"Inimitable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... written in his own inimitable style—another book of inspiration for people of all ages and either sex—a new vein of optimistic cheer for us mortals of a war-worn world—another message from the man who knows how to keep himself happy and well, and who is ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... ordered. There, I must own, a girl is bound by many and rigorous restrictions; little is permitted her; she learns to be distant, she learns to appear forbidding. But here, in free England—oh, glorious liberty!" she cried, and threw up her arms with a gesture of inimitable grace—"here there are no fetters; here the woman may dare to be herself entirely, and the men, the chivalrous men—is it not written on the very shield of your nation, honi soit? Ah, it is hard for me to learn, hard for me to dare to be myself. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... down to my miserable berth, and vainly tried to sleep, the discomfort and mismanagement which prevailed leading my thoughts by force of contrast to the order, cleanliness, and regularity of the inimitable line of steamers on the West Highland coast. Wherever the means of locomotion are concerned, these colonies are very far behind either the "old country" or their enterprising neighbours in Canada; and at present they do not appear ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... granitique que j'ai traversee, se trouve presque couverte de ces masses; les uns sur les sommets des montagnes les plus elevees, les autres sur la pente et dans les vallees. Plusieurs de ces masses sont arrangees les uns sur les autres avec un art inimitable, les autres sont isolees ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... Lakhanas an equally sanguinary two days' conflict had been in progress. The Greeks attacked and finally captured the Bulgarian entrenched positions. Time after time their charges failed to reach, but eventually their persistent courage and inimitable elan won home, and the Bulgarians fled in utter rout and panic, leaving everything, even many of their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... after-dinner and occasional speaker Dickens was rarely equaled; and as an actor upon the amateur stage, in plays of his own composition, he was inimitable. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... no!" said M. Rodin, with an inimitable expression of simplicity; "it is quite a matter of course when one has a heart like M. d'Aigrigny's. But amongst all his good qualities, he has particularly that of never forgetting worthy people—people of integrity, honor, conscience—and therefore, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... black lace that called itself a bonnet, with black strings tied demurely under the chin. The abundance of character and dignity in the beauty which yet to-night was so young and glowing—the rich arresting note of the voice—the inimitable carriage of the head—Wharton realised them all at the moment with peculiar vividness, because he felt them in some sort as additions to his own personal wealth. To-night she was ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sudden plunge proved. Sometimes one of the group appeared alone on the ground, when no person was about (except behind the blinds), and then he talked with himself for company, a very charming monologue in the inimitable bluebird tone, with modifications suggesting that a new and wonderful song was possible to him. He was evidently too full ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... great deal younger, Duncan thought, than when they had been classmates, what time Duncan shared his rooms with Kellogg: very much younger and suffering exquisitely from over-sophistication. His drawl barely escaped being inimitable; his air did not escape it. "Smitten with my old trouble," Duncan appraised him: "too much money... Heaven knows I hope he ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... dark-blue mountain-ridges; here, where Hannibal defeated Flaminius, the rivers now held each other in their green embraces; lovely, half-naked children tended a herd of black swine, beneath a group of fragrant laurel-trees, hard by the road-side. Could we render this inimitable picture properly, then would everybody exclaim, "Beautiful, unparalleled Italy!" But neither the young Divine said so, nor anyone of his grumbling companions in the ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... heard of a book, called Three Men in a Boat, by Mr. JEROME K. JEROME, some of whose observations, in a collection of papers entitled Stage-land, had caused him to laugh several times, and to smile frequently, for the subject has not been so well touched since GILBERT ABBOTT A BECKETT wrote his inimitable Quizziology of the Drama, which for genuine drollery has never been surpassed. Anticipating, then, some side-splitters from Three Men in a Boat, the Baron sent for the work. He opened it with a chuckle, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... far pleasingly was spent, And every Hour admin'stred Content, Then would I range the Fields, and flow'ry Meads, Where Nature her exub'rant Bounty spreads, In whose delightful Products does appear Inimitable Beauty ev'ry where; Contemplate on each Plant, and useful Weed, And how its Form first lay involved in Seed, How they're preserv'd by Providential Care, For what design'd, and what their Virtues are. Thus to my Mind by dint of Reason prove, That all below ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... says the inimitable Abercrummie, {3} 'stands upon an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open to the south. It hath one principals street, with houses upon both sides, built of freestone; and it is beautifyed with the situation of two castles, one at each end of this street. ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inimitable monologues, being each the apotheosis of some typical Bromide—a shopgirl, a country dressmaker, a bargain-hunter and so on—become, through her art, intensely sulphitic. They are excruciatingly funny, just because she represents types so common that we recognize them instantly. ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... his ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice—thanks to the inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, even in the desolation of at least thirteen centuries, has not lost its cunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and fills the whole vast hollow with its clear, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the school would dwindle away, and I would start out. I would visit Mun Eddings, who lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whose flaming face seemed ever ablaze with the dark red hair uncombed, was absent all last week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler's farm on shares, would tell me how the crops needed the boys; and the thin, slovenly mother, whose face was pretty when washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... in American fiction to compare with it.... Mr. Crane has added to American literature something that has never been done before, and that is, in its own peculiar way, inimitable."—Boston Beacon. ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... this stepped forward with his candles, and, with an inimitable bow, requested the young officers to follow him. They bowing again to madame and her daughters, followed the maitre d'hotel, who led the way to a large room with two beds in it, as also a couple of cane sofas, several ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... he said afterwards to Wharncliffe as they walked away from the door together, 'she was inimitable to-night; she has more roles than Desforets!' Sir John and his ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... colonel, with an inimitable shrug of his shoulders, and an indescribable expression of countenance, indicative of intense disgust. "I am a brave man; I fear nothing—mais c'est ce terrible mal de mer!" (this ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... the book of Proverbs, he found many of those practical truths which he applied to life with new authority and power. From the same storehouse of crystallized experience he derived certain of those figures which he expanded into his inimitable parables; he adopted also, and put to new use, the effective gnomic form of teaching of the wisdom school. As in the mouth of his herald, John the Baptist, the great moral and spiritual truths, first proclaimed by the ancient prophets, live again on the lips of Jesus. At every point in ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... signification of the word "blessed" means happy. In Christ's inimitable Sermon on the Mount He declares, "Happy are the beggars in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." All the uninterrupted felicities of the glory land are theirs at the hour of dissolution. Their joy is augmented by the pure fellowship and friendship of the Saviour and ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... to which Rupert played accompaniments on the banjo, while Ducky and Billykins led the applause, and Sylvia posed as audience, aping the languid, bored look of a fine lady at a concert with such inimitable mimicry that she came in for nearly as much applause as the proper performers from such of the other passengers ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... apprehension, or rather the mere possibility of failure, for when I looked round on my competitors I was encouraged by the thought that dear old Woollet knew more about a rate appeal than Littledale himself, while old Peter Ryland, with his inimitable Saxon, was quite as good at the irremovability of a pauper as Codd was in accounting for the illegal removal of a duck, and both in their several branches of knowledge more learned than Alderson or Bayley. But ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... Stories of inimitable wit and humor with lullabies and sketches of every day scenes that made Eugene Field famous. ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... would give the traveler a rough time of it were he to suggest that they are any but pure Chinese. To the ethnological student, it is obvious that so soon as the Chinese have tyrannized sufficiently and in their own inimitable way preyed upon these feudal landlords enough to warrant their lands being confiscated, reducing a tribe to a condition in which, far removed from districts where co-tribesmen live, they have no ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... light lately thrown by that admirable writer M. Anatole France on the question of any animated view of the histrionic temperament—a light that may well dazzle to distress any ingenuous worker in the same field. In those parts of his brief but inimitable Histoire Comique on which he is most to be congratulated—for there are some that prompt to reserves—he has "done the actress," as well as the actor, done above all the mountebank, the mummer and the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... his dropping, his driving, his penning, aroused the loud-tongued admiration of crowd and competitors alike. He was patient yet persistent, quiet yet firm, and seemed to coax his charges in the right way in that inimitable ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... Continent, not down as with us) and sat in the full draught of the night-air. A pleasant young Irishman named Martin, a near relative of the Miss Martin who collaborated with Miss Somerville in the inimitable Experiences of an Irish R.M. noticed this. "By Gad! that fellow will get fever if he sits in the draught from the swamps. I'll go and warn him." I told Martin that the South American spoke no English. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... clothed with trees; to the north, a receding line of mountains; elsewhere infinite space and blazing light. Our "tonga," its pair of wheels and its white awning rolling and jolting behind two good horses, passes long lines of bullock-carts. Indians, walking beside them with their inimitable gait, make exquisite gestures of abjection to the clumsy white Sahibs huddled uncomfortably on the back seat. Their robes of vivid colour, always harmoniously blent, leave bare the slender brown legs and often the breast and back. Children stark naked ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Emmentaler was made in Switzerland for export to Italy where it was hardened in caves to become a grating cheese called Raper, and now it is largely imitated there. Emmentaler, in fact, because of its piquant pecan-nut flavor and inimitable quality, is simulated everywhere, ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... sipped the delicious wine, testing its flavor with great deliberation, and said, on returning the cup: "I agree with you, it is indeed a noble wine, and tastes twice as well when presented with such inimitable grace. Strangers are quite right in saying that there are ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... pretend to give this in the language or manner of Mr. Polk, which is said to be inimitable; neither do we claim him as a 'Union man.' He has remained quietly at home, and taken no part in the contest; but we are indebted to him, or to some one who has reported it as coming from him, for ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... cost less than presents, and are worth more. No one gives as much as he who gives hopes. It is not necessary for the man we choose to be of brilliant intellect. I would even prefer him to be of no great ability. Stupid people show an inimitable grace in roguery. Be guided by me, gentlemen, and overthrow the Republic by the agency of a Republican. Let us be prudent. But prudence does not exclude energy. If you need me you will find me ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... to putter away at these things. Every day I try to come down here for an hour or so. It rests me because it gives my mind a complete change. For, whether you believe it or not," he added with his inimitable chuckle, "to make a poem and to make a chair are two very ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... 'painfulness,' we have that so well expounded and illustrated in John Bunyan's Mr. Fearing, that all I need to do is to recall that inimitable character to your happy memory. 'He was a man that had the root of the matter in him, but at the same time he was the most troublesome pilgrim that ever I met with in all my days. He lay roaring at the Slough of Despond for above a month together. ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... the strange perversions of isolated scraps of Bible language—texts torn from their context—the harassing doubts as to the truth of Christianity, the depths of despair and the elevations of joy, which he has portrayed with his own inimitable graphic power. It is a picture of fearful fascination that he draws. "A great storm" at one time comes down upon him, "piece by piece," which "handled him twenty times worse than all he had met with before," while "floods of blasphemies were poured ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... his speeches were pitched in a much loftier key than his former oratorical efforts. While he remained fond of telling funny stories in private conversation, they disappeared more and more from his public discourse. He would still now and then point his argument with expressions of inimitable quaintness, and flash out rays of kindly humor and witty irony; but his general tone was serious, and rose sometimes to genuine solemnity. His masterly skill in dialectical thrust and parry, his wealth of knowledge, his power of reasoning and elevation ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... condition; while the Slav was sometimes almost voiceless, sometimes inspired. She put you off with a hope, a promise, time after time. But she was quite as likely to put you off with a revelation,—with an interpretation that was inimitable, unrepeatable. ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... Julian the Roman, and Chosroes the Persian, emperor; among the leaders of armies, it had Chabrias and Phocion, those brave generals of the Athenians; among mathematicians, those leading stars of science, Eudoxus, Archimedes[16] and Euclid; among biographers, the inimitable Plutarch; among physicians, the admirable Galen; among rhetoricians, those unrivaled orators Demosthenes and Cicero; among critics, that prince of philologists, Longinus; and among poets, the most learned and majestic Virgil. Instances, though not equally illustrious, ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... one could but have followed our two friends into the wide-verandahed house, sat down with them in the cool trellised room, where the wine shone on the lamp-lighted tablecloth; tasted of their exotic food—the raw fish, the bread-fruit, the cooked bananas, the roast pig served with the inimitable miti, and that king of delicacies, palm-tree salad; seen and heard by fits and starts, now peering round the corner of the door, now railing within against invisible assistants, a certain comely young native lady in a sacque, who seemed too modest to be a member of the family, and too imperious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gaulois," or "English character," or "American Democracy," while, in accordance with the problematic character of our being, we Germans, except for the statuesque heroes of legendary times, or certain historic but inimitable figures, have conceived or poetically created no character of which we can say that it embodies the ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Ballad Monger, Mrs. TREE appeared as Princess Claudia, the part originally played, and excellently played, by Lady MONCKTON. Although probably accustomed to roles of a lighter kind, she was fairly equal to the occasion. As for her husband, as Demetrius, he was simply admirable and inimitable. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when they patted me on the back as when they kicked me in the shins. Whenever since I've happened to have a glimpse of them they were still blazing away—still missing it, I mean, deliciously. YOU miss it, my dear fellow, with inimitable assurance; the fact of your being awfully clever and your article's being awfully nice doesn't make a hair's breadth of difference. It's quite with you rising young men," Vereker laughed, "that I feel most what ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... jewelled hand, and while her Carl disappeared through a secret door on one side of the room, she glided forward with grace and elegance inimitable, to receive the high-born ladies who were just then passing the portals of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... long before that agitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which Coleridge describes with such anxious gravity in his apologetic preface to the republication of the lines. On the whole one may pretty safely accept De Quincey's view of the true character of this incident as related by him in his own inimitable fashion, namely, that it was in the nature of an elaborate hoax, played off at the poet's expense. [3] The malice of the piece is, as De Quincey puts it, quite obviously a "malice of the understanding and fancy," and not of the heart. There is significance in the ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... be said in closing as to the merits of 'The Rape of the Lock' and its position in English literature. In the first place it is an inimitable picture of one phase, at least, of the life of the time, of the gay, witty, heartless society of Queen Anne's day. Slowly recovering from the licentious excesses of the Restoration, society at this time was perhaps unmoral rather than immoral. It was quite ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... adornings." What loftiness and awe have I seen expressed in the step of an actress, not yet deceased, when first she advanced, and came down towards the audience! I was ravished, and with difficulty kept my seat! Pass we to the mazes of the dance, the inimitable charms and picturesque beauty that may be given to the figure while still unmoved, and the ravishing grace that dwells in it during its ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... read from the public platform had by this time become so insistent that Riley could no longer resist it, although modesty and shyness fought the battle for privacy. He told briefly and in his own inimitable fashion of these trying experiences. "In boyhood I had been vividly impressed with Dickens' success in reading from his own works and dreamed that some day I might follow his example. At first I read at Sunday- school ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... highly of this great work, its author was bowed down by poverty and infirmities, and nothing was done for him by the king or his courtiers. The last glimpse of the life of Cervantes I have space for, is from his own inimitable pen, and is taken from the preface to the "Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda," which was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... practical jokes, trying to show them what an innocent creature he was when it came to mules, or how the only policy of fire insurance he held had lapsed, how void of guile he was in any direction, and all with that inimitable drawl, that perplexed countenance and peculiar scraping of the left foot, like a boy speaking his first piece at school." If he just escaped disaster, he likewise just escaped millions; on one occasion, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... introducing the irrepressible "Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful in Jem Baggs. His "make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... suppose I must call her so. They were not mere outer disguises; they were finished pieces of dramatic study. Those two people were an actor and actress, as well as a pair of rogues; and in both their roles they were simply inimitable. ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... words three times before he put down the paper. The words were: "I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!" They were in the quite inimitable, not to say illegible, handwriting of ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... like to identify the house which the creator of Paul Dombey had in mind when he painted the inimitable portrait of Mrs. Pipchin, "ogress and child queller," whose castle "was in a steep bye street.... where the small front gardens had the property of producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... inconsistency into which she betrays her heroine. Allow me to say that in my humble opinion nothing in the whole range of literature so fully portrays a perfect woman as that noble sketch by Wordsworth, and the inimitable ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... speech and behaviour were to me, at the time when the bare recollecting and transcribing them obliged me to drop my pen. The women had tears in their eyes. I was silent for a few moments.—At last, Matchless excellence! Inimitable goodness! I called her, with a voice so accented, that I was half-ashamed of myself, as it was before the women—but who could stand such sublime generosity of soul in so young a creature, her loveliness giving grace to all she said? Methinks, said I, [and I really, in a manner, involuntarily ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... before a snug fire, in his cottage by the sea, with one of the prettiest girls in all England by his side, knitting him a pair of inimitable socks, the "beggar" opened his ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... flower, warbling one song, growing together like a double cherry. Of England, is the picture of the hounds with "ears that sweep away the morning dew"; from England, all this out-door woodland life, the clown's play and the clowns themselves,—Bottom with his inimitable conceit, and his fellows, Snug, Quince, and the rest. English is all Puck's fairy lore, the cowslips tall, the red-hipt humble-bee, Oberon's bank, the pansy love-in-idleness, and all the lovely imagery of the ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... Dionysius says (Div. Nom. ix) "the same things are both like and unlike God. They are like by reason of a variable imitation of the Inimitable"—that is, because, so far as they can, they imitate God Who cannot be imitated perfectly—"they are unlike because they are the effects of a Cause of Whom they fall short infinitely and immeasurably." Hence, if there be no fear in God (since ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... unexpected places. Last May I glanced up from my book and espied an olive-backed thrush in the back yard, foraging among the currant-bushes. Raising a window quietly, I whistled something like an imitation of his inimitable song; and the little traveler—always an easy dupe—pricked up his ears, and presently responded with a strain which carried me straight into the depths of a White Mountain forest. But in December, with some exceptions, of course, birds must be sought after rather than waited for. The 15th, for ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... belt gleamed an unsheathed dagger. Slowly and with courtly grace he approached the panting Nelida, who now, with half-closed eyes and slackening steps, looked as though she were drowsily footing her way into dreamland. He touched her snowy shoulder,—she started with an inimitable gesture of surprise, ... a smile, brilliant as morning, dawned on her face,—withdrawing herself slightly, she assumed an air of haughtily sweet disdain and refusal, ... then capriciously relenting, she gave him her hand, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the bloomy olive pallor of a young peach. The independent stride was distinguishingly American. Ah, the charm of these women who are my countrywomen! They come, they go, alone, unattended, courageous without being bold, self-reliant without being rude; inimitable. In what an amiable frame of mind Nature must have been on the day she cast these molds! But I proceed. The young woman's chin was tilted, and Warburton could tell by the dilated nostrils that she was breathing in the gale with all the joy of living, filling her healthy ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... find artistic value in the turns; and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for their sense of character; fat female singers, who had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered to possess inimitable drollery; there were those who found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while others exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction of conjurers and trick-cyclists. The crowd too, under another influence, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Volkslieder has to contend with difficulties of no ordinary kind. The freshness of their phrases, the spontaneity of their sentiments, and the melody of their unstudied cadences, are inimitable. So again is the peculiar effect of their frequent transitions from the most fanciful imagery to the language of prose. No mere student can hope to rival, far less to reproduce, in a foreign tongue, the charm of verse which ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... abilities that separation from New South Wales was eventually conceded from Home. In the elective contests we saw some of the peculiar talent with which Lang fought his many political foes, when, with an inimitable blandness of address, and the softest of mellifluous language, he would build up a many-sided argument, patiently and leisurely, and at last, as with the bitterly biting end of a stockman's long whip, flay the Wentworths of ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... Colonel Zane contrived, with inimitable skill, to get Betty, Will, Silas, Bessie and the others interested in some remarkable news he had just heard, or made up, and this left Jonathan and Helen comparatively alone ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... did not know of this. No one informed her of the death of her lover, and her weary waiting for his return is what has given the touch of keenest pathos to the romantic story. Bret Harte, in his inimitable style, has put into exquisite verse, the story of the waiting of this true-hearted ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... leaving a sudden sullen gray; the little square room, littered with an upheaval of excelsior, sheet-shrouded furniture, and the paper-hanger's paraphernalia and inimitable smells, darkening ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the grape vintage, the varied aspects of his Sabine retreat in the fierce summer heats, or when the snowy forehead of Soracte purpled in winter sunsets! Scattered through his odes and the occasional poems which he addresses to his city friends, you find these graceful and inimitable touches of rural beauty, each a ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... bless him with an unchiding welcome; and on the other, the contrition of the penitent, turning homeward with tears, from his wanderings, his stricken spirit breaking with its ill-desert, he sobs aloud, "The lowest place, the lowest place, I can abide no other." Or in those inimitable words, "Father, I have sinned against Heaven, and in thy sight, and no more worthy to be called thy son; make me as one of thy HIRED servants." The supposition that hired servants were the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... grateful leaves wait and beckon. A voice comes from the garden bed; it is the complaint of the pansy. "Here I lie," it says, "with all my jewels low in the dust. Where is the purple of my amethysts, the yellow of my topaz, the inimitable sheen of my milk-white pearls? Alas and alack for pansies when the rain beats them earthward!" The marigold, like a yellow-haired boy with his straw hat well back from his flying mane, whistles softly to himself for joy, and buries his hands in the pockets of his green breeches. The peonies ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... could do, poor souls, in fifteen minutes, and wonderful in the time. 'Tis women for quick thinking and quick acting where men are concerned; and, indeed, the look of astonishment Mrs Gunning gave as the three entered was inimitable, though already she had every particular set down in her mind. She swept the stateliest curtsey, and cast a rebuking maternal eye on her daughters, ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... certain tree, miles away—but what or whom he saw when he got there, he does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree near which he sometimes sat—"the Apollo of the woods—tall and graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could walk, if it only would"; and mentions that in a dream-trance he actually once saw his "favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around VERY CURIOUSLY." (1) Once ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... pattering swiftly through the darkness of the next room. The master of the Typhoon followed close behind him. Outside the councilor hesitated for a moment, as if debating which route to take, and then with a prodigious wink at Captain Plum and a throatful of his inimitable chuckles, chose the path down which his startled visitor of a short time before had fled. For fifteen minutes this path led between thick black walls of forest verdure. Obadiah Price kept always a few paces ahead of his companion and spoke not a word. At the end of perhaps half a mile ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... 290. For the idea of this line, I am indebted to Emerson, in his inimitable sonnet ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... friend the justly celebrated naturalist J.J. AUDUBON, as a small tribute of respect to his eminent talents, and the highly important services he has rendered science. The drawing which accompanies this paper, is from his inimitable pencil. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... in them. The cause for which Socrates lived was the education of the people of Athens to truth and justice. All the Sophists were his enemies. Aristophanes ridiculed him as no other reformer has ever been ridiculed, holding him up, by his inimitable wit, to the scorn of the crowded theatre. When he died, and died in the faith, all this ended. Socrates and his great cause of justice rose at once, and drew all men to them. So Savonarola, who lived only with the purpose of helping on the triumph of pure religion in the Church, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... inimitable, and will delight boys and girls of mature age, as well as their juniors. No happier combination of author and artist than this volume presents could be found to furnish healthy amusement to the young folks. The book is an artistic ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... smattering of grammar and spelling, and a lively sense of humor within her own limitations, with a particularly small intelligence in other directions. Her one art was histrionics of the kind that made an individual appeal. In such, she was inimitable. She had been reared in a criminal family, which must excuse much. Long ago, she had lost track of her father; her mother she had never known. Her one relation was a brother of high standing as a pickpocket. One principal ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... them all, said, "There are here abundance of fine things, and such as do honor to the noble writers, but I am under the indispensable necessity of giving the palm to my lord Dorset; and when I have read it, I am convinced your lordships will all be satisfied with my judgment—these are the inimitable words: ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... may turn aside from the dust and heat of the day, and drink of the living streams of knowledge. There is a "daily beauty in his life," on which mankind may meditate, and grow better. It exhibits no lofty and almost useless, because inimitable, example of excellence; but presents a picture of active, yet simple and imitable virtues, which are within every man's reach, but which, unfortunately, are not exercised by many, or this world would be ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... drawn to him against her will; how she held Gorst's card tight in her poor little hand; how her eyes had foreknowledge of his errand and besought him to spare her; and how in her awkwardness she yet preserved her inimitable grace. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... the European undoubtedly is), and wherever the unkindness of nature has not degraded the human features too much below the pure standard, and, by habituating them to their own deformity, rendered them insensible to genuine corporeal beauty. Respecting the inimitable perfection of the antique in its few remains of a first-rate character, there is but one voice throughout the whole of civilized Europe; and if ever their merit was called in question, it was in times when the modern arts of design had sunk to the lowest ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... that, Captain Collyer, and take care that it never again occurs," answered Mr Fitzgerald, with inimitable gravity, but with an expression on his comical features which made our good-natured skipper almost burst into ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... as an intellectual and amusing observer of life's foibles with a hero characterized by inimitable kindness and humor."—The Independent. ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... the point," said Sunday. "I believe your own accent to be inimitable, though I shall practise it in my bath. Do you mind leaving ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... common reader—and a maximum length of six thousand words. Short stories broke out everywhere. Kipling was writing short stories; Barrie, Stevenson, Frank-Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least one perfect one, "The Happy Hypocrite"; Henry James pursued his wonderful and inimitable bent; and among other names that occur to me, like a mixed handful of jewels drawn from a bag, are George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella d'Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham, Arthur Morrison, Marriott ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... look more the vagabond enthroned. For dress, he wore the common equipment of Cattleland—jingling spurs, fringed chaps, leather cuffs, gray shirt, with kerchief knotted loosely at the neck, and revolver ready to his hand. But he carried them with an air, an inimitable grace, that marked him for a prince among his fellows. Something of the kind she hinted to him in jesting paradoxical fashion, making an attempt to win from his sardonic gloom one of ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... those days recorded. It is, of course, not to be relied upon as a narrative of facts; but it is worthy of very special attention by every cultivated mind of the present day, from the fact, that such is the beauty, the grace, the melody, the inimitable poetic perfection with which the story is told, in the language in which the original record stands, that the narrative has made a more deep, and widespread, and lasting impression upon the human mind than any other narrative perhaps ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... sentiment, gracefully written and deftly touched with a gentle humor. It is a dainty book—daintily illustrated."—New York Tribune. "A wholesome, bright, refreshing story, an ideal book to give a young girl."—Chicago Record-Herald. "An idyllic story, replete with pathos and inimitable humor. As story-telling it is perfection, and as portrait-painting it is ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... of Plutarch consists in these very details which we are no longer permitted to describe. With inimitable grace he paints the great man in little things; and he is so happy in the choice of his instances that a word, a smile, a gesture, will often suffice to indicate the nature of his hero. With a jest Hannibal cheers his frightened soldiers, and leads them laughing to the battle which ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... The royal duties, which seemed to be purely maternal, consisted in putting the Pirates to bed after a day of rapine and bloodshed, and in feeding them with liquorice water through a quill in a small bottle. Limited as her functions were, Polly performed them with inimitable gravity and unquestioned sincerity. Even when her companions sometimes hesitated from actual hunger or fatigue and forgot their guilty part, she never faltered. It was her real existence—her other life ...
— The Queen of the Pirate Isle • Bret Harte
... me false. But within a day or two, when half-way down the mountain path, I heard the well-known strain ringing through the woods. It was unquestionably that, and nothing else, for I sat down upon a convenient log and listened for ten minutes or more, while the singer ran through all those inimitable variations which infallibly distinguish the wood thrush's song from every other. And afterward, to make assurance doubly sure, I again saw the bird in the best possible position, and at short range. On looking into the subject, indeed, I learned that his ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... true,' which is what many people feel about Christianity. 'Dombey and Son' was the outlet for that curious psychology of Dickens which could get the best out of a pathetic incident by approaching it from a grotesque angle. It came, as Chesterton points out in his own inimitable way, 'into the inner chamber by coming down the chimney.' Which demonstrates the ever nearness of pathos to humour, of the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the very first chapter to the hero, the young schoolmaster, about to be tarred and feathered by a brutal mob. And a real hero he proves himself in his gentleness, conscientiousness, and manly moral and physical courage. Carl, the German boy, is an inimitable picture of young German life and character. Toby, the house negro, is, in his mingled stupidity, cunning, and faithfulness, drawn to the life. Nor are the negroes of the cave less excellent. Events hurry forward, different characters are strangely grouped, new elements and capacities constantly ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... into the faces of the two as they stood for a moment peering into the gloom. Howland could hear the Cree chuckling in his inimitable way as he struck a match, and as a big hanging oil lamp flared slowly into light he turned a grinning ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... Masaccio, the theory of perspective of Paolo Uccello, the varied works of Fabriano, Antonello da Messina, the Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, the Bellini, and their contemporaries, culminated in the inimitable painting of the Cinquecento—in works still unsurpassed, ever challenging artists of later centuries to the task of ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... paced back and forth upon the gravel, repeating without mistake and with gestures and accents inimitable the lines which Phoebe had dictated. She watched him, listening attentively, conscious that what she saw and heard, though given in a moment, were to be carried with her forever; convinced as well that she was for something in ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... ale-houses of the Black Forest, for the woodcutters and charcoal-women to dance; and yet this boy, with his long yellow curls and big blue eyes, defies all your Italian impostors. His left hand is possessed of inimitable melody, grace, and suppleness, and his right of a power to draw the bow, that the Almighty rarely ...
— The Dean's Watch - 1897 • Erckmann-Chatrian
... the Bardi, father and son, might have been held reverently on the lips of scholars in the ages to come; not on account of frivolous verses or philosophical treatises, which are superfluous and presumptuous attempts to imitate the inimitable, such as allure vain men like Panhormita, and from which even the admirable Poggio did not keep himself sufficiently free; but because we should have given a lamp whereby men might have studied the supreme productions of the past. For why is a young man like Poliziano (who was not yet ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... seen in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer was in many ways the exact opposite of Langland, and was the precursor of modern literature as Wycliffe was the precursor of modern religion. He was an inimitable story-teller, with an eye which nothing could escape. He was ready to take men as he found them, having no yearning for the purification of a sinful world. Heroic examples of manly constancy and of womanly ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... partly from the more than semi-Episcopalian character of this gentleman's opinions, partly from the inimitable felicities of his style, and partly from one or two peculiar incidents in his history which lead to a particular tone of remark, that we infer him to be the writer of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... led into dark recesses on either side of the building, and faint lights of different colours showed the way to certain things. Terabon saw a wonderfully beautiful woman, in furs, with sparkling diamonds, and of inimitable grace waiting in a little half-curtained cubby hole; he heard a man ask for "Pete," and caught the word "game" twice. The sounds were muffled, and a sense of repression and expectancy ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... necessarily inferior in force. Dryden, while writing this scene, had unquestionably in his recollection the quarrel betwixt Brutus and Cassius, which was justly so great a favourite in his time, and to which he had referred as inimitable ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... of intimate detail at his finger tips that it was a great pleasure and privilege to go through the French quarter with him. He exhaled the atmosphere of Southern aristocracy which is so agreeable to Northern sensibilities, he told inimitable stories, and, as for antiques, he knew every shop and bargain in the city. He was liberal, moreover, nay, ingenuous in sharing this knowledge with his new-found friends, even while admitting that he ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... a gala day in Flosston. True Tred Troop and Venture Troop Girl Scouts seemed to comprise a veritable army, as the girls in their brown uniforms congregated and scattered, then scattered and congregated, in that way girls have of imitating the "inimitable" bee. ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... not as it ought to be—I commit to your kindness. I do not claim to have succeeded in translating "the inimitable La Fontaine,"—perhaps I have not even a right to ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... the trust with which he was honoured by the inimitable lady, he had the pleasure of acquitting himself of it in a very few months, to every body's satisfaction; even to that of the unhappy family; who sent him their thanks on the occasion. Nor was he, at delivering up his accounts, contented without resigning the legacy ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... always acted like a dragging anchor upon the movement of his thought. These were radical defects, but in every other respect he was a consummate artist. He arrested the attention of his hearers with an inimitable skill and held it ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss |
