) of his appearance in youth. With the single exception of Tennyson, he was the most poetical-looking poet I have ever seen. And circumstances put to the best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic period of his life that he met the best people on the Continent and in England. I suspect, indeed, that after the plastic period in a man’s life is passed it is not of much use for him to come into contact with what used to be called “the great world.” To be, or to seem to be, unconscious ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... preoccupied in connecting other public lines with private surveys as I looked in his face. It was certainly a hard face, and reminded me of the singular effect of that mining operation known as "ground sluicing"; the harder lines of underlying character were exposed, and what were once plastic curves and soft outlines were obliterated by ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... ceaseless attempts at making? Froebel's answer was that intellectually, through making he gains ideas, which, received in words, remain mere words. "To learn through life and action is more developing than to learn through words: expression in plastic material, united with thought and speech, is far more developing than mere repetition of words." Morally, it is through impressing himself on his surroundings, that the child reaches the human attributes of self-consciousness and self-control. One of the most important ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... attention has been drawn to the classical nobility from which Berlioz's art so spontaneously springs. It is not fully acknowledged that he was, of all nineteenth-century musicians, the one who had in the highest degree the sense of plastic beauty. Nor do people always recognise that he was a writer of sweet and flowing melodies. Weingartner expressed the surprise he felt when, imbued with current prejudice against Berlioz's lack of melodic invention, he ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... creating that contrast between the new and the old, so stimulating to the new itself. For the impulse to originate operates best alongside of and in opposition to the desire to conserve. France has been the great originator in the plastic arts during recent times; but it has also been the only country where a genuine traditional standard has existed. When tradition is based on experiments, as in art, it cannot be in essence hostile to them. And all valid aesthetic principles are sufficiently broad and ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... mind. Its influence is most telling in the various Faculties where students specialize for their future career. For Philosophy plays such a large part in human life, the movement of opinions and the direction of minds. The Catholic student in those most plastic years, in that critical period of receptivity, wherein ideas are analyzed and synthesized for life time, cannot help but imbibe ideas and doctrines opposed to his belief. The elite alone, we believe, can resist in the long run the influence ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... that little mortal his gift for conversation, his profound knowledge, his easy gestures, his freedom of manners, that familiarity with which he could treat women! His beauty was plastic! ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... happiness. But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So, striving to divert her thoughts, Emma determined now to see in this reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well enough to please the eye, and she even smiled internally with disdainful pity when at the back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man appeared in ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... me in the same way.[219] All entities, O son of Kunti, attain to my nature at the close of a Kalpa. I create them again at the beginning of a Kalpa.[220] Regulating my own (independent) nature I create again and in this whole assemblage of entities which is plastic in consequence of its subjection to nature.[221] Those acts, however, O Dhananjaya, do not fetter me who sitteth as one unconcerned, being unattached to those acts (of creation). Through me, the overlooker, primal nature produceth ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... in his mellow bass. "How are you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia's approach, where woman, das ewig Weibliche, enters into conflict ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... A plastic power Abode with me, a forming hand, at times Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, A local spirit of its own, at war With general tendency, but for the most Subservient strictly to external things With which it communed. An auxiliary light Came from my mind which on ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... poet, was the exact opposite of Zhukovsky, being the first to grasp the real significance of the mood of the ancient classical poets, and to appropriate not only their views on life and enjoyment, but even their plastic and thoroughly artistic mode of expression. While Zhukovsky removed poetry from earth and rendered it ethereal, Batiushkoff fixed it to earth and gave it a body, demonstrating all the entrancing charm of tangible reality. Yet, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... absorpt is yellow care, And at each puff imagination burns: Flash on thy bard, and with exalting fires Touch the mysterious lip that chants thy praise In strains to mortal sons of earth unknown. Behold an engine, wrought from tawny mines Of ductile clay, with plastic virtue formed, And glazed magnific o'er, I grasp, I fill. From Paetotheke with pungent powers perfumed, Itself one tortoise all, where shines imbibed Each parent ray; then rudely rammed, illume With the red touch of zeal-enkindling sheet, Marked with Gibsonian lore; forth issue clouds Thought-thrilling, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... joined him in the worship of machinery, and they came buoyantly up to the tenement and began that examination of plastic slate roof, kalamein doors, and seven-eighths-inch blind-nailed flooring, began those diplomacies of hurt surprise and readiness to be persuaded to do something they had already decided to do, which would some day ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... from Zary, but that had not prevented Fenwick from behaving in a dastardly fashion. It seemed to him as if Fate were playing into his hands by bringing Evors here at this moment. Hitherto he had found Evors such plastic material that he had never seriously considered him in the light of a foe. Now, for the first time, he saw how greatly he ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... necessity of the carnivorous appetite of replacing the bodily waste, by the azote contained in animal tissues. The lungs are satisfied with a provision of vegetable and farinaceous food. But to be strong and active the body must be supplied with those plastic elements that renew the muscles. Until the Maories become members of the Vegetarian Association they will eat meat, and ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... manner in which the striking characters were produced, so as to convey words and ideas through their variety of combinations. I soon perceived that the simple but distinctive characters shown in the above representations were essentially connected with the employment of plastic clay; this being the material most suitable for their impression, by means of a three-sided instrument or stylus. The angular extremity of this instrument, when depressed into the surface of a tablet ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... I'd like to know who's to blame, if he isn't. Wishes me to bring my Shakspeare along;—it's a wonder he had not said Plotinus, or Jacob Boehme's 'Aurora'; they're more in his style. The deuse take that boy and his picture, Ned! What if we two fools have been playing too roughly with such plastic clay? I wish to-night were come and gone safely. I'll go see Dr. Thorne, and ask him to accompany us to-night. He claims to be something of a connoisseur, and the picture is really worth seeing, if the lad has not spoiled it with his 'final touches'. And anyhow, the boy will be a study ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... between Central Asian and Central American art, both in architectural forms and plastic and sculptured remains. He thinks that its tradition was transmitted from Asia to America in the third and fourth centuries of our era. If so, it was an unlucky moment for the recipients, as the art of Asia, as well as that of Europe, was then at ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... both of mind and body, might be comprised in the homely eulogy, "as blithe as bonnie." So it may be, that if you are alarmed at the humility of the occupation of the one—even with your remembrance that Sir Isaac Newton experimented upon soap-bubbles—as being so intractable in the plastic-work of romance, you may be appeased by the qualities of the other; for has it not been our delight to sing for a thousand years, yea, in a thousand songs, too, the praises of young damsels, whether under the names of Jenny or Peggy, or those of Clarinda or Florabella, or whether ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... intended to answer the question, What brought the moon into that position, close to the surface of the earth? We will only say that there is the gravest reason to believe that the moon was, at some very early period, fractured off from the earth when the earth was in a soft or plastic condition. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... anything different before her eyes, who knows what plans for domestic reform might have taken shape in the girl's plastic brain? Emeline had never seen one example of real affection and cooperation between mother and daughters, of work quickly and skilfully done and forgotten, of a clean bright house and a blossoming garden; she had never heard a theory ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... unfortunate characters to have any, and not only was she a consummate master of words and of the art of suggestion, but she had been brought up by finicky parents who held that certain words were not to be used in refined society. The impressions received in plastic years were not to be obliterated by any ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... melodious. He sang in beautiful, tempered strains, along the middle octaves, never ranging high into the treble or deep into the base. There is a certain Tennysonian sweetness, artistic self-restraint, and plastic simplicity in his lyrics; just as there is in Wergeland's reformatory ardor, his noble rage, and his piling up of worlds, aeons, and eternities a striking kinship to Shelley. But both these poets, though their ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... made by curdling milk with rennet, warming and fermenting the curd, heating it until it is plastic, drawing it into ropes and then kneading and shaping while hot. Provolone, Caciocavallo and Mozzarella are ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... called the "beautiful" Braschi, well deserved that epithet. No nobler or more plastic beauty was to be seen; no face that more reminded one of the divine beauty of ancient sculpture, no form that could be called a better counterfeit of the Belvedere Apollo. And it was this beauty which liberal Nature ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... and without accomplishments," adding rather whimsically that this person, "the reverse of handsome," had "a pretty figure, beautiful black hair and magnificent eyes," and though "without accomplishments" had "a very strong natural turn for plastic art." At any rate she seems to have suited Leigh Hunt admirably. The Examiner soon became ill-noted with Government, but it was not till the end of 1812 that a grip could be got of it. Leigh Hunt's offence is in the ordinary books rather undervalued. That ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... part of Italy during the thirteenth century, otherwise a statue so imbued with true classical feeling and so correct in technical finish as that of Sigilgaita in Ravello Cathedral could never have been produced; yet the names of the artist or artists who thus anticipated the great plastic revival remain undiscovered. Portrait-busts, similar in treatment and idea to that of the so-called Sigilgaita, are to be found here and there in museums, but this effigy in remote Ravello remains unique amidst its ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... because the material in which the literary artist works is the dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of address to the public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thoughts build up the body in vigour and grace. The body is a delicate and plastic instrument, which responds readily to the thoughts by which it is impressed, and habits of thought will produce their own effects, good or bad, ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... He was watching two men in white carefully wrapping the skull in a plastic bag. They tied it and carried it into the crystal cage. "And if I should make ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick
... of observation is naturally high at the Salon, quickened by a thousand artful or artless appeals, but it need have put forth no great intensity to take in the characters I mention. As a solicitation of the eye on definite grounds these visitors too constituted a successful plastic fact; and even the most superficial observer would have marked them as products of an insular neighbourhood, representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on the recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a holiday—Christmas and Easter, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... it was not possible to begin too early in implanting right habits and forming character. Poverty and crime, he believed, were results of errors in the various systems of education and government. So plastic was child nature, that society would be able to mould itself "into the very image of rational wishes and desires." That "the infants of any one class in the world may be readily formed into men of any other class," was a fundamental ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... figured prominently in Marescotti's creed, spite of his belief in the stern precepts of Savonarola—the plastic creed of an artist, made up of heavenly eyes, ravishing forms, melodious sounds, rich color, sweeping rhythms, ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... of mud is not confined to the method given, but great quantities of this plastic material flow at times from volcanic craters. In the year 1691 Imbaburu, one of the peaks of the Andes, sent out floods of mud which contained dead fish in such abundance that their decay caused a fever in the vicinity. The volcanoes ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... chief patrons, the Burgomaster Tulp. Of the masters who have striven pre-eminently after truth he is, beyond all question, one of the greatest that ever lived. In order to succeed in this aim, he acquired a correctness of drawing, a kind of modelling which imparts an almost plastic effect to his animals, an extraordinary execution of detail in the most solid impasto, and a truth of colouring which harmonises astonishingly with the time of day. In his landscapes, which generally consist of a few willows in the foreground, and of a wide view over meadows, ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... stage is that of catalepsy, certainly not a healthy condition to be in. Its grand feature is a plastic immobility by which the subject maintains all the attitudes given to his body and limbs, but with this peculiarity, that the limbs and features act in unison. Join the hands of the patient as if ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... appear as if the reproductive powers failed in their ordinary function of producing new organic beings closely like their parents; and as if the entire organization of the embryo, under domestication, became in a slight degree plastic{196}. We shall hereafter have occasion to show, that in organic beings, a considerable change from the natural conditions of life, affects, independently of their general state of health, in another and remarkable manner the reproductive system. I may add, judging from the vast ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... Corinthians—doubtless all these and many others have transmitted their blood down to our ages, and are now living amongst us by representation. But why do we not perceive this? Why do the Athenians seem to have perished utterly? Simply for this reason: they were a plastic, yielding, unobstinate race. An Athenian lived in a port of Italy, married an Italian woman; thence threw out lines of descent to Milan, thence to Paris; and because his Attic usages were all local, epichorial, and tied ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... but you call [it] careening of an old morphewed lady, to make her disembogue again: there 's rough-cast phrase to your plastic. ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... he had a milk-and-roses complexion, and a babe's capacity for, and love of, liquid refreshment. Perhaps the archdeacon thought that the West was a sort of kindergarten, where children like The Babe are given, at small expense, object-lessons and exercises peculiarly adapted to young and plastic minds. In Central America certain tribes living by the seaboard throw their children into the surf, wherein they sink or learn to swim, as the Fates decree. ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... write that 'we may know the certainty of the things which are most surely believed' in their day. They 'bear record of what they have seen and heard.' I know not how stronger words could have been used to prevent the notion of that plastic, growing myth which Strauss conceives to have been ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... coachman's wig, this work of primaeval art was already hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying, already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess authentic records of man's abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... tumult outside the wide-open gap in the Shed's wall. Something went shrieking by the doorway. It looked like the magnified top half of a loaf of baker's bread, painted gray and equipped with an air-scoop in front and a plastic bubble for a pilot. It howled like a lost baby dragon, its flat underside tilted up and up until it was almost vertical. It had no wings, but a blue-white flame spurted out of its rear, wobbling from ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... as fame. Think of that subtle, all-embracing, plastic, mysterious, irresistible thing called public opinion, the god of this lower world, and consider what a State, or a cluster of States, of marked and acknowledged literary and intellectual lead might do to color and shape that opinion to their will. Consider how winged are words; how electrical, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... cloud of rapidly-moving, evanescent forms, has already been described; we have now to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish. The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a living being of appropriate form—a being which when once thus created is in no way under the control of its creator, but lives out a life of its own, the length of which is proportionate ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... ancient as harmony is of modern music. On the imaging arts, Hemsterhuys made this ingenious remark, that the ancient painters were perhaps too much of sculptors, modern sculptors too much of painters. This touches the very point of difference; for the spirit of collective ancient art and poetry is plastic, as that of the modern is picturesque." And again: "The Pantheon is not more different from Westminster Abbey or the Church of St. Stephen at Vienna than the structure of a tragedy of Sophocles from a drama of Shakespeare. The comparison between these ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... and human laws he knew to be often only blinds for the concealment of plastic iniquity, and were secretly purchased by the few who had the gold ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... effort of concentration, gazing into the thin light of the dying fire and two watery tallow dips. Her coarsely spun dress, coloured with sassafras bark and darker than the yellow hickory stain, drew about her fine shoulders and full, plastic breast. "I'd like it," she repeated; "but afterward. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... reflection. They have their own inspirations. Young Powell's inspiration consisted in being "enthusiastic" about Mrs Anthony. 'Enthusiastic' is really good. And he was amongst them like a child, sensitive, impressionable, plastic—but unable to find for himself ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... society, his mind did not rust from the want of intelligent companions. The clear perception, accurate knowledge, and unerring judgment of Trenchard, the fantastic cynicism of St. Barbe, and all the stores of the exuberant and imaginative Waldershare, were brought to bear on a young and plastic intelligence, gifted with a quick though not a too profound sensibility which soon ripened into tact, and which, after due discrimination, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... what we may term palimpsests, new expressions imposed upon the antique, artistic imaginings instead of historical reproductions. The so-called fascination of the past depends in part upon these expressions of ours, which we weave into historical expressions. Thus in hellenic plastic art has been discovered the calm and serene intuition of life of those peoples, who feel, nevertheless, so poignantly, the universality of sorrow; thus has recently been discerned on the faces of the Byzantine saints "the terror ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... (1743-17—?); he is a great unknown. Nobody can accuse him of anything dishonest or dishonourable. When he was here before we were all mad about music, and so he enchanted us with his violin. But Italy knows him as an expert in the plastic arts, and Germany admires in him a master in chemical science. In France, where he was supposed to possess the secret of the transmutation of metals, the police for two years sought and failed to find ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... strange. Of course, there are men to whom one great city is as another—commercial travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically strange, while ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... alone can expression be perfectly given to the finest perceptions and emotions. The Greek has the same perceptive, emotional temperament as the Celt; but he adds to this temperament the sense of MEASURE; hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in which the Celtic genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual straining after mere emotion, has accomplished nothing. In the comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches, crosiers, relic-cases, and so on, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... to be sung, if only with one finger, which has done much to console me for the technical powers nature has so plentifully denied me. I offer the same solution to all others who are in my case, only suggesting that it would be wise of them, perhaps, to learn while they are yet plastic the use of all ten fingers. They will not thereby secure ten times as much enjoyment, but their families will ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... moving portrait raise, Each rival stroke the force of life conveys; Heroes and beauties round their tablets stand, And rise unfading from their plastic hand; Each breathing form preserves its wonted grace, And all the Soul ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... Dickens was reporter on the staff of a newspaper; he had written a book which, although successful, had created no very intense excitement; he was moreover a young man, and consequently plastic, and fifteen pounds a month would be a small fortune to him; so at least argued the artist and his friends. How little they understood the resolute, self-reliant character of this unknown writer! The result was altogether different ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... door. It was a heavy plastic irising door. It was locked and naturally would not respond to the whorl patterns of ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance
... "But God be thanked, that ye have obeyed from the heart that pattern of doctrine to which ye were delivered," writes the apostle (Rom. 6: 17). The pattern, as the context shows, is Christ dead and risen. If the church truly lives in the Spirit, he will keep her so plastic that she will obey this divine mold as the metal conforms to the die in which it is struck. If she yields to the sway of "the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience," she will be stereotyped according to the fashion of the world, and they that look upon her will fail ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... has frequently treated these domestic occupations. The Attic divinities, Athene Ergane and Aphrodite Urania, as well as the Argive Here, Ilithyia, the protecting goddess of child-bearing, Persephone, and Artemis, all these plastic art represents as goddesses of fate, weaving the thread of life, and, at the same time, protecting female endeavors; in which two-fold quality they have the emblem of domestic activity, the distaff, as their attribute. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... began skidding, then held firm to the two guy ropes remaining. A horde of gray creatures hurled themselves on those lines as a hatchway opened above and a ladder dropped down. The men scurried up the ropes just as the plastic dome of the Control Tower sank ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... when zeal is ardent, was added fraudulently to truth, as if error or falsehood were the inevitable alloy of truth, and even the virtues of the human mind: they called up past ages, summoned spectres, and the dead were heard to speak. They played upon the plastic imagination of princes, by rapid transition from terror to enthusiasm. The knowledge of the phantasmagoria, then but little known, served as an auxiliary in these deceptions. On the death of Frederic II., his successor submitted to such ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... these were the preludes, we can understand how there might well be something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way of thought and in the style of the young men who read them during the plastic period of their minds and characters. Allow for all these influences, allow for whatever impressions his German residence and his familiarity with German literature had produced; accept the fact that the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... apparently not sophisticated, as were most of the young women at home whom I knew intimately (as were the Watling twins, for example, with one of whom, Frances, I had had, by the way, rather a lively flirtation the spring before); she seemed refreshingly original, impressionable and plastic.... ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... universe, the Athenian sage was incapable of conceiving how the simple unity of his essence could admit the infinite variety of distinct and successive ideas which compose the model of the intellectual world; how a Being purely incorporeal could execute that perfect model, and mould with a plastic hand the rude and independent chaos. The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties, which must ever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold modification—of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... doubly so if you give me proofs that you believe in her." And the Duchess, appearing to consider that with this she had made herself clear and her interlocutor plastic, rose in confident majesty. "I leave ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... retarding the earth, must also push the moon out from the parent planet on a spiral orbit. Plainly, then, the moon must formerly have been nearer the earth than at present. At some very remote period it must have actually touched the earth; must, in other words, have been thrown off from the then plastic mass of the earth, as a polyp buds out from its parent polyp. At that time the earth was spinning about in a day of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... still kept well within constructional expediency—were doubtless covered with a coating of plaster where they occurred inside of the rooms. At Tusayan and Cibola, on the other hand, the tendency has been rather to elaborate the plastic element of the masonry. The nearly universal use of adobe is undoubtedly largely responsible for the more slovenly methods of building now in vogue, as it effectually conceals careless construction. It is not to be expected ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... greatly in appearance, organization and life-history. They are so very plastic that they can adapt themselves readily to their various hosts, hence we have a great variety of forms. But they all agree in certain characters; all take their food and oxygen and carry on excretory processes by osmosis, i.e., through the body-wall; all ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... away, the farthest horizon ended, chopped off like a cliff. Beyond lay the stars, crowding that night which never ends. It grew very still while the gang waited for his word. He could listen to his own lungs and pulse, loud in the spacesuit; he could even notice its interior smell, blend of plastic and oxygen cycle chemicals, flesh and sweat. He was used to the sensation of hanging upside down on the surface, grip-soled boots holding him against that fractional gee by which the asteroid's rotation overcame its feeble gravity. But it came to him that this was ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... morals and conventions are no longer absolute. Sudden crises threaten the stability of nations and civilizations. Safety lies alone in the ability to go forward, to progress. Psychology teaches us that if authoritative opinions, convictions, or "complexes" are stamped upon the plastic brain of the youth they tend to harden, and he is apt to become a Democrat or Republican, an Episcopalian or a Baptist, a free trader or a tariff advocate or a Manchester economist without asking why. Such "complexes" ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... limestone that rest upon the shale have generally avoided crumpling or distortion, and thus give the mountain views the appearance of having had all the upper surfaces rolled flat when they were in a plastic condition. Denudation and the action of ice in the glacial epochs have worn through the hard upper stratum, and formed the long and narrow dales; and in Littondale, Wharfedale, Wensleydale, and many other parts, one may plainly see the perpendicular ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... on her way, undeluded by specious promises of easier methods, inuring her students to toil as the price of success; not rigid and motionless, but plastic and adapting herself to the necessities of different minds; yet never confounding things that differ, nor vainly hoping on a narrow basis of culture to rear the superstructure of the broadest attainment and character, but ever determined to make her instructions the most truly ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... you will be content with our Asa San," he said; "the character is still plastic. In England it is different; but in France and in Japan we say it is the husband who must make the character of his wife. She is the plain white paper; let him take his brush and write on it what he will. Asa San is a very sweet girl. She is very easy to manage. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... ingenious. No one who has ever written verse but must have felt the pain of erasing some happy line, some striking stanza, which, however excellent in itself, did not exactly suit the place for which it was destined. How curiously does an author mould and remould the plastic verse in order to fit in the favourite thought; and when he finds that he cannot introduce it, as Corporal Trim says, any how, with what reluctance does he at last reject the intractable, but still cherished offspring of his brain! Mr. Tennyson manages ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... some strong good man had often passed this way. I saw the mystic sign of him deep-lettered in the hearthstone of a home; I heard it speaking bravely from the weak lips of a friend; it is carved in the plastic heart of many a boy. No, I do not doubt the immortalities of the soul; in this community, which I have come to love so much, dwells more than one of John North's immortalities—and will continue to dwell. I, too, live more deeply because ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... by comparison with the heroine. Of her we hear no end of praise. Her delicacy, her plastic simplicity, the simple elegance of her attire, her indescribable air of polish, her surpassing beauty and modesty of mien, are referred to again and again. She is simple, she is feminine, she is dignified. To men her smiles are ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... The change that had come to his old pupil was marked enough. Strickland's mind dwelt on the old laird. Was that the personality, not of one, but of two, of the whole line, perhaps, developing all the time, step by step with what seemed the plastic, otherwise, free time of youth, appearing always in due season, when its hour struck? Would Alexander, with minor differences, repeat his father? How of the mother? Would the father drown the mother? In the enormous all-one, the huge blend, what would arrive? Out of all fathers and mothers, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... "unpremeditated song." And let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the "Orlando Furioso." Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 'Gertrude of Wyoming,' may be compared to those segments of the showery arch we see in a disordered evening sky; but he has reared no complete 'bow of God.' Moore's 'Lalla Rookh' is an elegant and laborious composition—not a shapely building; it is put together by skilful art, not formed by plastic power. Byron's poems are, for the most part, disjointed but melodious groans, like those of Ariel from the centre of the cloven pine; 'Childe Harold' is his soliloquy when sober—'Don Juan' his soliloquy when half-drunk; the 'Corsair' ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... but was educated and has resided in France. He attracted notice among the Parnassiens by the degree of perfection with which he rendered in words the element of plastic beauty and the rare finish and precision of his style. He has used almost exclusively the form of the sonnet, to which he has given a new ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
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