"Imitative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... probably that in the earlier objective phases of music, even the contemporary audiences were not moved in the sense that we should be moved to-day. The audiences were objective also and their enthusiasm may have been aroused by merely the imitative aspects of music as Avison called them. It is certainly a fact that content and form are more closely linked in music than in any other art. Suppose, however, we imagine the development of melody, counterpoint, harmony, modulation, etc., to be symbolized by a series ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... with Major Cragiemuir, Ah Moy arrived at his place of business in Four-and-a-half Street, a mass of bruises, and with a heart full of hatred for his assailant. Perhaps, after all, the fellow had meant no harm. In his guileless, imitative way he had simply tried to do what he had often seen American young men do. Had he not frequently observed big Policeman Ryan kiss the red-haired widow who kept the lodging-house around on Missouri Avenue? Did not Muggsy Walker—across ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... literary fashion, the origin is a good deal of an accident. What the milliners of Paris, or the demi-monde of Paris, enjoin our English ladies, is (I suppose) a good deal chance; but as soon as it is decreed, those whom it suits and those whom it does not all wear it. The imitative propensity at once insures uniformity; and 'that horrid thing we wore last year' (as the phrase may go) is soon nowhere to be seen. Just so a literary fashion spreads, though I am far from saying with equal primitive unreasonableness—a ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... a certain imitative melody, but disapproved of the subject itself as low and unworthy of ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... are much mortified that they cannot eradicate it from their grounds: but were a handloom on a simple construction, as used by the natives of Java, introduced amongst them, they could soon turn their cotton to good account. An instance of their ingenuity and imitative powers in matting, was a thing perfectly unknown amongst them till Captain Cook introduced it from Anamooka, one of the Friendly Isles: but in that branch of manufacture they now far surpass their original. ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... sitting in an office to Irishmen and the-dollar-and-a-half-a-day "jobs" of sweeping the streets to the Italians. This general struggle to rise in life, to be at least politically represented by one of the best, as to occupation and social status, has also its negative side. We must remember that the imitative impulse plays an important part in life, and that the loss of social estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhaps most dreaded by the humblest, among whom freedom of individual conduct, the power ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... of the conception), he confounded with our synthesis of objects in actual experience, which is always, of course, empirical. Thus, too, he regarded the principle of affinity, which has its seat in the understanding and indicates a necessary connection, as a mere rule of association, lying in the imitative faculty of imagination, which can present only contingent, and ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... hang about the Winter Palace. In the manner of children they will make a ghastly sport of them. Once, when they were in a specially jocular mood, Alexander, in company with his brother Constantine and some comrades in play, enacted—as youngsters in their apishly imitative mood will do—one of the most hideous scenes that concluded a previous reign. The throttling of the Emperor Paul was the subject! Alexander, standing for Paul, was assaulted and thrown down by his brother, who knelt upon his chest. With the aid of the sportive accomplices, a cord was passed ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... phenomenon; all prove the debility of the system, and the decreptitude of old age. On the other hand, the United States, in the flower of youth; increasing in hands; increasing in wealth; and, although an imitative policy had unfortunately prevailed in the erection of a funded debt, in the establishment of an army, the anticipation of a navy,[14] and all the paper machinery for increasing the number of unproductive, and lessening the number of productive ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... first scene of the first act the impotent imitation of Marlowe is pitifully patent. Possibly there may also be an imitation of the still imitative style of Shakespeare, and the style may be more accurately definable as a copy of a copy—a study after the manner of Marlowe, not at second hand, but at third. In any case, being obviously too flat and feeble to show a touch of either godlike hand, this scene may be set ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... wings, while the under surface is almost always soberly coloured, and often very dark and obscure. The moths on the contrary have generally their chief colour on the hind wings only, the upper wings being of dull, sombre, and often imitative tints, and these generally conceal the hind wings when the insects are in repose. This arrangement of the colours is therefore eminently protective, because the butterfly always rests with his wings raised so as to conceal ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... principle of judgment applies of necessity to all great work in art. It does not apply to merely good work, for that is nearly always imitative, and therefore not much provocative of imitation. It happens sometimes that an imitator, to the undiscerning reader, may even seem better than the man he mimics, because he has a modern touch. But remember, in his time the ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... to set off all the good things there are in this world, the sunshine and flowers and laughter, against the limitations and thwartings and disappointments of life. For a time it seemed to her that these brave consolations were solutions, and she was stirred by an imitative passion. How stupid had she not been to let life and Sir Isaac overcome her! She felt that she must make herself like Elizabeth, exactly like Elizabeth; she tried forthwith, and a certain difficulty she found, a certain deadness, she ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... elaborate ceremonies including imitations of animals (imitative or sympathetic magic) are found in Central Australia.[265] When any animal is to be hunted the old men of the appropriate totemic group, dressed to imitate the totem and accompanied by some of the young men, repair to a spot regarded as sacred, and, along with other ceremonies, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... so terrible in these bric-a-brac places," said the princess of Meissen. "It brings one in contact with such low, imitative creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless under glass at the Louvre ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... he sometimes calls him, throughout his interminable—no, not interminable—his hundred-paged Introduction. He abominates Pope's Homer, and groans to think how it has corrupted the English ear by its long domination in our schools. He takes up, with leathern lungs, the howl of the Lakers, and his imitative bray is louder than the original, "in linked sweetness long drawn out." Such sonorous strictures are innocent; but his false charge of licentiousness against Pope is most reprehensible—and it is insincere. For he has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... this time, had been tentative and imitative, being mainly reflections from (and upon) what had most struck him in his reading. He had read considerably in some six languages, (Hebrew, Irish, German, Italian, French and English) and widely in at least four of them, ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... produced in outline is filled in with flat tints of body-colour, without gradation or any attempt at brush-work shading. Whatever finishing in this respect might be thought necessary was added with the pen. Nothing could show more clearly that it is simply and frankly imitative of stained glass. As in the glass the black outline is left for definition. No colour is used on hands of faces except a slight touch of red on the cheeks and lips. The prevailing colours are rich blue and bright scarlet. Perhaps the illuminator would have been better advised had he neglected ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... provoked a natural and perhaps wholly unconscious desire to draw other parallels; and if we may use a convenient German technical term, there is a traceable Tendenz in this direction, as is indicated in the Annotations on later pages. It is not to be supposed that even these apparently imitative incidents are (not to mince matters) mere pious frauds; they may well have come into existence in the folk-consciousness automatically, before they received their present literary form. But such a development could hardly have centred in an ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... began with a Latin oration on the state of society by Mr. Kipley. Then an English Oration on the Imitative Arts, by Mr. J. Wheelock. The degrees were then conferred, and, in addition to the usual ceremony of the book, diplomas were delivered to the candidates, with this form of words: 'Admitto vos ad primum (vel secundum) gradum in artibus ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Rousseau and the sentimentalists, adopting in this poem the ordinary denunciations of the corruption of towns, and singing the praises of an innocent country life. Doubtless, the young writer was like other young men, taking up a strain still imitative and artificial. He has a quiet smile at Savage in the life, because in his retreat to Wales, that enthusiast declared that he "could not debar himself from the happiness which was to be found in the calm of a cottage, ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... banker's wife came to call she was able to offer her a cup of tea, with sliced lemon, quite as a matter of course, after the manner that Mrs. Kemp had handed it to her the week before. Milly was not crudely imitative: she was selectively imitative, and for the present she had chosen ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... pastoral: "She is like the rising of the golden morning, when the night departeth, and when the winter is over and gone. She resembleth the cypress in the garden, the horse in the chariots of Thessaly." These figures plainly declare their origin; and others, equally imitative, might be pointed out in ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... chairs, that this "is not a proof of imagination but of an unsatisfied desire," and that rich children who own ponies and who drive out in motor-cars "would be astonished to see the delight of children who imagine themselves to be drawn along by stationary armchairs." Imitative play has, of course, nothing to do with poverty or riches, but is, as Froebel said long since, the outcome of an initiative impulse, sadly wanting in deficient children, an impulse which prompts the child of all lands, of all time and of all classes to imitate or dramatise, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... I have read of this work seems admirably done. My praise, however, is not much worth the author's having; but you may thank him in my name for his. The idea is new—we have excellent imitations of the Satires, &c. by Pope; but I remember but one imitative Ode in his works, and none any where else. I can hardly suppose that they have lost any fame by the fate of the farce; but even should this be the case, the present publication will again place them on ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... already out. With a curt nod the Indian seated himself by the fire, and, producing a square plug of tobacco and a knife, began leisurely to fill his pipe. Thorpe watched him in silence. Finally Injin Charley spoke in the red man's clear-cut, imitative English, a pause ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... "Imitation in Children," Miss Haskell observes: "That the imitative faculty is what makes the human being educable, that it is what has made progressive civilization possible, has always been known by philosophical educators. The energy of the child must pass from potentiality to actuality, and it does so by the path of imitation because this path offers the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... artists, who made the bronzelamps of Pompeii. Would you hang one of those in your hall? To say that a man is an artist and copies nature is not enough. There are two great schools of art; the imitative and the imaginative. The latter is the most noble, and most enduring; and Goethe belonged rather to the former. Have you read Menzel's attack ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... was in far upper Third Avenue. She had not yet been down to First Street. In fact, she was in New York two weeks before she got as far south as 100th Street. She had almost forgotten that she had ever dwelt elsewhere than in New York. Her imitative instinct was already exchanging her Western burr for a ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... desires of the other. In the eyes of the Indian the most stoical and repressive white man was little better than a garrulous old woman. The "Yenghese," as the Indians called the English, were less criticised on this point than were the French; but the latter, being an imitative race, more easily adapted themselves to the manner and life of the red man, and therefore won his ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... are. And each animal, man, beast, or bird has to do it for himself. Apart from the instinctive actions which the child does without knowing their value at all, and apart from the equally instinctive imitative way of doing them without aiming at learning more by the imitations, he proceeds in all cases to make experiments. Generally his experiments work through acts of imitation. He imitates what he sees some other creature ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... is to say, whatever of dramatic or literary interest the decorative design may possess must be, as it were, woven into it, so that the general effect shall please as instantly, as directly, and as independently of the meaning, as the pattern of an Oriental rug. The former, it will be seen, is an imitative, the latter an inventive art. In the one, the elements of the subject are rendered with all possible naturalism; while, in the other, effects of atmosphere and the accidental play of light and shade ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... lingered, for the worst was yet to come. He lingered, nursing a colossal scruple. Poor Spinks's honour was dear to him because it was less the gift of nature than the supreme imitative effort of his adoring heart. He loved honour because Rickman loved it; just as he had loved Flossie for the same reason. These were the only ways in which he could imitate him; and like all imitators he exaggerated ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... imitations of many birds and quadrupeds. His mocking-bird is very fair; his thrush, passable; but his canary less successful, being rather too reedy and harsh. Farm-yard sounds are thrown off with considerable imitative power. His pig is so good, indeed, that it invites a purchaser, who puts one of the calls into his mouth, and frightfully distorts his features in his wretched efforts to produce the desired grunts and squeaks. The crowing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... did but know how refreshing it is to see anything shabby, and dull, and ugly," Mrs. Grinstead answered with imitative inflections, which set Anna Vanderkist off into a fit of laughter, infecting both her uncle and aunt. ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they have learned to regard as good, preferring imitations of it to anything requiring the acquisition of a new viewpoint; and that other kind, receptive to new sensations. The first class is the more numerous, which explains why most of our art, in fact most of all art, is imitative - that is, imitative of ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... read Benvenuto Cellini, pored over reproductions of ornament, and began to make pendants in silver and pearl and matrix. The first things he did, in his start of discovery, were really beautiful. Those later were more imitative. But, starting with his wife, he made a pendant each for all his womenfolk. Then he ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... of his room. He sate down near the fire, trying to study them with a critical eye, to represent public opinion as far as he could. He had changed his style since the Mrs. Hemans' days. He was essentially imitative in his poetic faculty; and of late he had followed the lead of a popular writer of sonnets.' He turned his poems over: they were almost equivalent to an autobiographical passage in his life. Arranging them in their order, they ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... morning the three departed, Pathfinder earnest and intelligent in all he did, the Great Serpent silent and imitative, and June meek, resigned, but sorrowful. They went in two canoes, that of the woman being abandoned: Chingachgook led the way, and Pathfinder followed, the course being up stream. Two days they paddled westward, and as many nights they encamped on islands. Fortunately the weather became ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... too much time. It is a blessed doctrine. The utmost extremes of dress, the love of colors, of fabrics, of jewels, of "featherses," are, after all, but an effort after the beautiful. The reason why the beautiful is not always the result is because so many women are ignorant or merely imitative. They have no sense of fitness: the short wear what belongs to the tall, and brunettes sacrifice their natural beauty to look like blondes. Or they have no adaptation; and even an emancipated woman may show a disregard for appropriateness, as where a fine ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... including blackcaps, wrens, the active little titmice, together with the North American wood warblers. Next to these are cases (53-55) of Thrushes, including the tropical ant thrushes; the Javan mountain warbler; the Brazilian king thrush; the rock thrushes: the imitative Australian thrush; the blackbird; the North American mimic thrush; the Chinese and South American thrushes, celebrated for their babbling; the yellow orioles, of Europe and the east; and here also are the short-legged thrushes ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... of the imitative use of language. In national literatures many a passage, poetry or prose, is heightened in effect by assonance, alliteration, a certain movement or rhythm of phrase. Subtle suggestion slides in sound through ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... other peculiarities of their social life and forestine character. Dominant woodland animals, indeed, like monkeys, parrots, toucans, and hornbills, at least if vegetarian in their habits, are almost always gregarious, noisy, mischievous, and imitative. And the imitation results directly from the unusual intelligence; for, after all, what is the power of learning itself—at least, in all save its very highest phases—but the faculty of accurately imitating another? Monkeys for the most part imitate action only, because they haven't ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... taken her knows also how to give; and this portrait has preserved for you a part of what you loved. This picture, too, may influence Melissa's fate; for Caesar has a fine taste in art, and one of the wants of our time which has helped to embitter him is the paralyzed state of the imitative arts. It will be easier to win his favor for the painter who did this portrait than for a man of noble birth. He needs such painters as this Alexander for the Pinakothek in the splendid baths he has built at Rome. If you would but lend ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... confessed that we have improved upon them, and varied them ad infinitum. In those departments of the mechanics which are in any way connected with the fine arts, the ancients appear to have attained perfection. To them belongs the invention of all that embellishes life, of all the graceful forms of imitative art, varied with such exquisite taste, such boundless fertility of fancy, that nothing is left to us but to refine upon their ideas, and copy their creations. With all our new invented machines, and engines, we can do little more than what the ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... jay gave proof of the need of parental training. While he intuitively called like a jay, he never was able to sing the sweet, gurgling roulade of the wild jays. On the contrary, he treated us to all kinds of odd, imitative, mirth-provoking performances that no self-respecting jay in the open would think of enacting. After several months of cage life he was given his liberty. Now, indeed, he showed his lack of jay bringing up, and how ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... the Victorian time in art and literature have been solitary men, anarchical as regards tradition, strongly individualistic, working on their own lines without much regard for schools or conventions. The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, but not imitative; he has a fancy for doing things in his own way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron— were there ever four contemporary poets so little affected by one another's work? Think of the phrase in which Scott summed up his artistic creed, saying that he had succeeded, in so far ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... more, that frequent cause of strength in Saxon and other primitive words-their imitative character may be similarly resolved into the more general cause. Both those directly imitative, as splash, bang, whiz, roar, &c., and those analogically imitative, as rough, smooth, keen, blunt, ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... bars, opening in C minor, and passing to, and closing in E flat. It contains imitative passages evolved from ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... woman physicists as eminent as Helmholtz and Kelvin, woman painters as great as Raphael and Velasquez, woman musicians as able as Bach and Beethoven. That we have had none yet I believe to be solely the fault of inadequate education. Of this inadequacy our imitative, arbitrary and uninspiring club programmes are a part—the very fact that our clubwomen pin their faith to programmes of any kind is a consequence of it. The substitution of something else for these programmes, with the accompanying change in the interests and reading of clubwomen, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... forthwith written down, so as to impress it on our memories, and none of us have yet forgotten it. It was singular, moreover, how the imitative faculty gained strength among us. We children acquired the habit of speaking of all our garden-plants by such outlandish names as father then taught us,—not seriously, of course, but as a capital piece of fun. We knew no more of relations and affinities than he, and so used these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... declared the recent willingness of the English to take some interest in the United-Statesians to be a mistake; for their were noisy, without real confidence in themselves; they were restless and merely imitative instead of inventive. He told me that he was not exceptional; all Englishmen had thought similarly for fifty or sixty years; therefore, naturally, his opinion carried great weight with me. And myself, to my astonishment, I had often seen ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... poetry of sentiment imitate? What does a song imitate? How can the term be applied to all that class of poetry where the writer pours out his own reflections and feelings? The poetry of Wordsworth or of Burns can no more be said to be imitative, than the conversation of the same men, when, in their hours of intimate intercourse, the one may have given expression to his philanthropy, and the other to his friendship. But where the term is most applicable, it requires to be used guardedly. Even in painting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... foreign, and the general want of encouragement to new inventions, however ingenious, have been greatly detrimental to the progress of the arts and manufactures. The people discover no want of genius to conceive, nor of dexterity to execute; and their imitative powers have always been acknowledged to be very great. Of the truth of this remark we had several instances at Yuen-min-yuen. The complicated glass lustres, consisting of several hundred pieces, were taken down, piece by piece, in the course of half an hour, by two Chinese, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... and beliefs. It is suggested that too much stress has been laid on environment; and, though it is readily admitted that similar needs and experiences may in some cases have given rise to similar expedients and explanations, it is urged that man is an imitative animal and that inventive genius is far from common.(1) Consequently the wide dispersion of many beliefs and practices, which used generally to be explained as due to the similar and independent working of the human mind under like conditions, is now often provisionally registered ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... vagary in America. There fashionable and educational authorities had hitched their wagon to the literary star, Miss Edgeworth, and the followers of her system; while the religiously inclined pinned their faith also upon tracts written by Miss Hannah More. In this still imitative land the booksellers simply reprinted the more successful of these juvenile publications. The changes, therefore, in the character of the juvenile literature of amusement of the early nineteenth century in America were due to the adoption of the works of these two Englishwomen, and to ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... once comprehend how legend united of old the spell of enchantment with the power of song. All that I recalled of the effects which, in the former time, Margrave's strange chants had produced on the ear that they ravished and the thoughts they confused, was but as the wild bird's imitative carol, compared to the depth and the art and the soul of the singer, whose voice seemed endowed with a charm to inthrall all the tribes of creation, though the language it used for that charm might to them, as to me, be unknown. As the song ceased, I heard ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... proof of closeness of the imitation. He hints a curious addition to the theory in relation to sexual selection, which you will think madly hypothetical: it occurred to me in a very different class of cases, but I was afraid to publish it. It would aid the theory of imitative protection, when the colours are bright. He seems much pleased with your caterpillar theory. I wish the letter could be published, but without coloured illustrations [it] would, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... chair. Grigson is our Flight Commander—one of those rugged and impenetrable individuals who seem impervious to any kind of shock. There is a legend that on one occasion four machine-gun bullets actually hit him and bounced off, which gave the imitative Hun the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... employing exactly the same means and methods used by the upholders of that order. Among the workers, for instance, the only weapons used were general strikes, boycotts, and what is now called sabotage. These were wholly imitative and retaliative. It is clear that the strike is, after all, only an inverted lockout; and as early as 1833 a general strike was parried by a general lockout. The boycott is identical with the blacklist. The employer boycotts union leaders ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... come in, and he did. He was shown to the rear room, where Maggie was clearing off the supper table. Fitz was a young "man of the world," and as imitative as a monkey. He had once moved in what he called "good society," and was familiar with all the little courtesies of life. He expressed his regret at the illness of Andre in the most courtly terms, and his sympathy with Maggie. Leo wanted to go ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... animal representations, made hollow for use as drinking vessels, were obtained, displaying grotesquely imitative forms of deer, elk, sheep, big-horn, antelope, and other animals with which they are familiar. All of these objects have more color laid on them than is to be found on the pottery of their neighbors of Acoma, the birds and animals being painted in a ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... headed for the Kaisergarten, we reflect on our evening's search for nachtvergnuegungen. With the lone exception of our half-hour with Mimi, it has been a sad chase. All the places (with the possible exception of the Trocadero) have been cheaply imitative of Paris, with the usual appurtenances of arduous waiters, gorgeously dressed women dancing on red velvet carpets, fortissimo orchestras, expensive wines, blumenmaedl, hothouse strawberries and other accessories of manufactured ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... today is imitative. Once men had convictions, but we have only opinions, and these are usually borrowed. The artificiality of life, and the rush and the worry afford no time for great desires to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... look of being tiptoe with revelation which is one of the most fascinating tricks of the visible world, and which even a harsh town full of chimneys can sometimes take on when seen in given moments and lights. And it was astonishing to see into what lifeless imitative verse his most original and passionate moments could ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... for instance, a 'square' is a 'park,' or, even a 'garden' is a 'park.' A promenade, on the water, is a 'battery!' It is a pity that, in this humour for change, they have not thought of altering the complex and imitative mine of their town.—EDITOR.] ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... the word Barbar may be classed under four periods, 1. In the time of Homer, when the Greeks and Asiatics might probably use a common idiom, the imitative sound of Barbar was applied to the ruder tribes, whose pronunciation was most harsh, whose grammar was most defective. 2. From the time, at least, of Herodotus, it was extended to all the nations ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... at this, and Captain Miles hearing what had been said, every word being distinctly audible on the poop, began speaking to Mr Marline about the imitative ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... patriotism were powerless to resist this flood of foreign innovation; and for more than a century after the Tarentine war, legislative influence strove in vain to counteract the predominance of Greek philosophy and eloquence. But this imitative tendency was tempered by the pride of Roman citizenship. That sentiment breaks out, not merely in the works of great statesmen and warriors, but quite as strikingly in the productions of those in whom the literary character ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... same principle as the bed of Procrustes. The lyrics of this period, with the exception of those by Milton, were usually less idealistic, ethereal, and inspired than the corresponding work of the Elizabethans. This age was far more imitative, but it chose to imitate Jonson and Donne in preference to Shakespeare. The greatest lyrical poet of this time thus addresses Jonson as a ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of these illuminators, with his insignificant, eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the great resource of our manufacturers ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... domestic proprieties and the Nemesis of respectability. It was her refined and severely correct demeanour that gave soul and wings to the wild fun of A Night Off. From Miss Garth to Mrs. Laburnum is a far stretch of imitative talent for the interpretation of the woman nature that everybody, from Shakespeare down, has found it so difficult to treat. This actress has never failed to impress the spectator by her clear-cut, brilliant identification ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... it must be remembered that during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, at least, Greek philosophy found its way largely into Europe in Arab versions, and these characteristically Arabian additions of the discussion of curious trivial questions came with them and produced an imitative tendency ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... himself, and perhaps, too, with more real advantage to his auditory. It is, indeed, very difficult happily to excite the passions and draw the characters of men; but our nature leads us more directly to such paintings than to the invention of a story. We are imitative animals; and we are more naturally led to imitate the exertions of character and passion than to observe and describe a series of events, and to discover those relations and dependencies in them which will please. Nothing can be more rare than this quality. Herein, as I ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... till to-morrow eve, And you, my friends! farewell, a short farewell! We have been loitering long and pleasantly, And now for our dear homes.—That strain again! 90 Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe, Who, capable of no articulate sound, Mars all things with his imitative lisp, How he would place his hand beside his ear, His little hand, the small forefinger up, 95 And bid us listen! And I deem it wise To make him Nature's play-mate. He knows well The evening-star; and once, when he awoke In most distressful mood (some ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... satisfaction to the community if the principles of good architecture are observed and the building is set in the midst of trees and shrubbery and well-kept lawn. With such an object-lesson, the people of the community will presently contrast their own property with that of the public, the imitative impulse will begin to work, and individuals will begin to make improvements as leisure permits. There are villages that are ugly scars on a landscape which nature intended should be beautiful. With misdirected energy, farmers have destroyed the wild beauty of the fence ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... buffalo-mantle, whenever he can get them; spending as much time in be-painting his cheeks on a summer morning, as Beau Brummell, of departed memory, ever wasted in tying his cravat. And so it has ever been—so it will ever be; man is not only a two-legged unfledged animal, but he is also a vain imitative ape, fond of his own dear visage, blind to his deformities, and ever desirous of setting himself off to the best advantage. It is of no use quarrelling with ourselves for this physiological fact—for we presume it to be one of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... cups, what a skating over thin ice, what a tight-rope performance is achieved in this astounding chapter. A false note, one fatal line, would have ruined it all. On the one hand lay brutality; a hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally, with the soul left out, we have loads of such 'strong stuff' and it is nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse of 'better things' in Alf or Emmy ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... It is the opinion of Diderot, in his Treatise on Acting, that not only in the art of which he treats, but in all those which are called imitative, the possession of real sensibility is a bar to eminence;—sensibility being, according to his view, "le caractere de la bonte de l'ame et de ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... exercised my imitative powers in all directions, and often found myself instinctively mimicking the tones, movement, and expression of those about me. I'm afraid I was what the French call un enfant terrible—in the vernacular, an awful child! full of irresistible life and impulsive will; ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... pupils, as well as the more advanced students, are held mostly, if not wholly, by the power of love. In this particular, Brook Farm is a much improved model for the oft-praised schools of New England. It is time that the imitative and book-learned systems of the latter should be superseded or liberalized, by some plan better calculated to excite originality of thought and the native energies of the mind. The deeper, kindly sympathies ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... over twenty, the other under nineteen; and as they sat in that lofty room hung with French tapestries and furnished with the spindle-legged gilt chairs and tables of Louis XIV, they might have been playing, with all the gravity and imitative genius of little girls in a nursery, at ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... hand, our northern climates have universally the taste, latent if not developed, for powerful liquors. And through their blood, as also through the natural tendency of the imitative principle amongst compatriots, from these high latitudes the greatest of our modern nations propagate the contagion to their brothers, though colonizing warm climates. And it is remarkable that our modern ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... who brawl the loudest and swagger the finest in the world's market-places. No! I want nothing of her. My lord here condemned her as I came in; he said she was the offspring of echoing parrots, of imitative sheep, of fawning hounds. Who can want the creature of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... business was that Tempest himself seemed not to see the effect of his attitude on the house at large. He did not realise how much the juniors were impressed by what he said and how he looked, or how much his example counted with others of a less imitative turn. He looked upon his grievance as his own affair, and failed to give himself credit for all the influence ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... Just in the centre of a spacious hall; But whether in the sunbeam formed to sport, These shapes once lived in supleness and pride, And then, to decorate this wonderous court, Were stolen from the waves and petrified; Or, moulded by some imitative gnome, And scaled all o'er with gems, they were but stone, Casting their showers and rainbows 'neath the dome. To man or angel's eye might not be known. No snowy fleece in these sad realms was found, Nor silken ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... told in deathless lays A choral pulpit's military praise,) Thou, too, that dared'st a cloister'd warfare sing, And dip thy bucket in Castalia's spring! Forgive, blest bards, if, with unequal fire, I feebly strike the imitative lyre; Though strong to celebrate no vulgar fray, Since P——t and conquest swell the exulting lay. Not link'd, alas in friendship's sacred band, With hands fast lock'd the furious parsons stand; Each grasps the whip with unrelenting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... of the Pale Face Chief and of his countrymen is as the hurricane," I said, scarce believing my own ears. For a lad is imitative by nature, and I had not listened to the interpreters for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... vain, ineffectual, fruitless. Imagination alone can no more make a painter or a poet than wings can constitute a bird. Each must have a body. Unfortunately, in painting we have more than enough of body without spirit. Correct drawing, wonderful imitative powers, cleverness, adaptiveness, great facility and dexterity of hand, much largeness of quotation, and many material and mechanical qualities, all go to form an amusing, and, it may be, useful spectacle, but not a true picture. We have also, but not so often, the reverse ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... and settled, they looked back with pride to their wild conduct, and lived on the memory of the emotions of by-gone days. If their mirror showed them no change, the world had altered around them without their suspecting it, while they continued to copy their antiquated models. It is a curious imitative instinct, a slavery of the brain, to remain hypnotised by some point in the past, instead of trying to follow Proteus in his course—the life of change. One picks up the old skin which the young snake has ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... fashion in England at this time for women to paint; they principally affected miniature and water-color pictures, but of the many who called themselves artists few merit our attention; they practised but a feeble sort of imitative painting; their works of slight importance cannot now be named, while their lives were usually commonplace and void of incident. Of the few exceptions to this rule I have written in the later ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... must come up with him, must work side by side with him: apart from the difference between a great master and a scholar, apart from the differences of the natural bent of men's minds, which would make one man an imitative, and another an architectural or decorative artist, there should be no difference between those employed on strictly ornamental work; and the body of artists dealing with this should quicken with their ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... explorers, has tended to assume that since it can be found that Sidney, and Daniel, and Watson, and all the other writers of mythological poetry and sonnet sequences took their ideas and their phrases from foreign poetry, their work is therefore to be classed merely as imitative literary exercise, that it is frigid, that it contains or conveys no real feeling, and that except in the secondary and derived sense, it is not really lyrical at all. Petrarch, they will tell you, may ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... What style is the best adapted to Senatorial reading? An imitative style and tone, being careful in the use of the ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... who have proved their scholastic capabilities at various universities and colleges because it is generally surmised that these men are exceptional or that their success is due to a highly developed imitative faculty coupled with a strong memory, with which it is fashionable to credit the successful Native student, and I have advisedly confined myself to instances drawn from the everyday life and thought of the normal and uneducated ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... play, but few, if any, of our authour's compositions can be properly distributed in that manner. An act is so much of the drama as passes without intervention of time or change of place. A pause makes a new act. In every real, and therefore in every imitative action, the intervals may be more or fewer, the restriction of five acts being accidental and arbitrary. This Shakespeare knew, and this he practised; his plays were written, and at first printed in one unbroken continuity, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Greek art on half-cultivated, but excited and susceptible minds. The increased Hellenic culture of the seventh called forth a literary reaction, which destroyed the germs of promise contained in those simple imitative attempts by the winter-frost of reflection, and rooted up the wheat and the tares of the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... always find a complete correspondence between imitative colouring and instinctive endowment. If a caterpillar exactly resembles the colour of a twig, it also presents the instinct of habitually reposing in the attitude which makes it most resemble a twig—standing out from the branch on which it rests at the same angle ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... there in an analogy between experimental sciences and imitative arts? Between poetry and a magic-lantern? Is either an argument that is convincing? Are both effective ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... influence exercised by Byron's genius on the imagination of Pushkin is well known. Shakespeare and other English dramatists had also their share in influencing his mind, which, at all events in its earlier developments, was of an essentially imitative type. As an example of his Shakespearian tastes, see his poem of "Angelo," founded upon ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... bellows, the concussion bellows, the swell box, the pneumatic lever, the tubular-pneumatic action, the electro-pneumatic action, the Universal air chest, the leathered lip, the clothed flue, the diaphone, smooth reed tone, imitative string tone, the vowel cavity, tone reflectors, cement swell boxes, the sound trap joint, suitable bass, the unit organ, movable console, radiating and concave pedal board, combination pedals, combination pistons ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... so these matters must be the subject of careful study on the part of the student. Conscious imitation has its place in developing the power to write, and it is no less valuable in gaining an appreciation of an author's style. The study of the essay offers the best opportunity for imitative work of this kind, since it is the essay that the student himself, in his school exercises, is continually trying to write. Care should be taken at this stage of the work not to ask pupils to discuss matters that ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... goes out one morning with his flocks to the woodland glades whose charms the poet describes at length in a rather imitative rhapsody. The shepherd then falls asleep; a serpent approaches and is about to strike him when a gnat, seeing the danger, stings him in time to save him. But—such is the fatalism of cynical fable-lore—the shepherd, still in a stupor, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... the confusion, the dogs became affected with the spirit of excitement that filled their masters, and gave vent to their feelings in loud and continuous howling which nothing could check. The imitative propensity of these singular people was brought rather oddly into play during the progress of traffic. Buzzby had produced a large roll of tobacco—which they knew the use of, having been already shown ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... which man expresses in an imitative fashion, is numbered, weighed and measured, and forms an admirable harmony. This language through the larynx is universal, and common to all sensitive beings. It is universal with animals as with man. Animals give the identical sounds in ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... girl's adoration of him, her wild beauty, her strange winning personality—as rare and as independent of birth and circumstances as genius—had soon made that phenomenon plain. And now what was to be done? The girl was quick, observant, imitative, docile, and in the presence of strangers, her gravity of manner gave the impression of uncanny self-possession. It really seemed as though anything might be possible. At Helen's suggestion, then, the three stayed where they were for a week, for June's wardrobe was sadly in need of attention. ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... that capitalized on the popularity of the Travels were the imitative Memoirs of Lilliput (1727) and A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727). The author of the Memoirs emphasizes the evil character of the Lilliputians, particularly their lecherous clergy, and concludes with an account of the sufferings of ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... of slavery. "The whole commerce," says Mr. Jefferson, "between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unrelenting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it—for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive, either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... recovery, while the art of the centuries which followed was at first rude and imperfect, but was full of new life, determined in its reality and dominated by some intimate sense of beauty; it was in no sense imitative of ancient art, but grew and changed under the terms of its own inherent life ...
— Progress and History • Various
... indeed!" responded her husband, with imitative sarcasm. "An avis indeed, not a doubt ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... LITERATURE: THE POETS OF THE REPUBLICAN ERA.— Latin literature was almost wholly imitative or borrowed, being a reproduction of Greek models; still it performed a most important service for civilization: it was the medium for the dissemination throughout the world of the rich literary ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... arts in Greece arrived was owing to the concurrence of various circumstances. The imitative arts, we are told, in that classic country formed a part of the administration, and were inseparably connected with the heathen worship. The temples were magnificently erected, and adorned with numerous statues of pagan deities, before ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... young, from the adult; semi-erect attitude of some; mastoid processes of; influences of the jaw-muscles on the physiognomy of; female, destitute of large canines; building platforms; imitative faculties of; anthropomorphous; probable speedy extermination of the; Gratiolet on the evolution of; canine teeth of male; females of some, less hairy beneath ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... sickness, angels, etc. The lengthy description in which Elihu is introduced, and the mention of his genealogy, are very unlike the other introductions. The literary art of the section is, speaking generally, inferior to that of the rest of the book. It is imitative rather than creative. Elihu takes about twenty verses to announce the simple fact that he is going to speak, though there might be a dramatic propriety in this, as he is represented as a young ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... seemed to have passed out of it, it was repetition of repetition by poor workmen, and the simplicity and purity of the technic were corrupted by foreign influences. With the Alexandrian epoch Egyptian art came in contact with Greek methods, and grew imitative of the new art, to the detriment of its own native character. Eventually it was entirely lost in the art of the Greco-Roman world. It was never other than conventional, produced by a method almost as unvarying as that of the hieroglyphic ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... doubtless, this is instinctive), and experience. Instinct is, of course, the main factor, and by this term we mean that which prompts an animal or a man to act spontaneously, without instruction or experience. All creatures are imitative, and man himself not the least so. I had a visit the other day from a woman who had spent the last two years in London, and her speech betrayed the fact; she had quite unconsciously caught certain of the English mannerisms of speech. A few years in the South ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... open speech is of course exercised at certain personal risk. The king may be pleased, and raise the speaker to honour for that very bluntness of speech which three minutes later brings a too imitative petitioner to the edge of the ever ready blade. And the people love to have it so, for ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... The imitative arts being nearly allied, no wonder that, to their skill in working figures in their garments, and carving them in wood, they should add that of drawing them in colours. We have sometimes seen the whole process of their whale-fishery painted on the caps they wear. This, though rudely executed, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... national originality; the success is perfect. A sense of fitness always enhances the effect of beauty. I will not attempt a long essay on the subject, but if America, in her vastness, her immense natural resources, and her remote grandeur, would be less imitative, she would be infinitely more picturesque ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... a nation is always the best revealer of its genuine life: the range of its spiritual as well as of its intellectual outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though it be shackled ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... were merged, not in a Sicilian nation, for that did not exist, but in the common mass of settlers of Latin speech and rite, as distinguished from the older inhabitants, Greek and Saracen." Independent, enterprising, impatient of restraint, gifted with a rare imitative power which imparted a peculiar tinge and a peculiar grace to whatever they adopted from others, they lacked originality, and the power to maintain their own distinctive type of ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the guillotine, were execrated as the tools of the coalesced despots, and as persons who, to weaken the affection of America for France, became the calumniators of that republic. Already had an imitative spirit, captivated with the splendor, but copying the errors, of a great nation, reared up in every part of the continent self-created corresponding societies, who, claiming to be the people, assumed a control over the government and were ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... perfection, from the supremely beautiful but limited representations of the human body, to an attempt to paint the invisible, the spiritual side of man's nature. The work of these artists was great because it was not imitative and because it stretched toward an unending and ideal future. But the idealistic and aspiring temper of early Tuscan art had the defects of its qualities. Its spiritual ecstasy once conventionalized and reduced to a formula led to unreality, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... I became her teacher, she had made for herself upward of sixty signs, all of which were imitative and were readily understood by those who knew her. The only signs which I think she may have invented were her signs for SMALL and LARGE. Whenever she wished for anything very much she would gesticulate in a very expressive manner. Failing to make herself understood, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... the inner nature of the enterprise. The "model town," as was the case with imitative towns, proved to be a cunning device with two barbs. It militated to hold the workers to their jobs in a state of quasi serfdom, and it gave the company additional avenues of exploiting its workers ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... advantage—are not dominated or penetrated from actual inherence or plain bent to the said poetry and arts. Other work, other needs, current inventions, productions, have occupied and to-day mainly occupy them. They are very 'cute and imitative and proud—can't bear being left too glaringly away far behind the other high-class nations—and so we set up some home "poets," "artists," painters, musicians, literati, and so forth, all our own (thus claim'd.) The whole matter has gone on, and exists to-day, probably as it should ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of his head, down the neck and across the breast—like a black collar worn very low down. It was a spring-like morning, the thermometer rapidly rising toward forty-five, and Mr. Blue Jay was in one of his imitative moods. There is hardly a limit to his vocabulary, and it would not be surprising if some of his imitative stunts should be mistaken for the call of an early robin. Among these calls is a liquid gurgle, like hard cider coming out of the neck ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... forgotten to mention Red Angel. Over eight months before a baby orang-outan had been captured. He had grown rapidly, and George, the elder of the two boys, had taken a special delight in teaching or training him, and the result was that the imitative quality of the animal made him useful to the party in many ways. Angel was with them also, and was the only amusing element in their days ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... had to combat, and all these things to teach, and many more besides. And as Leam was young, and as even the hardest youth is unconsciously plastic because unconsciously imitative, the suave instructress did really make some impression; so that when she assured the incredulous neighborhood of Leam's improvement she had more solid data than always underlaid her words, and was partly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... beginning of a new time." "The figure of an adventurer and wrecker." "This saturnine egotist." "Are men dazzled simply by the scale of his flounderings, by the mere vastness of his notoriety?" "This dark little archaic personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar." There are other opinions. The Man of Destiny was worshipped by millions. Napoleona bring fortunes today. Interest in the man as a man has multiplied with every year. And certainly ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... opinion with many other historians that the Mehrikans were a mongrel race, with little or no patriotism, and were purely imitative; simply an enlarged copy of other nationalities extant at the time. He pronounces them a shallow, nervous, extravagant people, and accords them but few redeeming virtues. This, of course, is just; but nevertheless they will always be an interesting study by reason of their rapid ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... these characters are natural, while S. and T. are naturally factitious, because so imitative, and her mother differs from Juliet and her mother, by the impulse a single strong character gave them. Even at this distance of time, there is a slight but perceptible taste of iron in ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... rear; or, quitting it altogether for the time, he would take up his stand beside the other workmen, and, after looking at them with great attention, return and give it a few taps with the mallet, in a style evidently imitative of ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... Mathilde. But Heine might easily have retorted: "Where anywhere in the world are you going to find me a woman who is my equal, who is my true mate? You will bring me cultivated governesses, or titled ladies who preside over salons, or anemic little literary women with their imitative verse or their amateurish political dreams. No, thank you. I am a man. I am a sick, sad man. I need a kind, beautiful woman to love and take care of me. She must be beautiful, remember, as well as kind— ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... their good, or they have some accompanying truth or advantage. For example, in eating and drinking there is pleasure and also profit, that is to say, health; and in learning there is a pleasure and also truth. There is a pleasure or charm, too, in the imitative arts, as well as a law of proportion or equality; but the pleasure which they afford, however innocent, is not the criterion of their truth. The test of pleasure cannot be applied except to that which has no other good or evil, ...
— Laws • Plato
... several important considerations. Were these letters penned by natives or by half-castes, with foreign blood in their veins and inherited capacities of feeling? Unless we know that, no scientific deduction is allowable. These natives are very imitative. They learn our music easily and rapidly, and with the art of writing and reading they readily acquire our amorous phrases. A certain Biblical tone, suggesting the Canticles, is noticeable. The word "heart" is used in a way foreign to Polynesian thought, and apart from ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... be "an imitative animal." This is certainly true as to early education, and the tendency to imitate remains to a greater or less extent throughout life. Imitation is responsible for all the queer changes of fashion; and the ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... only not seen fully all that she is. And that they would not see short of reading her letters entire. Horace Walpole aspired to do in English for his own time something like what Madame de Sevigne had done in French for hers. In a measure he succeeded. The difference is, that he was imitative and affected, where she ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... squanders it on his pleasures, the so-called good or bad uses are alike drearily devoid of individuality. Philanthropist or profligate, the modern millionaire is one and the same in his lack of initiative. Saint or sinner, he is one or the other in the same tame imitative way. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Bancroft's tragedy of Sertorius, published in 1679, and so it would be if Dryden and Lee had never written. But its seeming excellence is greatly lessened when we recollect that All for Love and Mithridates, two great poems which are almost good plays, appeared in 1678, and inspired our poor imitative Bancroft. Sertorius is written in smooth and well-sustained blank verse, which is, however, nowhere quite good enough to be quoted. I suspect that John Bancroft was a very interesting man. He was a surgeon, and his practice lay particularly In the theatrical and literary world. He acquired, it ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... left us before the fire to make a career in the East, after having exhausted all local possibilities, the Bohemian Club included. His figures of the Four Elements are typical of his temperament and he acknowledges in them his indebtedness to Michael Angelo without being in the least imitative. These four figures are allegorically full of meaning, and taken simply as sculpture, they are excellently modeled. His "Fire," showing a Greek warrior defending himself from the fiery breath of a vicious reptile, ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... full of the sketches of all sorts of animals, remarkably characteristic. The organ of imitation is very strongly developed in the Bushmen, which accounts for their talents as draftsmen, and Omrah's remarkable imitative powers." ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... virtuosi; they will not make them artists. Because no two ages express their sense of form in precisely the same way all attempts to recreate the forms of another age must sacrifice emotional expression to imitative address. Old-world merry-making can no more satisfy sharp spiritual hunger than careful craftsmanship or half hours with our "Art Treasures." Passionate creation and ecstatic contemplation, these alone will satisfy men in search ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... embodies its own peculiar class of conceptions. Relief work is generally realistic or grotesque; incised work is almost exclusively geometric, and embraces combinations of lines usually recognized as archaic. An occasional example is easily recognized as imitative. Painted figures are both geometric and imitative, ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... came down from the top of the tree, followed by bursts of imitative shrieks and vociferous applause. "Ha! ha! ha!" shouted Master Ara, as he rolled his head and doubled up his body quite beside himself with laughter. Then came tumultuous applause and encores, and further shouts of "Ha! ha! ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... many crimes committed in its name, and much called so that is merely a methodical and imitative performance. It is in no wise that spontaneous expression of life which, coming simply and directly as an impulse, takes a decorative or applied form. All the beginnings of art grew up in this way. In primitive peoples it is the first expression of emotional life, which comes after the material ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... indeed the mimic works of Art, But Nature's works far lovelier. I admire, None more admires, the painter's magic skill, Who shows me that which I shall never see, Conveys a distant country into mine, And throws Italian light on English walls. But imitative strokes can do no more Than please the eye, sweet Nature every sense. The air salubrious of her lofty hills, The cheering fragrance of her dewy vales, And music of her woods—no works of man May rival these; these all bespeak a power Peculiar, and exclusively her own. Beneath the open ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper |
