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More "Retentive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "And a highly retentive memory. It seems she was shown over our place in Surrey last summer. She described it to me in the most perfect detail. She must be ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to his turn to speak, he said: 'My tale is but short, although story-telling is my profession. I am the son of a schoolmaster, who, perceiving that I was endowed with a very retentive memory, made me read and repeat to him most of the histories with which our language abounds; and when he found that he had furnished my mind with a sufficient assortment, he turned me out into the world under the garb ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... the books at his command served to develop his mental powers rapidly, giving him a retentive memory, correct forms of speech and a keen power of analysis. This faculty grew largely out of his special fondness for the study of mathematics, by which he acquired unusual facility in solving difficult problems. He early won the reputation of being the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... political, literary, and, for a boy, is very positive in them and sure about them; but he gets them from his schoolfellows, or his masters, or his parents, as the case may be. Such as he is in his other relations, such also is he in his school exercises; his mind is observant, sharp, ready, retentive; he is almost passive in the acquisition of knowledge. I say this is no disparagement of the idea of a clever boy. Geography, chronology, history, language, natural history, he heaps up the matter of these studies as treasures for a future day. It is the seven ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... of this war, very singular skill is manifested. A keen observer of all that passed before him, aided by a most retentive memory, and a fertile imagination, enabled our pilgrim forefather to gain much knowledge in a short time. He had been engaged, as a private soldier, in the Civil war; and was at the siege of Leicester, when it was ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... seas. In all scholarship, it chanced that this same boy, Grant Harlson, was easily in the lead. His mother, an ex-teacher in another and older State, loving, regardful, tactful, had taught him how to read and comprehend, and he had something of a taste that way and a retentive memory. So, inside the rugged schoolroom, he had a certain prestige. ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... own apotheosis among their kindred. They have had a strong natural yearning, not so much for applause as sympathy, which the cold fortune of their lifetime did but scantily supply; so that this unsatisfied appetite may make itself felt upon sensibilities at once so delicate and retentive, even a step or two beyond the grave. Leigh Hunt, for example, would be pleased, even now, if he could learn that his bust had been reposited in the midst of the old poets whom he admired and loved; though there ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... retentive mind had seized, long ago, on Rowlatt's recommendation at the Little Bear Inn, and he had developed, perhaps half consciously, a half sense of humour. A whole sense, however, is not congruous with the fervid beliefs and soaring ambitions of eighteen. Your sense of humour, that delicate percipience ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... scenes of travel or adventure in the great unbroken regions sought out by the fur trade, their retentive memories reproducing by the winter fireside or summer camp pictures so graphic as to commend themselves ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... things ambitiously that despises his neighbor proudly and bears his crosses peevishly or his prosperity impotently and passionately he that is a prodigal of his precious time and is tenacious and retentive of evil purposes is not a man disposed to this exercise: he hath reason to be afraid of his own memory and to dash his glass in pieces because it must needs represent to his own eyes an intolerable deformity. JEREMY TAYLOR, Holy ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... soil it is well to put at the bottom of the stone coating a layer of large stones, set on their broadest edges and lengthwise across the road in the form of a pavement. This is called a Telford road, and has advantages over the McAdam road in a soil retentive of moisture, as the layer of large stones operates as an under drain to the ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... the later happenings, including the final escape into Holland—are matters of official record and as such have frequently been mentioned in the official dispatches. The more personal details are based on the recollections of Corporal Edwards' retentive mind, aided by his very unusual powers of observation and the rough diary which he managed to retain possession ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... of Shakespeare, so far as I could judge, had been acquired through the theatre. The unacted plays were not familiar to him. Few people realize what a person of alert intelligence and retentive memory can learn of the best English literature through the theatre-going habit. Measuring Field's opportunity by my own, during the decade from 1873 to 1883, here is a list of Shakespearian plays he could have taken in through eyes and ears ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... for number, like grasshoppers upon the face of the land. You understand well enough, nor is it needful further to explain it to you, that the Utopian men had so rank and fruitful genitories, and that the Utopian women carried matrixes so ample, so gluttonous, so tenaciously retentive, and so architectonically cellulated, that at the end of every ninth month seven children at the least, what male what female, were brought forth by every married woman, in imitation of the people of Israel in Egypt, if Anthony (Nicholas) de ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... shown him all over the establishment (innocently enough, en route, furnishing him with a complete list of his other guests and their rooms: memoranda readily registered by a retentive memory) Lanyard chose the bed-chamber next that occupied by ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 very retentive of water, gases, and soluble plant-foods, which are important factors in successful agriculture. Soils, in fact, are classified according to the amount of clay that they contain. Hilgard suggests ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... observed; while in other forms of lessons the attention may be diverted for a moment to return to the consideration of exactly what was being observed before. It goes without saying that in one case quick and accurate observation, a retentive memory, and the association of causes and effects follow, and that in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... the tenth century, the high pitch at which the poetry of the Holy Rood has arrived, and the expansion given to the subject of the Day of Judgment. If we consider his language and manner, we remark the facility and copious flow of his poetic diction, but with a something that suggests the retentive mind of the student; his cumulation of old heroic phraseology not unlike the romantic poetry of Scott, joined occasionally with a departure from old poetic usage which seems like a slip on the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... extensively, and this grain is growing in favor with us. White people generally prefer wheat, which is an excellent grain that has been used by man for thousands of years. It has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and it is so retentive of life that it has started to grow after lying dormant for several thousand years. Truly it is a ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... scholars speak lightly of this multifarious knowledge, and nothing can be more probable, than that attainment of many languages, with any approach to their fluent use, is beyond the power of man. But his diligence was exemplary, his memory retentive, and his understanding accomplished by classical knowledge; with those qualities, much might be done in any pursuit; and though modern orientalists protest against the superficiality of his acquirements, their variety has been admitted, and still ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... days Aladdin matured enormously, for though a kind neighbor took him in, together with his brother Jack and the yellow cat, he had suffered many things and already sniffed the wolf at the door. The kind neighbor was a widow lady, whose husband, having been a master carpenter of retentive habits, had left her independently rich. She owned the white-and-green house in which she lived, the plot of ground, including a small front and a small back yard, upon which it stood, and she spent with some splendor a certain income of three hundred and eighty-two dollars ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... indications.[49] A comparison with my mother's contemporary account of the incidents common to both proves my brother's narrative to be remarkably accurate. Indeed, though he disclaimed the possession of unusual powers of memory in general, he had a singularly retentive memory for facts and dates, and amused himself occasionally by exercising his faculty. He had, for example, a certain walking-stick upon which he made a notch after a day's march; it served instead of a diary, and years afterwards ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... it no hardship to walk any where within a radius of four or five miles, in the coldest weather, in order to attend a debating society. He was possessed of a large and varied stock of information and a very retentive memory, which enabled him to quote correctly nearly everything of importance with which he had ever been familiar. His ability in this direction, coupled with a keen sense of the ridiculous and satirical, rendered ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... citizens of Mecca: the frankness of his manner concealed the artifice of his views; and the habits of courtesy were imputed to personal friendship or universal benevolence. His memory was capacious and retentive; his wit easy and social; his imagination sublime; his judgment clear, rapid, and decisive. He possessed the courage both of thought and action; and, although his designs might gradually expand with his success, the first idea which he ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... qualifying the noun 'tree,' and casts its shade obliquely, which is an adverb governing the qualifying verb 'casts.'" Thus, as we walked, I proceeded to give her a definition of the various parts of speech with their relation one to another, and found her to be, on the whole, very quick and of a retentive memory. Encouraged thus, I plunged into my subject whole-heartedly and was discussing the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs when she checked me in full career ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... accomplishments and rhetorical arts,—a talent very rare and approaching to creative genius. But to his natural gifts—like Luther, or Henry Clay, born an orator—he added marvellous attainments. He had a most retentive memory. He was versed in the whole history of the world. He was always ready with apt illustrations, which gave interest and finish to his discourses. He was the most industrious and studious man of his age. His attainments were ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... Macallan to our hero, whose thirst for knowledge constantly made fresh demands upon the surgeon's fund of information; and, pedantic as his language may appear, it contained important truths, which were treasured up by the retentive ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... factory—this last, of course only referred to the engines employed on the main line, which he had an opportunity of seeing, and would miss when they were laid up for repair—and how this had had the pressure on its safety-valve increased, and this had been diminished. He had such a retentive memory for these and kindred facts, that I have seen the foreman of the works appeal to him for information, which was never lacking. His penchant was so well known that he had special permission for access to ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... spite of the moral certainties of the later guest, it was impossible to prove that Ramsdell was lying flagrantly. One could only smile, and hand in a card, with the agreeable surety that it would be referred to the upstairs potentate and pigeonholed in Ramsdell's retentive memory as ticket for admission later on, or else a permanent rejection label, past all argument ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Horse. A Beast Valiant, Strong, Nimble and Hardy, the Vivacity of whose Spirits, neither Heat can scorch, or dry up, nor Cold benumb or freez; he is Valiant, Watchfull, and Laborious, naturally Cleanly, and of exquisite Scent; Gentle and Loving to man, docile, and of a retentive Memory, and Apt or Fit for the performing any Service wherein man employes him. And for the Use of which I am now speaking (Racing) he ought to be endued with these Qualifications. That he have the Finest Cleanest Shape possible, and above all, Nimble, Quick, and Fiery, ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... there were societies having a definite membership, with initiatory rites and reciprocal duties. Each society had its peculiar songs; and there were officials chosen from among the members because of their good voices and retentive memories, to lead the singing and to transmit with accuracy the stories and songs of the society, which frequently preserved bits of tribal history. Fines were imposed upon any member who sang incorrectly, while ridicule always and everywhere followed a ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... case of Reynolds, his studies of types are the result of an exceptional power of observation coupled with a very retentive memory. His keen eye notes—often unconsciously, as he admits—the small eccentricities by which character is revealed; his sense of humour emphasises them, and his memory retains them. As a result, when he essays to portray ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... early school companion, who, having left the mountains earlier than I did, had now been a number of years in Edinburgh. Of excellent head and generous heart, he loved the wild, green, and deep solitudes of nature. The other—G. M'D.—was of powerful and bold intellect, and remarkable for a retentive memory. Each of us, partial to those regions where nature strives to maintain her own undisturbed dominion, on all holidays hied away from the city, to the woodland and mountainous haunts, or the loneliness of the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... constitution and genial humors carried him abroad into sunshine and enjoyment, Johnson's physical infirmities and mental gloom drove him upon himself; to the resources of reading and meditation; threw a deeper though darker enthusiasm into his mind, and stored a retentive memory with all kinds ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... of this speech as an indication to our government of what was likely to be the course of the Emperor, I determined to retain it in my mind; and, although my verbal memory has never been retentive, I was able, on returning to our legation, to write the whole of it, word for word. In the form thus given, it was transmitted to our State Department, where, a few years since, when looking over ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... a great consolation that Mr. Elton should not be really in love with her, or so particularly amiable as to make it shocking to disappoint him—that Harriet's nature should not be of that superior sort in which the feelings are most acute and retentive—and that there could be no necessity for any body's knowing what had passed except the three principals, and especially for her father's being given a moment's uneasiness ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... also, to train the mind to be logical, critical and balanced: it is good to cultivate a retentive memory and to store up useful facts. But if while you are aiming at intellectual fitness and alertness you allow these good things to obscure other and better things, if, in short, you let means become ends, you will never be healthy, because you will miss half ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... idea of doing. He wants to produce a sensation, and he leaves a permanent disgust not to be got rid of. Who does not remember odious images that can never be washed out from the consciousness which they have stained? A man's vocabulary is terribly retentive of evil words, and the images they present cling to his memory and will not loose their hold. One who has had the mischance to soil his mind by reading certain poems of Swift will never cleanse it ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that few men have been born with the material for self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry, a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but his views are familiar ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... applause for his fine singing and playing the piano, began telling the company about the strange convict who had converted the hangman. Mahin told his story very accurately, as he had a very good memory, which was all the more retentive because of his total indifference to those with whom he had to deal. He never paid the slightest attention to other people's feelings, and was therefore better able to keep all they did or said in his memory. He got interested in Stepan Pelageushkine, ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... of secrecy, must be esteemed a rich historical legacy. The cardinal's intellect, these envoys tell us, was wonderfully acute. He understood the point at which those who conversed with him were aiming when they had scarcely opened their mouth. His memory was more than usually retentive. He was well educated, and learned not only in Greek, Latin, and Italian, but in the sciences, and especially in theology. He had a rare gift of talking. In the fulfilment of his promises he was less famous. According to one ambassador, he had the reputation of rarely speaking the truth. Another ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... of wide reading with a retentive, memory. The name brought back instantly to him the remembrance of the sinister reputation of its owner—a notorious buck of the thirties—who had gambled and duelled and steeped himself in drink and debauchery, until even the vile ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... look out, and thus gather the facts as we choose. This is true wisdom. "Wisdom is the knowledge of God." Wisdom comes by intuition. It far transcends knowledge. Great knowledge, knowledge of many things, may be had by virtue simply of a very retentive memory. It comes by tuition. But wisdom far transcends knowledge, in that knowledge is a mere incident ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... tongue nor fingers are very retentive. But I shall not say anything to him about it. He would only begin a very long story with a very long face, and I see him far too seldom to tease him with affairs of business or conscience when I do see him. He never comes near our house, and when we go to see him he is generally ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... to entertain the ill-judged proposal of discarding these languages altogether from general education. If I had been by nature extremely quick of apprehension, or had possessed a very accurate and retentive memory, or were of a remarkably active and energetic character, the trial would not be conclusive; but in all these natural gifts I am rather below than above par; what I could do, could assuredly be done by any boy or girl of ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... between the ends of a fractured bone favours their union by promoting the formation of callus, and advocated the treatment of fractures by massage and movement, discarding almost entirely the use of splints and other retentive appliances. We were early convinced by the teaching of Lucas-Championniere, and have adopted his principles ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... Haliburton Laurie, who was one of the most deservedly loved men of his generation, fell in the Boer War in 1901. If he had not been a great soldier, Colonel Laurie would have been a great historian. His knowledge of history, more especially of military history, was profound, and his memory was singularly retentive. He had, moreover, a very sound judgment in the marshalling of facts. He had written with a pen of light the history of his regiment, which he loved, and which loved him, and on which in life and in death he had ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... her whole life out of doors, in heat and cold, storm and rain, she had come to be intimately acquainted with all the signs of foreboding change of weather, and was looked upon by her acquaintances as a perfect oracle. She had also a most retentive memory, and being of a joyous nature, with a bodily frame that never knew illness, had learnt every verse or melody that was sung within her hearing, until her mind became a very storehouse of songs. To John, old Granny Bains soon took a great liking, he being a devout listener, ready to ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... at once, for in a few months' time she will not open it to you; the old, bad relations will re-commence, the rancor will be born and grow, and another memory will be stored away in Ireland's capacious and retentive brain. ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... lying by disturbances of the apprehensive, retentive, and reproductive faculties will not be discussed here in detail. These undeniably have their influence in facilitating the mechanism of lying. But to attribute this phenomenon wholly to disturbances ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... with a mixture of contempt for my want of taste, and astonishment at my presumption. But before the reply had time to burst out from lips, at no time too retentive, I was told, that at the end of one week more I should be suffered to take my way; that week being devoted to a round of especial entertainments in honour of my brother's election; the whole to be wound up by that most preposterous of all delights, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... my mind (a slow but, perhaps retentive mind), all the bearings of the place, and all its opportunities, and even the curve of the stream along it, and the bushes near the door, I was much inclined to go farther up, and understand all the village. But a bar of red light across the river, some forty yards on above me, and crossing from ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... get back to Fulton. I'm going along like an old man I used to know who used to start to tell a story about his grandfather. He had an awfully retentive memory, and he never finished the story, because he switched off into something else. He used to tell about how his grandfather one day went into a pasture, where there was a ram. The old man dropped a silver dime in the grass, and stooped over to pick it up. The ram was observing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... are thoroughly inoculated with microorganisms that can consume cellulose and lignin. Even though it looks like humus, it has not yet fully decomposed. It does have a water-retentive, granular structure that facilitates the presence of air and moisture throughout the mass creating perfect conditions for microbial digestion to ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... Castiglione, may be said to have set the model of good breeding to all Europe, began life under the happiest auspices. From his tutor Odasio of Padua we hear that even in boyhood he cared only for study and for manly sports. His memory was so retentive that he could repeat whole treatises by heart after the lapse of ten or fifteen years, nor did he ever forget what he had resolved to retain. In the Latin and Greek languages he became an accomplished scholar,[1] and while he appreciated the poets, he showed peculiar aptitude ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... extemporaneous, and allusive to events passing around them. But what was passing around them? The grand events of a spirit-stirring war; occurrences likely to impress themselves, as the mystical legends of former times had done, upon their memory; besides which, a retentive memory was deemed a virtue of the first water, and was cultivated accordingly in those ancient times. Ballads at first, and down to the beginning of the war with Troy, were merely recitations, with an intonation. Then followed ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... ordeal was well done with. Her rapidly beating heart had now opportunity to lessen its pulsations, and as she soon realized that she was practically unnoticed, her natural calmness began to return to her. She remembered why she was there, and her discerning eye enabled her to stamp on a retentive memory the various particulars of so unaccustomed a spectacle whose very unfamiliarity made the greater impression upon the girl's mind. She moved away from the group, determined to saunter through the numerous rooms thrown open for the occasion, and ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... to exhort us to practise virtues, which, if we had been rightly educated, we should have practised from our earliest youth with as much facility as we read or write. If a child is to learn grammar, let him commence, every one will say, when young, while his memory is most retentive. If we are to teach him those principles which are to shape his destiny in life, and have their home in the heart, should we wait till it is least susceptible of impression? It cannot be denied that too much indifference prevails on this subject. We are apt ...
— Reflections on the Operation of the Present System of Education, 1853 • Christopher C. Andrews
... the matter away in a corner of his mind for the moment; the answer would come to him later on. He had a wonderfully retentive mind. Everything which he saw or heard seemed to make its corresponding impression somewhere in his brain; often without his being conscious of it; and these photographic impressions were always there ready for him when he wished ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... and political are ever to be found in islands, like Corsica, Sicily, Ireland; or in remote glens and mountains, such as those of Scotland or Greece. Men who live in New York, London, or Paris must be singularly retentive of passion to keep up even their own hatreds, not to speak of the hatreds of their ancestors. But it is alike the bane and blessing of lives spent in retirement and monotony to retain impressions for years, and live in the past almost more vividly than in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Leipzig. In 1636, his library and MSS. at Sellerhausen having been destroyed by fire, he removed to the Paulinum at Leipzig, where he died on the 17th of September 1658. Barth was a very voluminous writer; his works, which were the fruits of extensive reading and a retentive memory, are unmethodical and uncritical and marred by want of taste and of clearness. He appears to have been excessively vain and of an unamiable disposition. Of his writings the most important are; Adversaria ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... excellent practical abilities, possessed a most retentive memory, and a thorough knowledge of the most intricate windings of the human heart. Nothing escaped his observation. It would have been a difficult matter to have made a tool of one, whose suspicions were always wide awake; who never acted from impulse, or without a motive, and who had a shrewd ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... and desirous of the conversation of those from whom any information was to be obtained, but by no means solicitous to improve those opportunities that were sometimes offered of raising his fortune; and he was remarkably retentive of his ideas, which, when once he was in possession of them, rarely forsook him; a quality which could never ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... among the emotions that grew round that child-like heart; shame, fear, and grief, however they might overshadow it for a time, left no taint of their presence on its bright, fine surface. Tender, perilously alive to sensation, strangely retentive of kindness as she was by nature, the very solitude to which she had been condemned had gifted her, young as she was, with a martyr's endurance of ill, and with ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... note-book or journal, and as my memory is not a retentive one I have allowed much to escape which I should now vainly attempt to recall. Some things must, however, have made a vivid and durable impression on my mind, as fragments remain, after the lapse of years, far more distinct than occurrences of much more recent ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Ficus deserve to be mentioned, though this catalogue does not claim to be exhaustive. FICUS FASCICULATA, as the title implies, bears its inedible fruit in bundles, branches, trunk, and exposed roots, being alike fertile, and is almost as retentive of life as the cockatoo apple. Opposita is remarkable for varied form of foliage, referred to particularly elsewhere, and for ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... drank a cup of intoxication under which my brain reeled for many a year. The character of Shylock burst upon me, even as Shakspeare had conceived it. I revelled in the terrible excitement that it gave rise to; page after page was stereotyped upon a most retentive memory without an effort, and during a sleepless night I feasted on the pernicious sweets thus hoarded ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... described as being a fine figure, five feet ten inches in height; of a pleasing but grave countenance, and having strait black hair.[1] His natural qualities were excellent. He was possessed of a solid judgment, a ready and wonderfully retentive memory, an ardent love for truth, and a sweet disposition, mild, affectionate, and grateful. His religion was Mahometanism; but he rejected the idea of a sensual paradise, and several other traditions that are held among the Turks. The foundation ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... a remarkably retentive memory,—a thing which many of us spoil by trashy reading, or allowing our time and attention to be distracted by the trifles of every-day life,—Harriet had learned twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters of the Bible. She was exceedingly fond of reading, but there was little in a poor ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... resolutions which she herself had made. Now, as he often told himself, they were as completely separated as though each had determined never again to communicate with the other. Months had gone by since a word had passed between them. He was a man, patient, retentive, and by nature capable of enduring such a trouble without loud complaint; but he did remember from day to day how near they were to each other, and he did not fail to remind himself that he could hardly expect to find constancy ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... gentleman may ever break an engagement, whether it be one of business or pleasure, with a lady, or with another gentleman. If not blessed with a retentive memory, he must carry a note-book and record therein all his appointments, guarding, by frequent reference, against making two for the same day and hour. To break an engagement with a lady is almost certain to give lasting ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... arrangements stand unaltered," replied the Spaniard. "My directions were that you should repeat to me the order of your instructions and that I should judge for His Grace whether or not your memory is retentive. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... applause of the university for academical exercises:—And this was the more remarkable, that having turned his thoughts towards the ministry, he carried on his theological studies at the same time, and made great improvements therein, for his memory was so retentive, that he scarcely forgot any thing had heard or read. It was easy and ordinary for him to inscribe any sermon, after he returned to his chamber, at such a length, that the intelligent and judicious reader, who had heard it preached, would ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... by keeping the mind in a healthy condition; it enables a man to come off clear from a judicial inquiry; it qualifies him both to learn and to teach the law; it makes him eagerly listened to, to have a retentive ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... more, at the close of my two years of study. I should previously have been one year in a physician's office as a student, but this regulation was very easily evaded. As to my studies, the less said the better. I attended the quizzes, as they call them, pretty closely, and, being of a quick and retentive memory, was thus enabled to dispense with some of the six or seven lectures a day which duller men ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... grew older his ability to absorb learning increased astonishingly. His power of analysis, his keen perception and retentive memory soon advanced him beyond the youths of his own age, and forced him to seek outside the pale of the schoolroom for the means to satisfy his hunger for knowledge. He early began to haunt the bookstalls of Seville, and day after day ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... This word exhibits the opinion entertained by the Hindoos as to the close connection existing between a powerful intellect and a retentive memory. Such a quality indicates the highest kind of pundit: and it should be recollected that Saraswati is the divinity of wisdom, ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... treasuring their most weighty thoughts, and making the wisdom of the wise his own. Even under the harsh discipline of his former instructors, he had early given promise of distinction; and with favorable influences his mind rapidly developed. A retentive memory, a lively imagination, strong reasoning powers, and untiring application, soon placed him in the foremost rank among his associates. Intellectual discipline ripened his understanding, and aroused an activity of mind and a keenness of perception that were preparing him for the conflicts ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... the knowledge of the names of sorcerers is one thing, participation in their art another, and that it is not tantamount to confessing a crime to have one's brain well stored with learning and a memory retentive of its erudition? Or shall I take what is far the best course and, relying on your learning, Maximus, and your perfect erudition, disdain to reply to the accusations of these stupid and uncultivated fellows? Yes, that is what I will do. I will not care a straw for ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... poetry, and in their language—which is very emphatic—they compose rhyme and verse, both which powerfully affect the fancy. And in my judgment (which is not singular in this matter) with as great force as that of any ancient or modern poet I ever read. They have generally very retentive memories; they see things at a great distance. The unhappiness of their education, and their want of converse with foreign nations, deprives them of the opportunity to cultivate and beautify their genius, which seems to have been formed by ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... synapse is the primary adjunct to memory! The human brain has billions of them, neuronically linked—sort of pathways that get grooved deeper and deeper with constant repetition of thought, until after a while they become completely permanent, retentive and self-functioning. ECAIAC is similarly equipped—not to the degree of the human ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... There, Webster![323] peal'd thy voice, and, Whitfield![324] thine. But far o'er all, sonorous Blackmore's strain; Walls, steeples, skies, bray back to him again. 260 In Tottenham fields, the brethren, with amaze, Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze; 'Long Chancery Lane retentive rolls the sound, And courts to courts return it round and round; Thames wafts it thence to Rufus' roaring hall, And Hungerford re-echoes bawl for bawl. All hail him victor in both gifts of song, Who sings so loudly, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... ravaged by the plague, and spared by the Great Fire of 1666; he must often have gazed in childish horror at those awful mounds beneath which hundreds of human bodies lay huddled together,—rich and poor, high and low, scoundrel and saint,—sharing one common bed at last. His retentive memory must have stored away at least the outline of those hideous images, so effectively recombined many years later by means of his powerful ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... frequented ordinarie: of which shreads he shapes a cote to fit any credulous foole that will weare it. You shall never observe him make any reply in places of publike concourse; hee ingenuously acknowledges himselfe to bee more bounden to the happinesse of a retentive memory, than eyther ability of tongue, or pregnancy of conceite. He carryes his table-booke still about with him, but dares not pull it out publikely. Yet no sooner is the table drawne, than he turnes notarie; by which meanes hee recovers the charge of his ordinarie. Paules is ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... local histories, not only of New York but also of other American cities. He found a large-scale map of the metropolis and spread it out on the table, true to the indicated compass points. Clustered about this outspread map, the other members of the patrol followed with eager eyes and retentive minds their ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... immediately before her lover's triumph closes the piece, the whole opera is a series of exquisite conceptions, hardly one of which does not contain some theme or passage calculated to catch the dullest and slowest ear and fix itself on the least retentive memory; and though the huntsman's and bridesmaid's choruses, of course, first attained and longest retained a street-organ popularity, there is not a single air, duet, concerted piece, or chorus, from which extracts were ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... observer; and Mr. Boyd Dawkins to pilot me among the caves and cairns. Then I should want a better pair of eyes and a better pair of ears, and, while I was reorganizing, perhaps a quicker apprehension and a more retentive memory; in short, a new outfit, bodily and mental. But Nature does not care to mend old shoes; she prefers a new pair, and a young person ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... recorded of many great men, who did not end their days in a workhouse, that they were equally non-retentive of money. Schiller, when he had nothing else to give away, gave the clothes from his back, and Goldsmith the blankets from his bed. Tender hands found it necessary to pick Beethoven's pockets at home before he walked out. Great heroes, who have made no scruple ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... almost exhausted. It is one redeeming quality of brigalow scrub, that water is to be found within its recesses, at times when all other channels or sources are dry; the soil in which it grows being stiff, retentive, and usually bare of vegetation. Thermometer at sunrise, 28 deg.; at noon, 73 deg.; at 4 P.M., 78 deg.; at 9, 47 deg.;—with wet ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... was absolutely necessary for the accumulation of authorities, and which alone may account for Johnson's retentive mind being enriched with a very large and various store of knowledge and imagery, must have occupied several years. The Preface furnishes an eminent instance of a double talent, of which Johnson was fully conscious. Sir Joshua Reynolds heard him ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... not allowed himself any very extensive range; while the alleged familiarity of Lord Byron with the same authorities must be taken with a similar abatement of credence and wonder to that which his own account of his youthful studies, already given, requires;—a rapid eye and retentive memory having enabled him, on this as on most other subjects, to catch, as it were, the salient points on the surface of knowledge, and the recollections he thus gathered being, perhaps, the livelier from his not having encumbered himself ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... sudden extraordinary idea leaped up in his brain. It seemed impossible, but the impossible sometimes comes true. It was the merest of fleeting glimpses that he had caught of that face, but his eye was uncommonly quick, and his mind equally retentive. ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of the book, and Sir William breathes in it very pleasantly. Endowed by Nature with a retentive memory and a literary taste, active if singular, he may be discovered in his own pages moving up and down, in and out of society, supplying and correcting quotations, and gratifying the vanity of distinguished authors by remembering their own writings better than they did themselves. The book ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... read, if the least handle for this charge should have been given, but no accusation of the kind is preferred. The story of his life shows him to be full of rough candour and honesty, and unlikely to descend to subterfuge, while his great love of reading and his accurate retentive memory would make easy for him a task which ordinary mortals might ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... and the title of a bill in a legislative body, are alike made the threads upon which to string the whole knowledge of the speaker upon every subject,—such an apology can scarcely be necessary. It should be said, in deference to a few retentive memories, that two chapters of this story, now embraced in the body of the work, were originally written for and published in the Continental Monthly, last fall, the publication of the whole work through that medium, at first designed, being prevented by a change of management and ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... your ignorance," he said to Dodger. "You have a great deal to learn, but on the other hand you are quick, have a retentive memory, and are very anxious to learn. I shall make ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... friends; but some less fortunate ones have to content themselves with hirelings, many of which are unreliable conveyances, because they pass through so many hands, that they run a great risk of being spoiled by bad riders, and in that respect, horses have unfortunately very retentive memories. From two to three guineas is the usual charge for a day; and from L12 to L20 for a month. In both cases, the job-master has to bear all reasonable risks. A person who hires a horse for longer than a day, has to keep the ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... Koshtis or Sunars, [233] though the offences committed by them were usually more heinous. Colonel Mackenzie had quite a favourable opinion of them: "A Banjara who can read and write is unknown. But their memories, from cultivation, are marvellous and very retentive. They carry in their heads, without slip or mistake, the most varied and complicated transactions and the share of each in such, striking a debtor and creditor account as accurately as the best-kept ledger, while their history and songs are all learnt by heart and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... professors seem to have left any marked influence on his mind or character; indeed they had little opportunity for doing so, for after the first term his attendance at lectures almost entirely ceased. Though never a student, he must have been at all times a considerable reader; he had a retentive memory and quick understanding; he read what interested him; absorbed, understood, and retained it. He left the university with his mind disciplined indeed but not drilled; he had a considerable knowledge of languages, law, literature, and history; he had not subjected his mind ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... therefore, by which right taste is formed, is first, patient. It dwells upon what is submitted to it, it does not trample upon it lest it should be pearls, even though it look like husks, it is a good ground, soft, penetrable, retentive, it does not send up thorns of unkind thoughts, to choke the weak seed, it is hungry and thirsty too, and drinks all the dew that falls on it, it is an honest and good heart, that shows no too ready springing before the sun be up, but fails not afterwards; ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... the weak spot was the native village, nevertheless. And the business of the man from Diamond Town was to lounge about its neighbourhood, using those sharp light eyes of his to excellent purpose, and storing his retentive memory—for it would not do for a stranger to be caught putting pencil to paper in a town under Martial Law, and bristling with suspicion—with the information indispensable for the putting in effect of young Schenk ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... allowed to go again. But the poison had gone deep. Whenever he could he went to hear old Brutus speak. Eagerly he heard stories of the fearless abolitionist's hand-to-hand fights with men who sought to skewer his fiery tongue. Deeply he brooded on every word that his retentive ear had caught from the old man's lips, and on the wrongs he endured in behalf of his cause and for ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... were considerable. His memory was remarkably retentive and well-stored,—a quality, I should infer from all I have observed, common to most Sovereigns. By the multiplicity of persons they are in the habit of seeing, and the vast variety of objects continually passing through their minds, this faculty is ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic, idiotic piety. I say idiotic piety because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... eagerly to ask: On this strongly marked temperament, so delicately imaginative and so keenly logical, so receptive and so retentive, a type alike of the philosopher and the poet, the scholar and the musician—on such a contemplative genius, what were the effects of so great and so constant indulgence in a drug noted for its power of heightening and extending, for ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Medenham. He never forgot anyone, and this lady was certainly not one of his acquaintances; nevertheless, her features, her robin-like strut, her very amplitude of girth and singular rotundity of form, came definitely within the net of his retentive memory. ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... a moment; then she sat down by Lambert, and began to talk to him. Unfortunately, my memory, though retentive, is far from being so trustworthy as my friend's, and I have forgotten the whole of the dialogue excepting those ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... his own account. True, also, that he tumbled into the river, and nearly ended his career at a very early age. Still he survived his river catastrophe; and, though he gained little book learning, possessed such a good and retentive memory, and was so observant, that his mind became stored with vivid impressions of the scenes and surroundings of his youth, which he related with ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... herself to reach the school ideal, thus force herself to drive hard nails of fact into her vagrant thoughts. And with success. For she had, it turned out, a retentive memory, and to her joy learning by heart came easy to her—as easy as to the most brilliant scholars in the form. From now on she gave this talent full play, memorising even pages of the history book in her zeal; and before ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... fancy in thine eye, and passions in thy heart? What, hast thou wrapt love in thy looks, and set all thy thoughts on fire by affection? I tell thee, it is a flame as hard to be quenched as that of Aetna. But nature must have her course: women's eyes have faculty attractive like the jet, and retentive like the diamond: they dally in the delight of fair objects, till gazing on the panther's beautiful skin, repenting experience tell them he hath a ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... religion and of the best kind of literature. The constitution of her mind is exempt from female weakness, and she is endued with a masculine power of application. No apprehension can be quicker than her's, no memory more retentive. French and Italian she speaks like English; Latin, with fluency, propriety, and judgement; she also spoke Greek with me, frequently, willingly, and moderately well. Nothing can be more elegant than her ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and is master of all its points. Although Mr. Bishop has never been what may be termed physically robust, he possesses great power of prolonged mental application. And being also endowed with a most remarkably retentive memory, his mind is stored with a very comprehensive knowledge of law. And if there be one faculty of his mind more than another, that gives character to the man, it is his prodigious memory of facts. In a case that recently came under our notice, Judge Bishop gave evidence pertaining ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... State three years ago by a disgruntled employee. The police of the country had been searching for him and Mr. Bowe had spent thousands of dollars in the effort to find him. What money and mind and trained detective intelligence failed to do, the retentive memory of the elephant, Sultana, has accomplished and, thanks to her, a grieving father and mother are reunited with their long-lost son. The performance will now continue and you will see what a great degree of intelligence is possessed by these pachyderms in the tricks which they will now ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... tones which seemed occasionally to tremble with the excess of melody that burdened them played hide-and-seek among the hills, startling whole choruses of deep-throated echoes, and attending and retentive ocean, catching the strains on her beryl strings, bore them whither—and how far? To palm-plumed equatorial isles, where dying auricular nerves mistook them for seraphic utterances? To toiling mariners, tossed helplessly ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the Third Empire. His alter ego, Georges Mandel, is endowed with qualities which supplement and correct those of his venerable chief. His grasp of detail is comprehensive and firm, his memory retentive, and his judgment bold and deliberate. A striking illustration of the audacity of his resolve was given in the early part of 1918. Marshal Joffre sent a telegram to President Wilson in Washington, and because he had omitted ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... once rode several miles in a carriage, together, to a town where both were to make addresses. Jones was quite an orator; Smith had a very retentive memory. Jones asked Smith about his speech, but Smith professed not to have fully decided upon his topic, and in turn asked Jones the same question. Jones gave a full outline of his speech, Smith getting him to elaborate it by judicious ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... talking of the curious fact that all three of them seemed able to continue thinking in a straight line, hold their minds to a subject, while all the rest grew more vague, less retentive, more content to live from moment to moment, without concern for ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... the new order of things has been fully established, and free, intelligent labor has taken the place of the drudging, dull toil of the slave. It is particularly fond of warm, southern exposures, with light limestone soil, and it would be useless to plant it on soil retentive of moisture. Bunch long, large shouldered and compact; berry medium, black, with blue bloom—"bags of wine," as Downing fitly calls them; skin thin, sweet flesh, without pulp, juicy and high flavored, never clogs the palate; fine for the table, and makes an excellent wine, which ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... a rather retentive memory, and considerable powers of imagination, I was able at times to bring almost all the things of importance which I had met with in my reading, before my mind, and compare them both with each other, and with all that was already in my memory. And whatever appeared to me most rational, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... as retentive as a printed page, the keen-eyed old wanderer described the landscape league by league, the streams and their direction, the hills which were prominent, the broad stretches of savannah or grassy meadow, the belts ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... themselves in the dirt of the streets, while their parents pursue their daily toil. In these public thoroughfares, during the part of their lives which is most susceptible of impressions and most retentive of them, they acquire dirty, immoral, and disorderly habits; they become accustomed to wear filthy and ragged clothes; they learn to pilfer and to steal; they associate with boys who have been in prison, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... therefore, the mighty son of Abhimanyu came to be called Parikshit (born in an extinct line). Well-versed in the interpretation of treatises on the duties of kings, he was gifted with every virtue. With passions under complete control, intelligent, possessing a retentive memory, the practiser of all virtues, the conqueror of his six passions of powerful mind, surpassing all, and fully acquainted with the science of morality and political science, the father had ruled over these subjects for sixty ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... professions; I had worked for a banker for six months and my services were so unsatisfactory that I was obliged to resign to avoid being discharged. My studies had been varied but superficial; my memory was active but not retentive. ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... was strong in the virtues of steadfastness and loyalty, on which the social gifts can root deeply and bear perennial fruit. Of these he had rich store. His conversations possessed singular charm; for his melodious voice, facile fancy, and retentive memory enabled him to adorn all topics. His favourite themes were the Greek and Latin Classics. The rooms at Holwood or Walmer were strewn with volumes of his favourite authors, on whom he delighted to converse ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... slightest wish to provoke opposition. I at length succeeded in turning the conversation into the fields of natural history, but not till after he had scattered forth a profusion of the most humorous anecdotes, that would baffle the most retentive memory to enumerate, and defy the most witty to depict. I succeeded by mentioning an error in one of his works; for which, when I had convinced him, he thanked me, and took the path in conversation we wished. In many instances, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... made intelligible to our Barwan guide, and he shaped his course accordingly. He took us through scrubs, having in the centre those holes where water usually lodges for some time after rain, where some substratum of clay happens to be retentive enough to impede the common absorption. But the water in these holes had been recently drunk, and the mud trampled into hard clay by the hoofs of cattle. Thus it is, that the aborigines first become sensible of the approach of the white man. These retired spots, where ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... it was Daddy Glass-Eyes, was it not?' was the ready response, for somehow this young man had a strangely retentive memory, and seldom forgot anything that ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... after orthodoxy, he had not allowed himself any very extensive range; while the alleged familiarity of Lord Byron with the same authorities must be taken with a similar abatement of credence and wonder to that which his own account of his youthful studies, already given, requires;—a rapid eye and retentive memory having enabled him, on this as on most other subjects, to catch, as it were, the salient points on the surface of knowledge, and the recollections he thus gathered being, perhaps, the livelier from his not ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... situated on a dirty little stream called the Dambovitza (as already stated, a tributary of the Ardges), concerning which some very famous verses have been written, proclaiming its waters to be so sweet that any one who drinks of them never desires to leave Bucarest. What its retentive properties may have been in former times we are not able to say, but we can quite imagine any person who ventures to drink of the water being incapable of leaving the city for ever afterwards. However, the prosaic authorities are not greatly impressed by ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... either note-book or journal, and as my memory is not a retentive one I have allowed much to escape which I should now vainly attempt to recall. Some things must, however, have made a vivid and durable impression on my mind, as fragments remain, after the lapse of years, far more distinct than occurrences of much more recent date; such, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... it. Capacity is power over given ideas combinations of ideas; genius is the power over those which are not given, and for which no obvious or precise rule can be laid down. Or capacity is power of any sort; genius is power of a different sort from what has yet been shown. A retentive memory, a clear understanding, is capacity, but it is not genius. The admirable Crichton was a person of prodigious capacity; but there is no proof (that I know) that he had an atom of genius. His verses that remain are ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... this multifarious knowledge, and nothing can be more probable, than that attainment of many languages, with any approach to their fluent use, is beyond the power of man. But his diligence was exemplary, his memory retentive, and his understanding accomplished by classical knowledge; with those qualities, much might be done in any pursuit; and though modern orientalists protest against the superficiality of his acquirements, their variety has been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Wolf's objection, that the Iliad and Odyssey are too long to have been preserved by memory, it may be met by a simple denial. It is a strange objection indeed, coming from a man of Wolf's retentive memory. I do not see how the acquisition of the two poems can be regarded as such a very arduous task; and if literature were as scanty now as in Greek antiquity, there are doubtless many scholars who would long since have had them at their tongues' end. Sir G. C. Lewis, with but ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... was in scenes of travel or adventure in the great unbroken regions sought out by the fur trade, their retentive memories reproducing by the winter fireside or summer camp pictures so graphic as to commend ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... self-respect reacts unfavourably on the moral sense. Ingratitude is a vice attributed to Bengalis by people who have done little or nothing to elicit the corresponding virtue. As a matter of fact their memory is extremely retentive of favours. They will overlook any shortcomings in a ruler who has the divine gift of sympathy, and serve him with devotion. Macaulay has branded them with cowardice. If the charge were true, it was surely illogical and unmanly to reproach a community numbering 50,000,000 for inherited ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... time, had extracted small loans from most of his male acquaintances, rarely repaying the same. He had a tendency to forget that he had borrowed half-a-crown here to pay a cab and ten shillings there to settle up for a dinner; and his memory was not much more retentive of larger sums. This made his friends somewhat wary. The consequence was that the great treasure-hunt was a failure from start to finish. He got friendly smiles. He got honeyed apologies. He got earnest assurances of good-will. But he got no ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... performed, and he had not kept his son in ignorance of them. As they worked together the father had explained to the son what he did, and why he did it, The results of their work spoke for themselves, and Hiram had a retentive memory. ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... word exhibits the opinion entertained by the Hindoos as to the close connection existing between a powerful intellect and a retentive memory. Such a quality indicates the highest kind of pundit: and it should be recollected that Saraswati is the divinity of wisdom, the pundit ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... own eye, till they could discern between good and evil; so, with the assistance of his generous master, my father ventured on a small farm on his estate. At those years, I was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven years ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... and vivacity, enjoying life, and anxious that the circle of his enjoyment should be widely extended. George Agar Ellis was the only son of Lord Clifden, and obtained early the reputation of being a prodigy of youthful talent and information. He was quick, lively, and had a very retentive memory, and having entered the world with this reputation, and his great expectations besides, he speedily became one of the most conspicuous youths of the day. Having imbibed a great admiration for Lord Orford (Horace Walpole), he evinced a disposition ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... seven thousand pieces. In short, he plays every piece that he has ever heard. How almost godlike (it cannot be brought to human comparison) is this retentive, this perfect memory, as relating to all that is musical, or even unmusical, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... this subject, I wish to express my thanks to Mr. S.A. Goddard for his assistance. His great age, his acute powers of perception, and his marvellously retentive and accurate memory, combine to make him, probably, the only living competent witness of some of the circumstances I have been able to detail; while the ready manner in which he responded to my request for information merits my warmest and most ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... have to remark, said Campuzano, is, that, as I was very attentive, my apprehension very sensitive, and my memory very retentive (thanks to the many raisins and almonds I had swallowed), I got it all by heart, and wrote it down, word for word, the next day, without attempting to colour or adorn it, or adding or suppressing ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Fuller, in 1607, had a most retentive memory; he could repeat 500 strange, unconnected words, after twice hearing them; and a sermon verbatim, after reading it once. He undertook, after passing from Temple Bar to the farthest part of Cheapside and back ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... but he carefully studied the town of Trenton and its neighborhood, and, going about in every direction after cows and oxen, he learned the roads so well that he could make a very good map of them. Everything that could be of service to the American cause was jotted down in Honeyman's retentive memory; and when he had found out everything that he could find out, he thought it was fully time that he should acquaint Washington with the state of affairs in the ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... ability, and with the consent of his parents taught him the elements of English and Latin. Allowed to use the library of Mr. Rault, Ollier early became acquainted with the best literature. It is said that he had a very retentive memory and that he could repeat and write at will long passages ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... was remarkably retentive, not only of the contents of books, but of all that great outlying fund of anecdote and story which the quaint and earnest New England life always supplied. There were pictures of peculiar characters, legends of true events stranger than romance, all stored in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... do," he replied after a moment, with pride rather than effusion—pride in a retentive ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... time to become professor of Greek. As professor of the mellifluous and most plastic of all the ancient tongues, he would undoubtedly have been proficient, as his college classics still remain fresh in his warm and retentive memory, and his literary taste is so severe and chaste as to make some of his scientific papers read like a psalm. But nature designed him for another, and some think a better, field, and endowed him with powers as a naturalist that have won for him recognition ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... Abraham Lincoln had little early culture, but his vigorous native intellect sought information wherever it could be obtained with limited means and opportunities, and overcame almost insuperable obstacles. His quick perception and powers of observation and reflection, and his retentive memory were remarkable; his judgment was good, his mental grasp and comprehension equal to any emergency, his intentions were always honest, and his skill and tact, with a determination to always maintain the right, begot confidence and made ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... interested him; he did not study them for complete mastery; and many and varied as are the traces of his literary interests, they have the air of being detached fragments that have stuck in a plastic and retentive mind, not pieces of systematic erudition. It is true that many books have been written to show that Shakespeare had the knowledge of a professional in law, medicine, navigation, theology, conveyancing, hunting ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... after a pause, renewing her lascivious movements in response to my own, we sank in a perfect death-like swoon of thoroughly satiated lust, and gradually and imperceptibly fell into the deepest slumber for many hours, locked as we were in each other's arms. Her wonderfully retentive power of cunt held my happy prick a willing prisoner through our long sleep. I awoke first, to find it standing stiff within the charmed circle which even in her sleep was deliciously grasping it with its nervous folds. I passed my ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... maitre-d'hotel had shown him all over the establishment (innocently enough, en route, furnishing him with a complete list of his other guests and their rooms: memoranda readily registered by a retentive memory) Lanyard chose the bed-chamber next that occupied by ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... balsams and quintescence, and pervaded at the same times with full springing tides of the invigorating influences of music and magnets both real and artificial, gives such elastic vigour to the nerves, on the one hand, of the male, and on the other, such retentive firmness to the female; and, moreover, all the faculties of the soul being so fully expanded, and so highly illuminated, that it is impossible, in the nature of things, but that strong, beautiful, brilliant, ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... civilized society is lessened, not only by the natural torpidity and inertia of the bucolic mind, but also by the progressive decrease of the rural as compared with the urban population in modern states; for I believe it will be found that the artisans who congregate in towns are far less retentive of primitive modes of thought than their rustic brethren. In every age cities have been the centres and as it were the lighthouses from which ideas radiate into the surrounding darkness, kindled by the friction of mind with mind in the crowded haunts of men; ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... to come; and, questioned at dinner why he had not done so, said, "Because I was detained by the Bore Contradictor—Hallam"—whose propensity to controvert people's propositions was a subject of irritation to some of his friends, less retentive of memory and accurate in ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... differences of working power among men are due chiefly to differences in the power of concentration. A retentive and accurate memory is conditioned upon close attention. If one gives entire attention to what is passing before him, he is not likely to forget it or to confuse persons or incidents. The book which one reads with eyes ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... preserved an effrontery which balked at no defiance of conventions in public, though essentially she was quite sufficiently discreet for self-preservation. Also she had a keen little brain, a reckless but good-humored heart and a memory retentive ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the professors seem to have left any marked influence on his mind or character; indeed they had little opportunity for doing so, for after the first term his attendance at lectures almost entirely ceased. Though never a student, he must have been at all times a considerable reader; he had a retentive memory and quick understanding; he read what interested him; absorbed, understood, and retained it. He left the university with his mind disciplined indeed but not drilled; he had a considerable knowledge of languages, law, literature, ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... verse, both which powerfully affect the fancy. And in my judgment (which is not singular in this matter) with as great force as that of any ancient or modern poet I ever read. They have generally very retentive memories; they see things at a great distance. The unhappiness of their education, and their want of converse with foreign nations, deprives them of the opportunity to cultivate and beautify their genius, which seems to have been formed by nature ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... Testament, and, at the Synagogue school, all the minutiae of the Jewish Law. The pupil was not allowed to write anything down; all was committed to the memory, which in consequence became extremely retentive. The perfect pupil 'lost not a drop from his teacher's cistern.' At the age of about fourteen the boy would be sent to Jerusalem, to study under one of the great Rabbis; in St. Paul's case it was Gamaliel. Under his tuition the young Pharisee would learn to be a 'strong Churchman.' The Rabbis ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... considerable. His memory was remarkably retentive and well-stored,—a quality, I should infer from all I have observed, common to most Sovereigns. By the multiplicity of persons they are in the habit of seeing, and the vast variety of objects continually passing through their minds, this faculty ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... than those of busy men. The idler, passing his time in search of amusement, can hardly fail to communicate it when he yields up his store of experiences. Being disengaged, his mind is more observant and more retentive of the by-play of life, which is the only amusing part of it, than that of one of the chief actors can possibly be. Moreover, idlers are the natural confidants of the busy: they are consulted, made useful as go-betweens, entrusted with those little services which, being transient and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... with a sufficient supply. She not only read with eagerness every book which met her eye, but pursued this uninterrupted miscellaneous reading to singular advantage, treasuring up all important facts in her retentive memory. So entirely absorbed was she in her books, that the only successful mode of withdrawing her from them was by offering her flowers, of which she was passionately fond. Books and flowers continued, through all the vicissitudes of her life, even till the hour of her death, to afford ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... been destroyed by fire, he removed to the Paulinum at Leipzig, where he died on the 17th of September 1658. Barth was a very voluminous writer; his works, which were the fruits of extensive reading and a retentive memory, are unmethodical and uncritical and marred by want of taste and of clearness. He appears to have been excessively vain and of an unamiable disposition. Of his writings the most important are; Adversaria (1624), a storehouse ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... music was of a devotional cast. As Margaret became older, her communications with the recluse assumed a different character. She was allowed, if not encouraged, to tell whatever she had remarked out of doors, and the Lady Hermione, while she remarked the quick, sharp, and retentive powers of observation possessed by her young friend, often found sufficient reason to caution her against rashness in forming opinions, and giddy petulance ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... generation, fell in the Boer War in 1901. If he had not been a great soldier, Colonel Laurie would have been a great historian. His knowledge of history, more especially of military history, was profound, and his memory was singularly retentive. He had, moreover, a very sound judgment in the marshalling of facts. He had written with a pen of light the history of his regiment, which he loved, and which loved him, and on which in life and in death he had ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... Mr. Boyd Dawkins to pilot me among the caves and cairns. Then I should want a better pair of eyes and a better pair of ears, and, while I was reorganizing, perhaps a quicker apprehension and a more retentive memory; in short, a new outfit, bodily and mental. But Nature does not care to mend old shoes; she prefers a new pair, and a young ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... (impressions) and consciousness are the same thing under different names. A lively sensation, in which the mind is entirely occupied, becomes attention, without the necessity of assuming an additional special faculty in the mind. Attention, by its retentive effect on the sensation, becomes memory. Double attention—to a new sensation, and to the lingering trace of the previous one—is comparison; the recognition of a relation (resemblance or difference) between two ideas is judgment; the separation of an idea ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry, a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Philadelphia, March 5th, 1842. His parents died while he was still at a tender age, and he was placed with some relatives who resided in the city. From early years he was characterized by quick perceptions and a retentive memory. In the Philadelphia High School, from which he received the academic degree of Master of Arts, he was considered the best scholar in his class, a marked distinction in view of the large numbers which attend that institution. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... this regard the class is much more advanced than that of the mammalia to which we ourselves belong. Accustomed as they are to ceaseless and active intercourse with each other by means of their varied calls, largely endowed with the faculty of attention, and provided with fairly retentive memories, the birds are, on the average, nearer in the qualities of their intelligence to man than are many of the species in his own class. It was long ago remarked that the birds of remote islands, ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... below), has a key-syllable that means holding: tenant, tenement, tenure, tenet, tenor, tenable, tenacious, contents, contentment, lieutenant, maintenance, sustenance, countenance, appurtenance, detention, retentive, pertinacity, pertinent, continent, abstinence, continuous, retinue. The second has a key-syllable that means stretching: tend, tender, tendon, tendril, tendency, extend, subtend, distend, pretend, contend, attendant, tense, tension, pretence, intense, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... dressing-gown as in his robes of state. A contemporary wrote that he would have been every inch a king, "even if he had been born under the roof of a beggar." Louis possessed much natural intelligence, a retentive memory, and great capacity for work. It must be added, however, that his general education had been much neglected, and that throughout his life he remained ignorant and superstitious. Vanity formed a striking trait in the character ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... than becomes a head of my age; and my stomach has not recovered its retentive faculty. Leaning forward, particularly to write, does not at present agree ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... His bright eyes shone with pleasure, and his response was so expressive of eager longing, that I at once began the first lesson. Sitting beside him on the ground, I drew the syllabic characters and spent an hour or so in teaching them to him. He had a very retentive memory, and was intensely anxious to learn as rapidly as possible. So, every day, when I had finished giving lessons to the crowd of young and old people, I used to hurry over to the wigwam where he lay to give him additional instruction; and so deeply interested ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... (a slow but, perhaps retentive mind), all the bearings of the place, and all its opportunities, and even the curve of the stream along it, and the bushes near the door, I was much inclined to go farther up, and understand all the village. But a bar of red light across ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... in Vrmland and thither Esaias accompanied him. Here he could drink deep from the fountain of knowledge for at Rmen he found a fine library of French, Latin and Greek classics. He worked prodigiously and this, coupled with a remarkably retentive memory, enabled him to make remarkably rapid progress in his studies. He would have remained in the library all the time poring over his dear classic authors but for the fortunate intervention of the young members of the Myhrman family, seven in all, who frequently would storm into ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... was beyond my control, and Mr.—a—Word's share in it without my consent; his service was, I believe, well repaid by my father; and the trouble with me is not that my memory is defective, but rather that it is too retentive. I remember ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... a certain amount of movement between the ends of a fractured bone favours their union by promoting the formation of callus, and advocated the treatment of fractures by massage and movement, discarding almost entirely the use of splints and other retentive appliances. We were early convinced by the teaching of Lucas-Championniere, and have ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... a few months before, he described the country minutely, its topography, its flora and fauna, its geological presentations, and expatiated upon its promising future. Sedgwick was very greatly interested, and with his retentive memory the facts were ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... learning Hebrew and Arabic. This pursuit was due partly to his growing interest in Biblical study, partly to the delight he took in his own linguistic powers. He had an ear of great delicacy; he caught up sounds as by instinct; and his retentive memory fixed the impression. Later he applied the reasoning of the philologist, classified and tabulated his results, and thus was able, when drawn into fields unexplored by science, to do original work and to produce results of great value to ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... them back, undismayed, by a grove of pikes and a shower of missile weapons. With desperate but successful valour he carried the redoubt and escaped with life. All this passed under the immediate observation of Cromwell, whose retentive memory never forgot any signal action, and whose discriminating policy generally placed the man who performed it in a situation suited to his character. He soon found Monthault to be as perfidious and unprincipled as he was daring and ready to undertake any office ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... and to be known must be observed; while in other forms of lessons the attention may be diverted for a moment to return to the consideration of exactly what was being observed before. It goes without saying that in one case quick and accurate observation, a retentive memory, and the association of causes and effects follow, and that in the other they ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... Bellefleur. It did not seem very much, so he felt a little encouraged, and taking Miss Clarissa's advice, set the book open on the table and began learning what he would have to say, while going on with his toilet. He had a really surprisingly retentive memory, and picked up a good bit even in ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... deliver Cassius: Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong; Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat: Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself. If I know this, know all the world besides, That part of tyranny that I do bear I can shake ...
— Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... card was then placed in my hand on which the alphabet was printed in very large type, and my attention called to each letter. My fingers, then soft and supple, were not long in tracing the outlines of each character, and, my memory being naturally retentive, I was soon able to distinguish each letter, and give its name as my finger was placed on it. Another card was then given me in smaller type, which I mastered in the same way, and so on till I ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... treasures his own. The conversation of such a man as Ben Jonson alone, supposing him to have made no more display of his learning than chance or vanity would occasionally produce, must have supplied ample sources of information to a mind so curious, watchful, and retentive, that it did not suffer the slightest thing to escape its grasp. Johnson is distinguished in his notes from the other commentators, chiefly by the acute remarks on many of the characters, and on the conduct of some of the fables, which he ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... last at this end of the bench, is a little man in spectacles, and with a preternatural look of wisdom on his face. He is the Right Hon. Lyon Playfair, and is said to have, next to Mr. Fawcett, the most remarkably retentive memory of any man in the House. Chiltern says he always writes his lectures before he delivers them to the House, sending the manuscript to the Times, and so accurate is his recitation that the editor has only to sprinkle the ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... stomach. Arrived at his goal he would pull her skirt, indicate as well as he could a little box lying by his neglected picture-book, and grunt with much expression. A monkey lived inside the box, and Tony, whose memory was retentive, persevered in expecting to hear that monkey summoned by wild tattoos and subterranean growls until it jumped up with a bang—a splendidly terrible thing of white bristles, and scarlet snout—to dance the fandango to a lively if unmusical tune. ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... political are ever to be found in islands, like Corsica, Sicily, Ireland; or in remote glens and mountains, such as those of Scotland or Greece. Men who live in New York, London, or Paris must be singularly retentive of passion to keep up even their own hatreds, not to speak of the hatreds of their ancestors. But it is alike the bane and blessing of lives spent in retirement and monotony to retain impressions for years, and live ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... neighbor. The scene was as gay and picturesque as you might see in a little town of Brittany; and the jargon of the Canadian patois much more confusing than any dialect one would hear on French soil. Hetty's New England tongue utterly refused to learn this new mode of speech; but her quick and retentive ear soon learned its meanings sufficiently to follow the people in their talk. She often made one of this evening circle at the spring, and it was a pleasant sight to see the quick stir of welcome with which her approach ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... as a seal upon Thine heart, as a seal upon Thine arm; For love is strong as death; Jealousy (ardent love) is cruel (retentive) as the grave; The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, A ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor
... of many great men, who did not end their days in a workhouse, that they were equally non-retentive of money. Schiller, when he had nothing else to give away, gave the clothes from his back, and Goldsmith the blankets from his bed. Tender hands found it necessary to pick Beethoven's pockets at home before he walked out. Great heroes, who have made ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... poetess was far from feeling any curiosity; instead of gazing at the shrubbery enlivened by birds, at the clear atmosphere or the sparkling sea, her eyes were fixed on a yellow roll of papyrus and she was impressing very dry details on her retentive memory. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... yield little fruit. Decomposing sandstone, and slate, known in Jamaica as rotten rock, mixed with vegetable mould, is one of the most favorable soils. The subsoil should be also carefully examined by a boring augur, for a stiff moist clay, or marly bottom retentive of moisture, is particularly injurious to the plant. A dark, rusty-colored sand, or a ferruginous marl on a substratum of limestone, kills the tree in a few years. In virgin lands, after the wood has been felled and cleared, the land is lined off into rows of from six to ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... stand unaltered," replied the Spaniard. "My directions were that you should repeat to me the order of your instructions and that I should judge for His Grace whether or not your memory is retentive. There must be ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... suggested the theme. It must have been in the incomparably lucid moments of that brilliant intellect. All the particulars of classic reading which the year before he worked up in the new edition of the Adagia were still at his immediate disposal in that retentive and capacious memory. Reflecting at his ease on all that wisdom of the ancients, he secreted the juices ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... and she will jot it down in spite of the roar and vibration of railway travel. As the train rushes on the composition may be completely worked out in the composer's mind before the journey's end, and so retentive is Chaminade's memory that, when she returns to her villa in Vesinet, near the forest of St. Germain not far from Paris, she can seat herself at her table and copy the work from that mental vision of it which she had ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... primary decomposers are thoroughly inoculated with microorganisms that can consume cellulose and lignin. Even though it looks like humus, it has not yet fully decomposed. It does have a water-retentive, granular structure that facilitates the presence of air and moisture throughout the mass creating perfect conditions for microbial digestion ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... Duke drove to a friend's house in the neighborhood, without a wish or desire to see his new acquaintance till that day seven years; but the memory of the Cornish elector, not being burdened with such a variety of objects, was more retentive. The supervisor died a few months after, and the Duke's humble friend, relying on the word of a peer, was conveyed to London posthaste, and ascended with alacrity the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... me by the hand when a child of eleven years. She conducted her school in a very systematic and orderly manner, and was very particular to require perfect recitations from her pupils; but as I possessed a retentive memory, I found my tasks much lighter than ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... wish to make it, but you must take her hand at once, for in a few months' time she will not open it to you; the old, bad relations will re-commence, the rancor will be born and grow, and another memory will be stored away in Ireland's capacious and retentive brain. ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... knew better than he how little regard John M. Hurd really felt for this mercurial youth. Yet Mr. Hurd had resisted with entire success all other means of approach. After all, family connections counted for something, even with the retentive old trolley magnate. So when at last he spoke, it was with the determination to show a part of his ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... clinging to their clothes till each looked as though clad in an integument of ragged cotton, or the long loose wool of a merino sheep yet unwoven into cloth. And as they forced their way through it—at times requiring strength to extricate them from its tough retentive hold—they could see the hideous forms of the huge spiders who had spun and woven these strangely patterned webs scuttling off, and from their dark retreats in the crevices of the trees looking defiant and angry at the intruders ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... this morning a singular proof of Dr. Johnson's quick and retentive memory. Hay's translation of Martial was lying in a window. I said, I thought it was pretty well done, and shewed him a particular epigram, I think, of ten, but am certain of eight, lines. He read it, and tossed away the book, saying—'No, it is not pretty well.' As I persisted ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... tendencies of this child of whom his father said once that he had never had any boyhood days in the ordinary sense, were early noted in his fondness for building little plank roads out of the debris of the yards and mills. His extraordinarily retentive memory was shown in his easy acquisition of all the songs of the lumber gangs and canal men before he was five years old. One incident tells how he was found one day in the village square copying laboriously the signs of the stores. A highly characteristic event at the age of six ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... extraordinary scenes around her, the physical aspect of the country, the peculiar traits of its population, and the manners of both natives and Anglo-Indians: the strong and faithful impressions they made never faded from a memory remarkably retentive. It is to these favourable opportunities of diversified observation, in her journeys by land and water, along the majestic Ganges, or by the dawk conveyance in a palanquin, and in her residence for so long a period away from the metropolis of British India, which exhibits but a mongrel kind of Eastern ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... studies it thoroughly to its conclusion, and is master of all its points. Although Mr. Bishop has never been what may be termed physically robust, he possesses great power of prolonged mental application. And being also endowed with a most remarkably retentive memory, his mind is stored with a very comprehensive knowledge of law. And if there be one faculty of his mind more than another, that gives character to the man, it is his prodigious memory of facts. In a case that recently came under our notice, ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... understanding, which were much cultivated by study, and still more by meditation and reflection. His memory was remarkably retentive, his imagination uncommonly vigorous, and his judgement keen and penetrating. He had a strong sense of the importance of religion; his piety was sincere, and sometimes ardent; and his zeal for the interests of virtue was often ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... my minute description to be able to stir the memory of one or other of the dozens of uniformed hall-porters whom I interviewed. The majority of such men have a remarkably retentive memory for a face, due to long cultivation, just as that possessed by one's club hall-porter, who can at once address any of the thousand ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... ferocity of the people. But they have many things to contend against, and Corsica is still behind the other provinces of France. The people are idle, haughty, umbrageous, fiery, quarrelsome, fond of gipsy life, and retentive through generations of old feuds and prejudices to an almost inconceivable extent. Then the nature of the country itself offers serious obstacles to its proper colonisation and cultivation. The savage state of the island and its internal feuds ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Why do we say our understanding was darkened? A. We say our understanding was darkened because even with much learning we have not the clear knowledge, quick perception and retentive memory that Adam had ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 3 (of 4) • Anonymous
... inquisitive, and desirous of the conversation of those from whom any information was to be obtained, but by no means solicitous to improve those opportunities that were sometimes offered of raising his fortune; and he was remarkably retentive of his ideas, which, when once he was in possession of them, rarely forsook him; a quality which could never be communicated to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... our early national life, they have not furnished valuable data; and the study of them suggests an observation which may be heeded with advantage in similar cases hereafter, though it comes too late to be useful in this instance, namely, that the recollections of old people with retentive memories, like Peter Cooper, may be invaluable, if they are intelligently aroused and guided; but if the speakers (as in his case) are left to their own initiative, they are too likely to furnish superfluous accounts ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... can open the window and look out, and thus gather the facts as we choose. This is true wisdom. "Wisdom is the knowledge of God." Wisdom comes by intuition. It far transcends knowledge. Great knowledge, knowledge of many things, may be had by virtue simply of a very retentive memory. It comes by tuition. But wisdom far transcends knowledge, in that knowledge is a mere incident ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... desirous of learning, we exchanged our notions with great delight. I perceived that I had, every day, more of his confidence, and always found new cause of admiration in the profundity of his mind. His comprehension is vast, his memory capacious and retentive, his discourse is methodical, and his ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... to reach the school ideal, thus force herself to drive hard nails of fact into her vagrant thoughts. And with success. For she had, it turned out, a retentive memory, and to her joy learning by heart came easy to her—as easy as to the most brilliant scholars in the form. From now on she gave this talent full play, memorising even pages of the history book in her ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... under the seal of secrecy, must be esteemed a rich historical legacy. The cardinal's intellect, these envoys tell us, was wonderfully acute. He understood the point at which those who conversed with him were aiming when they had scarcely opened their mouth. His memory was more than usually retentive. He was well educated, and learned not only in Greek, Latin, and Italian, but in the sciences, and especially in theology. He had a rare gift of talking. In the fulfilment of his promises he was less famous. According to one ambassador, he had the reputation ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... to with a mixture of contempt for my want of taste, and astonishment at my presumption. But before the reply had time to burst out from lips, at no time too retentive, I was told, that at the end of one week more I should be suffered to take my way; that week being devoted to a round of especial entertainments in honour of my brother's election; the whole to be wound up by that most preposterous of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... was a little inclined to drink: but the principal feature in him was lightness of heart; he was always singing. His voice was very fine and powerful. When in the service he used to be summoned to sing to the captain and officers, and was the delight of the forecastle. His memory was retentive, and his stock of songs incredible, at the same time, he seldom or ever sang more than one or two stanzas of a song in the way of quotation, or if apt to what was going on, often altering the words to suit ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... these fleeting opportunities, not listening to the preacher's voice, as of one that can make a pleasant sound from the harp or organ—not seeking merely the delight of the ear or intellect; but taking heed to hear for eternity, receiving in meek and retentive hearts the precious grain as it falls from the sower's hand, and giving diligence that the best possible results ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... too quick an impression of the images of such actions upon the fancy and thereby too frequently inflame the desire. But these gentlemen account it the highest accomplishment of a philosopher to have a clear and retentive memory of all the various figures, passions, and touches of past pleasure. We will not now say, they present us with nothing worthy the name of philosophy, while they leave the refuse of pleasure in ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... piers; and the water-line is backed by swelling ridges, here open and green- grassed, there spotted with islets of close and shady trees. Mangrove, that horror of the African voyager, shines by its absence; and the soil is not mud, but humus based on gravels or on ruddy clays, stiff and retentive. The formation, in fact, is everywhere that of Eyo or Yoruba, the goodly region lying west of the lower Niger, and its fertility must result from the abundant water supply of the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... at the close of my two years of study. I should previously have been one year in a physician's office as a student, but this regulation was very easily evaded. As to my studies, the less said the better. I attended the quizzes, as they call them, pretty closely, and, being of a quick and retentive memory, was thus enabled to dispense with some of the six or seven lectures a day which duller men found it ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... a man who had read all the rolls destroyed in the Library of Alexandria by successive burnings. (Some reckon the number of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further, this man to be gifted with a memory retentive as Lord Macaulay's. Suppose lastly that we go to such a man and beg him to repeat to us some chosen one of the fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of Euripides. It is incredible that he ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... long agitations of the past. Despair was unnumbered among the emotions that grew round that child-like heart; shame, fear, and grief, however they might overshadow it for a time, left no taint of their presence on its bright, fine surface. Tender, perilously alive to sensation, strangely retentive of kindness as she was by nature, the very solitude to which she had been condemned had gifted her, young as she was, with a martyr's endurance of ill, and with a stoic's ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... the curious fact that all three of them seemed able to continue thinking in a straight line, hold their minds to a subject, while all the rest grew more vague, less retentive, more content to live from moment to moment, without ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... characteristic of nervous matter is its retentive power. In other words, the modifications which accompany any experience, besides taking on the permanent character referred to above, pre-dispose the system to transmit impulses again through the same centres. Moreover, with ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... native intellect sought information wherever it could be obtained with limited means and opportunities, and overcame almost insuperable obstacles. His quick perception and powers of observation and reflection, and his retentive memory were remarkable; his judgment was good, his mental grasp and comprehension equal to any emergency, his intentions were always honest, and his skill and tact, with a determination to always maintain the right, begot confidence and made him successful and great. Party opponents ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... native, was at length made intelligible to our Barwan guide, and he shaped his course accordingly. He took us through scrubs, having in the centre those holes where water usually lodges for some time after rain, where some substratum of clay happens to be retentive enough to impede the common absorption. But the water in these holes had been recently drunk, and the mud trampled into hard clay by the hoofs of cattle. Thus it is, that the aborigines first become sensible of the approach of the white man. These retired spots, where nature ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... space which has a temperature of 200 deg. below zero; but we live, as it were, in a conservatory, in the midst of perpetual winter. We are roofed over by the air that treasures the heat, floored under by strata both absorptive and retentive of heat, [Page 95] and between the earth and air violets grow and grains ripen. The sun has a strange chemical power. It kisses the cold earth, and it blushes with flowers and matures the fruit and grain. We are feeble creatures, and the ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... Ekashrutadhara. This word exhibits the opinion entertained by the Hindoos as to the close connection existing between a powerful intellect and a retentive memory. Such a quality indicates the highest kind of pundit: and it should be recollected that Saraswati is the divinity of wisdom, ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... practise virtues, which, if we had been rightly educated, we should have practised from our earliest youth with as much facility as we read or write. If a child is to learn grammar, let him commence, every one will say, when young, while his memory is most retentive. If we are to teach him those principles which are to shape his destiny in life, and have their home in the heart, should we wait till it is least susceptible of impression? It cannot be denied that too much indifference prevails on this subject. We are apt to shut our eyes ...
— Reflections on the Operation of the Present System of Education, 1853 • Christopher C. Andrews
... yearning, not so much for applause as sympathy, which the cold fortune of their lifetime did but scantily supply; so that this unsatisfied appetite may make itself felt upon sensibilities at once so delicate and retentive, even a step or two beyond the grave. Leigh Hunt, for example, would be pleased, even now, if he could learn that his bust had been reposited in the midst of the old poets whom he admired and loved; though there is hardly a man among the authors of to-day ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... keeping up an enthusiasm for beautiful language in a badly-prepared lesson on Virgil, or expressing unreal indignation and unjustifiably exalted sentiments to evil doers, and one realizes his disadvantage against the quiet youngster whose retentive memory was storing up all these impressions for an ultimate judgment, and one understands, too, a certain relief that mingled with his undeniable emotion when at last the time came for young Benham, "the one living purpose" of his life, to be off to Minchinghampton and the next step in the ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... something magnetic about the suggestion. Tilden was able, rich, and known to everybody as the foe of the Tweed ring. Besides he was capable, notwithstanding his infirmity, of making a forceful speech, full of fire, logic and facts, his quick, retentive memory enabling him to enter easily into political controversy. As a powerful reasoner it was admitted that he had few equals at the bar. Indeed, the press, crediting him with courage, perseverance, and indomitable industry, had pictured him as ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... emotions of anger, hate, fear, love, and grief so plainly that "he who runs may read." That these animals possess these emotions is a fact which hardly needs demonstration. They likewise have very retentive memories, sometimes treasuring up an injury for days, months, and years, until an opportunity arrives for them to "get even," thus ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... several miles in a carriage, together, to a town where both were to make addresses. Jones was quite an orator; Smith had a very retentive memory. Jones asked Smith about his speech, but Smith professed not to have fully decided upon his topic, and in turn asked Jones the same question. Jones gave a full outline of his speech, Smith getting him to elaborate it by judicious inquiries as to how ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... first time he knew a burning desire for the formal education he had never had. In camp he had listened, dragging out routine jobs in order to overhear reports and the small talk of specialists keen on their own particular hobbies. But so much of the information Shann had thus picked up to store in a retentive memory he had not understood and could not fit together. It had been as if he were trying to solve some highly important puzzle with at least a quarter of the necessary pieces missing, or with unrelated bits from others intermixed. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... asks,—"Is it not possible that here Mr. Collier's remarkable memory is too retentive, and that, though second thoughts may be best, first thoughts are sometimes inconveniently remembered to the prejudice of the second?"[N] Here we see a palpable slip of memory or of the pen, by which an old man substituted one word ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... all this help one much? It is possible that some who have passed for the deepest observers of human nature, owed their renown more to an acute observation of the phenomena of feeling, an intuitive knowledge of what people like and dislike, a retentive memory, and a happy knack of making all these available at the right moment, than to any profound reasoning on abstract principles. Like some untaught arithmeticians, their calculations came out correct, but they could not have gone through the ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... this child of whom his father said once that he had never had any boyhood days in the ordinary sense, were early noted in his fondness for building little plank roads out of the debris of the yards and mills. His extraordinarily retentive memory was shown in his easy acquisition of all the songs of the lumber gangs and canal men before he was five years old. One incident tells how he was found one day in the village square copying laboriously the signs of ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... towards the palm, denote persons slow to grasp an idea, or a subject, but such people have retentive memories and "hold" or grip, as it were, any one thing they ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... adverb governing the qualifying verb 'casts.'" Thus, as we walked, I proceeded to give her a definition of the various parts of speech with their relation one to another, and found her to be, on the whole, very quick and of a retentive memory. Encouraged thus, I plunged into my subject whole-heartedly and was discussing the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs when she checked me in full career ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... These birds have retentive memories. A parrot that belonged to a lady recognised a black servant after three years' absence. Another bird was so fierce that no one in the house liked to touch it, but it would allow a lady visitor to ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... benefited by the addition of organic matter. When this organic matter—as animal and plant remains—decays and becomes thoroughly incorporated with the soil, it forms what is called humus. The addition of this humus makes the land mellow, friable, retentive of moisture, and promotes the general chemical activities of the soil. It also puts the soil in the best physical condition for the comfort and well-being of the plants. Very many of the lands that are said to be exhausted of plant-food still contain enough potash, phosphoric acid, and lime, and ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... by my minute description to be able to stir the memory of one or other of the dozens of uniformed hall-porters whom I interviewed. The majority of such men have a remarkably retentive memory for a face, due to long cultivation, just as that possessed by one's club hall-porter, who can at once address any of the thousand or so ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... bath. Having gained the farther side, he put on his stockings and boots, grasped his stick, and began to climb upward through the thickly growing trees towards the house of the sirens. His instinct had told him upon the terrace that the padrone was there. Uneducated people have often marvellously retentive memories for the things of every-day life. Gaspare remembered the padrone's question about the little light beside the sea, his answer to it, the way in which the padrone had looked towards the ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... dealing with a book are recommended to those only whose natural memories are not yet made powerfully retentive by the System as a Memory-TRAINER. If, however, a Pupil possesses a good natural memory and a mastery of the System as a Device for memorising, and he has also greatly added to the power of his Concentration as well as his memory by doing all ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... in the United States, were extemporaneous, and allusive to events passing around them. But what was passing around them? The grand events of a spirit-stirring war; occurrences likely to impress themselves, as the mystical legends of former times had done, upon their memory; besides which, a retentive memory was deemed a virtue of the first water, and was cultivated accordingly in those ancient times. Ballads at first, and down to the beginning of the war with Troy, were merely recitations, with an ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... the reasons for every bit of labor he performed, and he had not kept his son in ignorance of them. As they worked together the father had explained to the son what he did, and why he did it, The results of their work spoke for themselves, and Hiram had a retentive memory. ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... not set myself to thwart your will Withholding aught of what ye crave to know. First to thee, Io, will I tell and trace Thy scared circuitous wandering mark it well, Deep in retentive tablets of the soul. When thou hast overpast the ferry's flow That sunders continent from continent, Straight to the eastward and the flaming face Of dawn, and highways trodden by the sun, Pass, till thou come unto the windy land Of daughters born to Boreas: beware ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... Recollections, by ELLA RODMAN (published by Charles Scribner), is a natural, affectionate, and delightful narrative of early days, purporting to be from a charming old lady, who has both a retentive memory and an enviable gift of genial, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... intervals, recognize persons whom he had never seen but once or twice. When employed in dictation, he would resume the thread of his discourse without being prompted, after the most vexatious interruptions. His judgment was as sound as his memory was retentive; it was almost infallible,—no one was ever known to have been misled by it. He had a remarkable analytical power, and also the power of generalization. He was a very learned man, and his Commentaries are among the most useful and valued of his writings, showing both learning ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... Most retentive to her, as it had passed, of Huggo's share in all that episode had been that she from her expostulation with Huggo had not come away with the same satisfaction as seemingly had Harry. She put before ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... it. Successful action, as in arts, crafts, games, sports, and the like, must needs have subtle and accurate knowledge behind it; but the possessor of such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to lucidity. On the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly, without possessing any real knowledge of the ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... Knox, who both approved of it. Miranda seems to have made the same impression upon everybody. His extensive travels and acquaintance with distinguished men, his knowledge of facts, dates, and figures, his retentive and ready memory, his wonderful cleverness in persuading his hearers, are spoken of in the same terms by all. Dr. Rush wrote to a friend, that Miranda had dined with him, and had talked about European politics as if he had been "in the inside of all the kings and princes." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... the window and look out, and thus gather the facts as we choose. This is true wisdom. "Wisdom is the knowledge of God." Wisdom comes by intuition. It far transcends knowledge. Great knowledge, knowledge of many things, may be had by virtue simply of a very retentive memory. It comes by tuition. But wisdom far transcends knowledge, in that knowledge is a mere incident of ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... rhyme and verse, both which powerfully affect the fancy. And in my judgment (which is not singular in this matter) with as great force as that of any ancient or modern poet I ever read. They have generally very retentive memories; they see things at a great distance. The unhappiness of their education, and their want of converse with foreign nations, deprives them of the opportunity to cultivate and beautify their genius, which seems to have been formed by nature ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... man of wide reading with a retentive, memory. The name brought back instantly to him the remembrance of the sinister reputation of its owner—a notorious buck of the thirties—who had gambled and duelled and steeped himself in drink and debauchery, until even the vile set with whom he consorted ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... life, I incurred the deserved ridicule of my friends from the superficial nature of my acquisitions, which being, in the mercantile phrase, got up for society, very often proved flimsy in the texture; and thus the gifts of an uncommonly {p.047} retentive memory and acute powers of perception were sometimes detrimental to their possessor by encouraging him to a ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... go again. But the poison had gone deep. Whenever he could he went to hear old Brutus speak. Eagerly he heard stories of the fearless abolitionist's hand-to-hand fights with men who sought to skewer his fiery tongue. Deeply he brooded on every word that his retentive ear had caught from the old man's lips, and on the wrongs he endured in behalf of his cause and for ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... with small weak eyes;' long slender hands and fingers are 'especial marks of Mercury,' says Raphael. In character the Mercurial is busy and prattling. But when well affected, Mercury gives his subjects a strong, vigorous, active mind, searching and exhaustive, a retentive memory, a natural thirst for knowledge.[13] The persons signified by Mercury are astrologers, philosophers, mathematicians, politicians, merchants, travellers, teachers, poets, artificers, men of science, and all ingenious, clever men. When he is ill affected, however, he represents pettifoggers, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Aladdin matured enormously, for though a kind neighbor took him in, together with his brother Jack and the yellow cat, he had suffered many things and already sniffed the wolf at the door. The kind neighbor was a widow lady, whose husband, having been a master carpenter of retentive habits, had left her independently rich. She owned the white-and-green house in which she lived, the plot of ground, including a small front and a small back yard, upon which it stood, and she spent with some splendor ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... the Old Testament, and, at the Synagogue school, all the minutiae of the Jewish Law. The pupil was not allowed to write anything down; all was committed to the memory, which in consequence became extremely retentive. The perfect pupil 'lost not a drop from his teacher's cistern.' At the age of about fourteen the boy would be sent to Jerusalem, to study under one of the great Rabbis; in St. Paul's case it was Gamaliel. Under his ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Hurstwood, near Burnley. Spenser then was born in London, probably in East Smithfield, about a year before those hideous Marian fires began to blaze in West Smithfield. He had at least one sister, and probably at least one brother. His memory would begin to be retentive about the time of Queen Elizabeth's accession. Of his great contemporaries, with most of whom he was to be brought eventually into contact, Raleigh was born at Hayes in Devonshire in the same year with him, Camden in Old Bailey in 1551, Hooker near Exeter in or about 1553, Sidney at Penshurst ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... upon my mind (a slow but, perhaps retentive mind), all the bearings of the place, and all its opportunities, and even the curve of the stream along it, and the bushes near the door, I was much inclined to go farther up, and understand all the village. But a bar of red ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... is the power over those which are not given, and for which no obvious or precise rule can be laid down. Or capacity is power of any sort; genius is power of a different sort from what has yet been shown. A retentive memory, a clear understanding, is capacity, but it is not genius. The admirable Crichton was a person of prodigious capacity; but there is no proof (that I know) that he had an atom of genius. His verses that remain are dull and sterile. He could learn all that was known of any subject; he ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... ebony; not very much softer than lignumvitae; it cuts better than any other wood; and when an edge is made of the ends of the fibres, it stands better than lead or tin, nay almost as well as brass. Like holly, the box is very retentive of its sap, and warps when not properly dried, though when sufficiently seasoned it stands well. Hence, for the wooden part of the finer tools, for every thing that requires strength, beauty, and polish in timber, there is nothing equal to it. There is one purpose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 369, Saturday, May 9, 1829. • Various
... opportunity to lessen its pulsations, and as she soon realized that she was practically unnoticed, her natural calmness began to return to her. She remembered why she was there, and her discerning eye enabled her to stamp on a retentive memory the various particulars of so unaccustomed a spectacle whose very unfamiliarity made the greater impression upon the girl's mind. She moved away from the group, determined to saunter through the numerous rooms ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... scholar and a recluse, he was yet at the same time a man of the world, keenly interested in the movements of men and in the page of history that unrolled itself before him day by day. To the discussion of things new, as readily as of things old, aided by a capacious, retentive and ready memory, which dispensed with reference to printed pages, he brought also the exquisite keenness and subtlety of his highly analytic and imaginative intellect, the illustrative stores of his vast and varied erudition, and that large infusion of common sense which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... he injected into the brain of his neophytes dates by the dozen and proper names—geographical ones in particular—by the score, impressing them on stubborn memories through the aid of some easily-learnt rhyme, or comic association, that made even the dullest comprehension retentive ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... arraying before his mind's eye all the facts and bearings of the most intricate case, and contemplating them, as it were, not successively, but simultaneously. His perception was quick as light; and, at the same time—rare, most rare accompaniment!—his judgment sound, his memory signally retentive. Inferior, possibly, to Mr. Subtle in rapid and delicate appreciation of momentary advantages, he was sagacious, where Mr. Subtle was only ingenious. Mr. Attorney-General had as much weight with the ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Oxford, over seas. In all scholarship, it chanced that this same boy, Grant Harlson, was easily in the lead. His mother, an ex-teacher in another and older State, loving, regardful, tactful, had taught him how to read and comprehend, and he had something of a taste that way and a retentive memory. So, inside the rugged schoolroom, he had a certain prestige. Outside, he took ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... desirous of the conversation of those from whom any information was to be obtained, but by no means solicitous to improve those opportunities that were sometimes offered of raising his fortune; and he was remarkably retentive of his ideas, which, when once he was in possession of them, rarely forsook him; a quality which could never be ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... astronomy, and one of his pupils, the historian Nicephorus Gregoras, recognised the true length of the year and proposed the reform of the calendar centuries before Pope Gregory. Theodore's memory was so retentive that he could converse on any topic with which he was familiar, as if reading from a book, and there was scarcely a subject on which he was not able to speak with the authority of an expert. He seemed a living library, 'walking encyclopaedia.' ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... the light of subsequent events, it shows how well-informed he was, and what an impartial mind he brought to bear on the subjects before him. He read very quickly, he could at a glance grasp the salient points of any question, and, having a wonderfully retentive memory, no important detail was lost sight of. He wrote both quickly and clearly, and had the faculty of presenting his points in a lucid manner. Like many military men, who are, when young, taken from their studies, he did not always ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... white children, and after he was freed, he was sent to school for several years, and became a teacher. He moved to Houston in 1888 and opened a barber shop. Jeptha claims to have been born on Oct. 17, 1835, which would make him 101 years old. He has the appearance of extreme age, but has a retentive memory, and his manner of speaking varies from fairly good English to ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... fresh tones which seemed occasionally to tremble with the excess of melody that burdened them played hide-and-seek among the hills, startling whole choruses of deep-throated echoes, and attending and retentive ocean, catching the strains on her beryl strings, bore them whither—and how far? To palm-plumed equatorial isles, where dying auricular nerves mistook them for seraphic utterances? To toiling mariners, tossed helplessly by fierce ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... as good as this, in manner infinitely before it, in my poor judgment. Why did you not add the Waggoner? Have I thanked you, though, yet, for Peter Bell? I would not not have it for a good deal of money. C—— is very foolish to scribble about books. Neither his tongue nor fingers are very retentive. But I shall not say any thing to him about it. He would only begin a very long story, with a very long face, and I see him far too seldom to teaze him with affairs of business or conscience when I do see him. He never comes near our house, and when we go to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... was no necessity, his requirements being always reasonable and only such as she was fully capable of meeting. She had a good mind, quick discernment and retentive memory, and she was quite resolved to be industrious and to keep her promise to her father to be a good girl in every way. Also her ambition was aroused to attempt to overtake ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... did not suit his strenuous nature, and he returned home and soon afterward received an appointment in this detective service. Job was known in the force as quiet, self-contained, observant, patient, and was possessed of an extraordinarily retentive memory. Rarely was it necessary for him to say, "I ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor
... the materials gathered by Scott from the lips of Mrs. Hogg and other Border ballad reciters, or from the Glenriddell MSS., was the golden mine of old poetry, for the preservation of which he and the nation were indebted to the taste and retentive memory of Mrs. Brown, daughter of Professor Thomas Gordon, of King's College, Aberdeen, and wife of a minister of Falkland, in the beginning of the century. There are in existence three MSS. of the songs and ballads this lady ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... first pointed out that a certain amount of movement between the ends of a fractured bone favours their union by promoting the formation of callus, and advocated the treatment of fractures by massage and movement, discarding almost entirely the use of splints and other retentive appliances. We were early convinced by the teaching of Lucas-Championniere, and have ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... dervish came to his turn to speak, he said: 'My tale is but short, although story-telling is my profession. I am the son of a schoolmaster, who, perceiving that I was endowed with a very retentive memory, made me read and repeat to him most of the histories with which our language abounds; and when he found that he had furnished my mind with a sufficient assortment, he turned me out into the world under the garb of dervish, to relate them ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... and he took up his abode with one of his sons, enjoying, perhaps, as serene and happy an old age as ever fell to the lot of mortals. His conversation often gathered charmed listeners around him, for he had a very retentive memory, and his mind was crowded with the incidents of his romantic career. It is said that at this period of his life an irritable expression never escaped his lips. His grand-children vied with each other in affectionate attentions to one whom they ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... not only acquainted with the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldee languages, but with philosophy, the mathematicks, canon and civil law, all parts of natural philosophy, and chymistry itself; for his application was unremitted, his head clear, his apprehension quick, and his memory retentive. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... and common-sense remedy. There may be cases where, in addition to the drain, it may be expedient to bore with an auger in the course of the drain. This, however, would be useful only where, from the peculiar formation, water is pent up upon a retentive subsoil in the manner already indicated. Elkington's method of draining by boring is illustrated ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... Linda. "From the short acquaintance I have with him I should not call him at all imaginative, but he is extremely quick and wonderfully retentive. You have to show him but once from which cactus he can get Victrola needles and fishing hooks, or where to find ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... least two feet from the surface. If by chance this comes naturally, so much the better, but otherwise the land must be tile-drained. Sloping land is by no means always well drained, many hillsides having a subsoil so impervious or so retentive of moisture that under-drainage is a necessity. The texture of the land is usually improved so greatly by good drainage that the grower has little need to rely on the clemency of the season in carrying on vineyard cultivation ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... so many questions to me at once that you tax my memory beyond its means; I never was celebrated for having a very retentive memory, my ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... of digestion and assimilation, my brain was more a machine-shop than a wareroom; hence capacity of retail dealing was of the smallest. I was not in the least conscious at this time that a large wareroom amply stored by virtue of a retentive memory was not the most needed as an equipment for all the practical affairs of life. I have ever found it necessary to dodge some memories, when there was lack of time to ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... bad, I should for ever loath myself To be the messenger to so good a lord. I do exceed my instructions to acquaint Your lordship with thus much; but 'tis my venture On your retentive wisdom: and because I would no jealous scruple should molest Or rack your peace of thought. For I assure My noble lord, no senator yet knows The business meant: though all by several letters Are warned to be there, and give their voices, Only ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... drove to a friend's house in the neighborhood, without a wish or desire to see his new acquaintance till that day seven years; but the memory of the Cornish elector, not being burdened with such a variety of objects, was more retentive. The supervisor died a few months after, and the Duke's humble friend, relying on the word of a peer, was conveyed to London posthaste, and ascended with alacrity the steps of ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... is excellent. Heavy soils give the Spy a greasy skin. Light soils cause the tree to grow upright and to bear fruit of poor flavor. The King likes a soil slightly lighter than the best Greening soils, but retentive of moisture. Hubbardson will utilize the sandiest soil of any northern variety, preferring ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... liken her to any of our four-footed friends; indeed, just at this moment, I must confess that no comparison occurs to me: but Aunt Mary loved her nieces, delighted to impart to them those stores of knowledge to which she was herself constantly adding, and which a very retentive memory enabled her to draw on for ...
— Aunt Mary • Mrs. Perring
... twenty-eight years, and now he let himself run on, seeing again in his mind's eye the faces and the scenes of many lands, none of them, however, more strange than his present surroundings. The only difficulty was his insufficient vocabulary; but his mind was a quick and retentive one and each new word, once captured, came at his bidding. Also, Pocahontas was a bright listener; she guessed at much he could not express and helped him ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... sewage, where its quantity is small, shall be stored in tanks until a large volume has accumulated, and that it then be rapidly discharged over the soil. There is no objection to an actual saturation of the ground, provided the soil is not of such a retentive character as to be liable to become puddled, and so made impervious. The tanks being emptied, the flow ceases until they are again filled. During the interval, the liquid settles away in the soil, by which ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... source in the person of the famous old Chief, Capilano, who, for the first time, revealed them to her in Chinook, or in broken English, and, as reproduced in her rich and harmonious prose, belong emphatically to what has been called "The literature of power." Bound together, so to speak, in the retentive memory of the old Chief, they are authentic legends of his people, and true to the Indian nature. But we find in them, also, something that transcends history. Indefinable forms, earthly and unearthly, pass before us in mystical ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... education at the public school. He was one of the brightest scholars in his class, learned easily, was fond of books, never wearied of study, and never forgot what he acquired. At the start he was blest with a most marvelous and retentive memory, and a keen sense of the practical side of life. "It was thus," as one of his friends has remarked, "that his school days were profitable to him to a degree not common, and it was thus that his rapidly-growing literary attainments became ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... objection, that the Iliad and Odyssey are too long to have been preserved by memory, it may be met by a simple denial. It is a strange objection indeed, coming from a man of Wolf's retentive memory. I do not see how the acquisition of the two poems can be regarded as such a very arduous task; and if literature were as scanty now as in Greek antiquity, there are doubtless many scholars who would long since have had them at their tongues' end. Sir G. C. Lewis, with but little conscious ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... used books for what interested him; he did not study them for complete mastery; and many and varied as are the traces of his literary interests, they have the air of being detached fragments that have stuck in a plastic and retentive mind, not pieces of systematic erudition. It is true that many books have been written to show that Shakespeare had the knowledge of a professional in law, medicine, navigation, theology, conveyancing, hunting and hawking, ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... shale, formed from the red shale of this region which has become hardened by the heat of the intruding trap. Where this rock occurs covering large surfaces, nearly level, "the soil is a dark brown colored clay, very retentive of moisture and better adapted to grass than grain.... A deficiency of lime probably occurs here, and there may be some obnoxious ingredient present. Minute grains of iron sand are generally interspersed through this rock, and as it is not acted upon by atmospheric influences, its combination ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... his mother, partly on an elbow and a knee, but mostly on his stomach. Arrived at his goal he would pull her skirt, indicate as well as he could a little box lying by his neglected picture-book, and grunt with much expression. A monkey lived inside the box, and Tony, whose memory was retentive, persevered in expecting to hear that monkey summoned by wild tattoos and subterranean growls until it jumped up with a bang—a splendidly terrible thing of white bristles, and scarlet snout—to ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... dared to impugn its veracity. Whatever their misgivings in secret, to myself they displayed the most credulous faith. Nor was their trust so much misplaced, for I had, in reality, become a perfect chronicle of all that went forward in Paris—never missing a debate in the Convention, where my retentive memory could carry away almost verbally all that I heard—ever present at every public fete or procession, whether the occasions were some insulting desecration of their former faith, or some tasteless mockery of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... She has the most ardent love of true religion and of the best kind of literature. The constitution of her mind is exempt from female weakness, and she is endued with a masculine power of application. No apprehension can be quicker than her's, no memory more retentive. French and Italian she speaks like English; Latin, with fluency, propriety, and judgement; she also spoke Greek with me, frequently, willingly, and moderately well. Nothing can be more elegant than her handwriting, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... good, also, to train the mind to be logical, critical and balanced: it is good to cultivate a retentive memory and to store up useful facts. But if while you are aiming at intellectual fitness and alertness you allow these good things to obscure other and better things, if, in short, you let means become ends, you will never be healthy, because ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... by pomalgrande, detale. Retail (trade) detala. Retailer revendisto. Retain gardi, teni. Retainer vasalo. Retaliate revengxi. Retaliation revengxo. Retard prokrasti, malhelpi. Retardation prokrasto, malhelpo. Retentive persista, premorebla. Retina retino. Retinue sekvantaro. Retire reeniri. Retirement kvieteco. Retort respondi, reparoli. Retort (chem. vessel) retorto. Retouch (revise) korekti. Retrace reveni, repasxi. Retract malkonfesi. Retreat ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the work has been prepared by him amidst many distractions, and hope that, in this instance at least, no ungenerous use will be made of such a circumstance to the disadvantage of the author, and that persons of greater reading or more retentive memories than the Editor, who may discover any such passages, will do him the favour to ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... manner, a third class of the pupils, whose minds have been better cultivated, and whose memories are more retentive, will not only remember all this, but they will also remember, in connection with each of these subdivisions, many of the more specific events included in, or springing from them, and which carry forward this regular analytical table one step farther. As for example, under the subdivision entitled ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... last a centenarian passed away at Whithall, Galway, in the person of Mrs. Catherine Hynes, who had attained the remarkable age of 102. The old lady had a remarkably retentive memory, recalling with ease incidents which occurred three generations ago. Her recollection of Cromwell's campaign was particularly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... to excite the Ranger's liveliest admiration. Only now and then, as if in an unguarded moment, did he appear to forget himself and speak with an authority equaling her own. What he said at such times indicated either a remarkably retentive memory or else an ability to think along original lines too rare among men of his ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... had now been a number of years in Edinburgh. Of excellent head and generous heart, he loved the wild, green, and deep solitudes of nature. The other—G. M'D.—was of powerful and bold intellect, and remarkable for a retentive memory. Each of us, partial to those regions where nature strives to maintain her own undisturbed dominion, on all holidays hied away from the city, to the woodland and mountainous haunts, or the loneliness of the least ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... all truth was conveyed in symbolical forms. That means toward a time of narrow experience, and of knowledge far more limited than the present. Memory, in those days, was enormously and abnormally capacious and retentive, but there was no appreciation of humanity. Few lessons from the experiences of others were possible, because the mind was filled with merely tribal legends. What was called early civilization was only relatively ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... bonfires with a clear head and an appetite undiminished by punch; and probably she was the only one at Morristown of whom this could be said. The morning light did not break for her on aching eyelids and a brain at once too retentive of the boasts of the small hours and too sensitive to the perils of the day to come. Colonel John had scarcely passed away under guard, old Darby had scarcely made his first round—with many an ominous shake of the head—the slatternly ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... not even tend to make them dishonest. You see, a religious belief does not affect the senses. Justice should not shut any door that leads to truth. No one will pretend that, because you do not believe in hell, your sight is impaired, or your hearing dulled, or your memory rendered less retentive. A witness in a court is called upon to tell what he has seen, what he has heard, what he remembers, not what he believes about gods and devils and hells and heavens. A witness substantiates not a faith, but a fact. In order ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... to gain the general applause of the university for academical exercises:—And this was the more remarkable, that having turned his thoughts towards the ministry, he carried on his theological studies at the same time, and made great improvements therein, for his memory was so retentive, that he scarcely forgot any thing had heard or read. It was easy and ordinary for him to inscribe any sermon, after he returned to his chamber, at such a length, that the intelligent and judicious reader, who had heard ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... pitch at which the poetry of the Holy Rood has arrived, and the expansion given to the subject of the Day of Judgment. If we consider his language and manner, we remark the facility and copious flow of his poetic diction, but with a something that suggests the retentive mind of the student; his cumulation of old heroic phraseology not unlike the romantic poetry of Scott, joined occasionally with a departure from old poetic usage which seems like a slip on the part of an accomplished imitator.[134] Occasionally he has ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... break an engagement, whether it be one of business or pleasure, with a lady, or with another gentleman. If not blessed with a retentive memory, he must carry a note-book and record therein all his appointments, guarding, by frequent reference, against making two for the same day and hour. To break an engagement with a lady is almost certain to give lasting offence, and ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... unexpected, as he first taught mathematics in the university, and expected in due time to become professor of Greek. As professor of the mellifluous and most plastic of all the ancient tongues, he would undoubtedly have been proficient, as his college classics still remain fresh in his warm and retentive memory, and his literary taste is so severe and chaste as to make some of his scientific papers read like a psalm. But nature designed him for another, and some think a better, field, and endowed him with powers as a naturalist that have won for him ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... they had learned a certain thing, in speaking to them she used English for that thing. The Folk, keen-witted and retentive of memory as barbarians often are, made astonishing ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... reading was so great, that her parents found no little difficulty in furnishing her with a sufficient supply. She not only read with eagerness every book which met her eye, but pursued this uninterrupted miscellaneous reading to singular advantage, treasuring up all important facts in her retentive memory. So entirely absorbed was she in her books, that the only successful mode of withdrawing her from them was by offering her flowers, of which she was passionately fond. Books and flowers continued, through all the ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... shall deal with the use in reasoning of such curves, either actually 'plotted' or roughly imagined. In this chapter I point out, firstly, that they can be easily remembered (partly because our visual memory is extremely retentive of the image made by a black line on a white surface) and that we can in consequence carry in our minds the quantitative facts as to a number of variations enormously beyond the possibility of memory if they were treated as isolated instances; ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... clever. Once or twice, looking back, she had been somewhat surprised to find that she could remember nothing of what had been said. It occurred to her, fleetingly, that of so much talk, some word ought to stick in her usually retentive memory; but she gave the matter no more thought. She had also been aware, somewhat dimly, that Austin Page was more or less out of drawing in the carefully composed picture presented on those social afternoons. He had the inveterate habit of being ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... watch, I found that it was nearly two o'clock—he had informed me that he dined at four—and, not to detain the reader with these details, recurring to a very retentive memory, I found myself, two hours afterward, seated at table with the editor of ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... lightly of this multifarious knowledge, and nothing can be more probable, than that attainment of many languages, with any approach to their fluent use, is beyond the power of man. But his diligence was exemplary, his memory retentive, and his understanding accomplished by classical knowledge; with those qualities, much might be done in any pursuit; and though modern orientalists protest against the superficiality of his acquirements, their variety has been admitted, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... from the novels of Sylvanus Cobb to Euclid's Elements, both of which I found (to my almost equal wonder) he had managed to peruse: he was taking stock by the way, of the people, the products, and the country, with an eye unusually observant and a memory unusually retentive; and he was collecting for himself a body of magnanimous and semi-intellectual nonsense, which he supposed to be the natural thoughts and to contain the whole duty of the born American. To be pure-minded, to be patriotic, to get culture and ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... became their permanent abode. They had one brother, now Judge Breckinridge of St. Louis. Margaret's school-days were pleasantly passed, for she had a genuine love of study, an active intellect, and a very retentive memory. When her school education was over, she still continued her studies, and never gave up her prescribed course until the great work came upon her which absorbed all her time and powers. In the year 1852 her sister married ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... speculative literature, and although he was a great lover and great buyer of water-colour pictures, I do not think he had much real sense or knowledge of art. But he had read very extensively and with great profit and discrimination in many widely different fields, and his memory was unusually retentive. He was an excellent literary critic, and if clear thought and accurate knowledge were what he most valued, it would be a complete mistake to suppose that he was insensible to the poetic and imaginative side of literature. He could repeat long passages from 'Childe Harold,' and I can well remember ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and lies, she tracked and stored up against them till she had at moments, in private, a triumphant vicious feeling of mastery and ease, a sense of carrying their silly guilty secrets in her pocket, her small retentive brain, and thereby knowing so much more about them than they suspected or would care to think. There were those she would have liked to betray, to trip up, to bring down with words altered and fatal; and all through a personal hostility provoked by ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... St. John without any extraordinary gift. He was bound to our LORD by more than ordinary affection. He was ever nearest to Him. Is it not conceivable, (we are asked,) that these two causes, aided by a retentive memory, would at least enable him to give us the record which he ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... was a brilliant and persuasive extempore speaker. He possest in high degree faculties essential to great oratory—a capacious mind, retentive memory, logical acumen, vivid imagination, deep concentration, and wealth of language. He had an extraordinary personal fascination, largely due to his ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
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