"Mimicry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the same scheme to ridicule a third, and either take advantage of, or invent, some story for that purpose, and mimicry will have already produced a sort of rude comedy. It becomes an inviting treat to the populace, and gains an additional zest and burlesque by following the already established plan of tragedy; and the first man of genius who seizes the idea, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... Christopher was very small in stature. Charles accordingly squatted down as well as he could, to get his head in as low a position as the architect's, and walked about the room in that ridiculous attitude, looking up in mimicry of Sir Christopher's manner, and then said, "Oh, yes, now I think they ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... with inimitable spirit and mimicry, as want of clerical wit is a direct impeachment of the validity of one's "call" to preach; and when the table is filled, and with outstretched hands the blessing said, our father gets a universal compliment for his carving. There is roast turkey, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... each remark with a pantomime mimicry of the air and gesture of the individual. He showed in a second the contortions of Harry Weston in drawing the bow, and in another the grimaces of Henry Hope, the choir man, in producing bass notes, or the swelling majesty ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... bells, which must be made to sound in concert with the notes of the musicians. In attitude and gesture they are almost as bad as their pious sisters of the temples. The endeavor is to express the passions of love, hope, jealousy, despair, etc, and they eke out this mimicry with chanted songs in every way worthy of the movements of which they are the explanatory notes. These are the only women in Hindustan whom it is thought worth while to teach to read and write. If they would but make as noble use of their intellectual ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... The other (and as we shall later see) more justifiable misinterpretation of the word Empathy is based on its analogy with sympathy, and turns it into a kind of sympathetic, or as it has been called, inner, i.e. merely felt, mimicry of, for instance, the mountain's rising. Such mimicry, not only inner and felt, but outwardly manifold, does undoubtedly often result from very lively empathic imagination. But as it is the mimicking, inner or outer, of movements and actions which, like the rising of the mountain, take place only in our imagination, it ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... softly hummed a merry melody she had heard from an Egyptian actor on the previous evening. Darius had brought a company of Egyptians from Babylon, and after the banquet, had commanded that they should perform their music, and dancing, and mimicry, for the amusement of ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... closest resemblance of any in the group. Your weight is about the same as mine—your shoulders are a trifle stooped and you walk with a curious drag of your left foot. Your hair is white but thick: the contour of our faces is quite similar, and so with dry cosmetics, some physical mimicry, and the use of a pair of horn-rimmed glasses like yours I can make a comparatively good double. The only exposure to the sharp eyes of your enemies will be, first, when I substitute myself for you and take your automobile ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... evening he made the acquaintance of Kunz, a bookseller, publisher, and wine-dealer, at the pleasure-resort of Bug (close to Bamberg) in a characteristic manner. Kunz, an honest, jovial, good-natured giant, not lacking humour and gifted with a remarkable talent for mimicry and imitation, became little Hoffmann's fast friend—nay, his only real friend—during the whole of the time the latter remained in Bamberg. They were almost inseparable, associated in all amusements and diversions: they spent many ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... gladiatorial Rome of old, her best efforts have been used to stop the games. Society, on the other hand, preoccupied with the art of life, has no warmer gift than patronage for those whose skill and energy exhaust themselves on the mimicry of life. The reward of social consideration is refused, it is true, to all artists, or accepted by them at their immediate peril. By a natural adjustment, in countries where the artist has sought and attained a certain modest social elevation, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... said to myself, "and he must obviously be an excellent judge. I shall devote more time to mimicry in future. H'm! ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... [88] as a mirror of life, but as an illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and characters of the players. Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates, the most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in the private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men and women. Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history, presents itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie, the theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... Chamberlain's own methods, and pointing a finger at his distinguished victim, would hiss out his charges word by word with a vibrant slowness. Even the impassive Chamberlain used sometimes to color a little under this mimicry. If ever a man went thoroughly out of his way to be hated it was Lloyd George. But he gained way. Once under an unsparing attack by Lloyd George, Chamberlain winced, leaped to his feet, and asked permission to make a second speech in reply. That was ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... the operator usually announces to a subscriber the fact that a call emanated from such an office. The shop was closed, but I rang the bell at the side door and obtained permission to use the telephone upon pleading urgency. I had assiduously cultivated a natural gift for mimicry, having found it of inestimable service in the practice of my profession. It served me now. I had worked in the past with Inspector Dunbar and his subordinate Sergeant Sowerby, and I determined to trust to my memory of the latter's ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... reality of Perfection is that musical idea, and there is that one great creative force in our civilisation. When it wakens not, then our faith in money, in material power, takes its place; it fights and destroys, and in a brilliant fireworks of star-mimicry suddenly exhausts itself and dies in ashes ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... indeed, where huge caverns opening in front to the vast ocean, which had probably hollowed them out of the earth-fast rock in the course of succeeding ages, yawned in the mimicry of Gothic arches, the entering tide would rush, as it were, into the bowels of the land, roaring and groaning in those strange subterranean dungeons like some strong prisoner, Typhon, Enceladus, or Ephialtes, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... spent a day in the city, and my father took my brother and me to the theatre. Although the world was unfolding rather rapidly for a country boy of twelve, it was with difficulty that I was made to understand that what we had witnessed on the stage was but mimicry. ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... mimicry of life, so absolute the deception of breathing sleep, that I scarce dared ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... Gold Coast bear witness to the powers of mimicry evinced by the hyaena; they say that he hides himself in the jungle, and imitates the cries of other beasts till he allures them to his side, when he falls upon and devours them. A gentleman, who long commanded a fortress on the Gold Coast, told me the following ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... about himself, his terrible struggle with a snake in the streets of 'Frisco, after a champagne supper: girls, by Jove! He toned down his anecdotes and dished them up for Lily's entertainment; told her absurd yarns enlivened with mimicry, in which he excelled, like the real mummer that he was, and Lily shrieked with laughter, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... melancholy reason to know, for, listening to these new anecdotes, I recalled the last occasion on which the fruitful theme of a Nanna's oddities had been developed; when the speaker was that fascinating athlete and gentleman, E. B., a gallant officer with a gift of mimicry as notable as his sense of fun and his depth of feeling, who, chiefly for the amusement of two children, but equally—or even more—to the delight of us older ones, not only gave us certain of his old nurse's favourite sayings, in her own voice, but reconstructed ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... Each is a gigantic lotus-flower of paper, so perfectly made in every detail as to seem a great living blossom freshly plucked; the petals are crimson at their bases, paling to white at their tips; the calyx is a faultless mimicry of nature, and beneath it hangs a beautiful fringe of paper cuttings, coloured with the colours of the flower, green below the calyx, white in the middle, crimson at the ends. In the heart of the blossom is set a ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... of this county, sir," the old gentleman said, smiling at the man's knack of mimicry. "My home, Arden, is but ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... fact that the results of the two kinds of causes resemble each other. You may galvanize the nerve of a corpse till the action of a limb startles the spectator with the appearance of life. It is not life, it is only a spasmodic hideous mimicry of life. Men having seen that the spiritual is always associated with forms, endeavour by reproducing the forms to recall spirituality; you do produce thereby a something that looks like spirituality, but it is a resemblance only. The worst case of all occurs in the department of the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... social movements in the history of the world. Here we are concerned only with the simplest and most definite examples that can be found anywhere, and therefore we will deal in preference with the lower animals, among which, in the absence of voice, the means of communicating thought, mimicry, and physiognomy, are so imperfect that the harmony and interconnection of the individual actions cannot in its main points be ascribed to an understanding arrived at through speech. Huber observed that when a new ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... started and looked up. She had almost expected to see that shadow beside her again. But there was nothing. The lifeless bodies stood motionless in their mimicry of life under the bright light. The swarthy negro frowned, the face of the Malayan woman wore still its calm and gentle expression. Far in the background the rows of gleaming skulls grinned, as though at the memory of their four hundred lives; the skeleton of the orang-outang ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... service than in the entertainment of mankind. The intensity of his moral nature enhanced rather than subdued his exuberant humor, which love prevented from becoming satire, and seriousness preserved from degenerating into wit. His native faculty of mimicry led men to call him an actor, yet he wholly lacked the essential quality of a good actor,—power to take on another's character,—and used the mimic art only to interpret the truth which at the moment ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... was Vanwigglevandoozen's idea to have Clarence Fussyface play the monkey, because Clarence's intelligence is built on a plan to suggest such mimicry, but a hand-organ proprietor by the name of Guissepi, who is summering at Newport, came to the rescue with a real monkey ...
— Skiddoo! • Hugh McHugh
... hunted by bailiffs and duns; how, to the landlady's horror, though she never could abide the woman, he did not marry his wife till a short time before her death; and what a queer little wild vixen his daughter was; how she kept them all laughing with her fun and mimicry; how she used to fetch the gin from the public-house, and was known in all the studios in the quarter—in brief, Mrs. Bute got such a full account of her new niece's parentage, education, and behaviour as would scarcely have pleased ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her husband's declaration. With clever mimicry she struck the attitude of a nervous photographer just ready to close the shutter of his camera. Dicky stood just behind her too, also smiling, but while Lillian's merriment evidently was genuine, I detected a distaste for the proceedings behind Dicky's smile, ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... had lost consciousness some moments before Lanyard's intervention. Released, she had fallen positively inert, and lay semi-prostrate on a shoulder, with limbs grotesquely slack and awry, as if in unpleasant mimicry of a broken doll. Only the whites of bloodshot eyes showed in her livid and distorted countenance. Arms and legs twitched spasmodically, the ample torso was violently ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... Miss Symes. "The gift of mimicry is a somewhat dangerous one, but I don't think Betty meant it unkindly. I would ask her, however, to spare our good ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... laughed at; but it is very often not the laugh of incredulity; it is a mode of distorting the sense of inferiority into a sense of superiority, or a mimicry of superiority interposed between the laugher and his feeling of inferiority. Two persons in conversation {253} agreed that it was often a nuisance not to be able to lay hands on a bit of paper to mark the place in a book, every bit of paper on the table was sure to contain something ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... lowered her head a little; her eyebrows had come nearer together under the close cluster of her hair; uneasiness passed into her eyes. She was used to the boyish mimicry of infatuated men. But this woman was not for me! She dealt me the blow of an unfeeling laugh, and disappearing, shut the door ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... hat, Manderson's broad-brimmed hat! There is too much character in the back of a head and neck. The unknown, in fact, supposing him to have been of about Manderson's build, had had no need for any disguise, apart from the jacket and the hat and his powers of mimicry. ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... actor shook hands heartily with the old seaman, thanking him for the tribute which he had paid him. But here the captain's enthusiasm fell flat. Meeting the object of his sympathy face to face, and as man to man, and finding that the interesting scenes he had just witnessed were but an inimitable mimicry, was a great disappointment; and he seemed to feel wronged and defrauded in ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... an eye—the creature appeared, there, behind Lucy; fearfully the same as to outward semblance, but kneeling exactly as Bridget knelt, and clasping her hands in jesting mimicry as Bridget clasped hers in her ecstasy that was deepening into a prayer. Mistress Clarke cried out—Bridget arose slowly, her gaze fixed on the creature beyond: drawing her breath with a hissing sound, never moving her terrible eyes, that were steady as ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... together by the shady river-side. He went through the dumb show of repeatedly offering to his captive guest the fish they had caught, pressing additional portions upon him, laughing significantly and joyously throughout his mimicry. Then suddenly grave, he seized the Highlander's left arm, giving it an earnest grasp about the wrist, the elbow, then close to the shoulder to intimate that he spared him for his gift to the ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Abbot did. This also he did—his crowning piece. He caused her to wear round her waist a girdle made of bright steel in which was a staple. To the staple he fixed a fine steel chain—a toy, a mimicry of prisons, but in fact a chain—and the other end of a chain was fixed to a monk's wrist. The chain was fine and flexible, it was long, it could go through the keyhole—and did—but it was a chain. Wherever the girl went, to the garden, to table, to music, to bed, abroad, or to Mass, she was ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... Foss. 502, t. 39, f. 10. The Singhalese, on following the elk, frequently effect their approaches by so imitating the call of the animal as to induce them to respond. An instance occurred during my residence in Ceylon, in which two natives, whose mimicry had mutually deceived them, crept so close together in the jungle that one shot the other, supposing the cry to proceed ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... their fellow-citizens; but it does not follow that they would have appeared so to us. What they saw is there; it is a reality both for them and for us; but the literal identification of it with the form belongs to them, not to us, and our mimicry of it can result only in these abstraction's. For us it is elsewhere, beyond these finite shapes, on which, by an illusion, it seemed to rest. The Greek statues are tropes, which we gladly allow in their original use, but, repeated, they become flat and pedantic. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... of Volucella of which I had never heard. (134/2. Volucella is a fly—one of the Syrphidae—supposed to supply a case of mimicry; this was doubtless the point of interest with Bates. Dr. Sharp says ["Insects," Part II. (in the Camb. Nat. Hist. series), 1899, page 500]: "It was formerly assumed that the Volucella larvae lived on the larvae of the bees, and that the parent flies were providentially ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... on golden platters, which the guests threw from the open windows into the Tiber. Masques and balls, comedies and carnival processions filled the streets and squares and palaces of the Eternal City with a mimicry of pagan festivals, while art went hand in hand with luxury. It seemed as though Bacchus and Pallas and Priapus would be reinstated in their old realm, and yet Rome had not ceased to call herself Christian. The hoarse rhetoric of friars ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... seconds, uttered another "Hurrah," which he emphasized with a defiant gesture, and went on energetically eating. In the midst of this, something alarmed him, and he flew swiftly away and did not come back. Was this crow a pet that had concluded to strike out for himself? Or had his mimicry or his habit of laying hold of whatever pleased him caused him to appropriate this word ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... deal of forgetting; and yet, in the very week when I am revising this passage, I observe advertised a new edition, attractively illustrated, of the "Evenings at Home"—a joint work of Mrs. Barbauld's and her brother's, (the elder Dr. Aikin.) Mrs. Barbauld was exceedingly clever. Her mimicry of Dr. Johnson's style was the best of all that exist. Her blank verse "Washing Day," descriptive of the discomforts attending a mistimed visit to a rustic friend, under the affliction of a family washing, is picturesquely circumstantiated. And her prose hymns ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... bloodless mimicry of war, the United Provinces presented for the space of twelve years a long-continued picture of peace, as the term is generally received; but a peace so disfigured by intestine troubles, and so stained by actions of despotic cruelty, that the period which should have been that of ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... wrung her hands in pretty mimicry of despair, and poured out soothing words, as one might pour oil upon stormy waters. The Seneschal sat in stolid silence, a half-scared spectator of this odd scene, what time the Marquise talked and talked until ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... natural limits of its type. They have become convinced that this is not possible in dispersion, as, under that condition, prejudice, hatred, and contempt continually follow and oppress them, and either stint their development, or force them to an ethnical mimicry which necessarily makes of them, instead of original types with a right to existence, mediocre or bad copies of foreign models. They therefore work methodically with a view to rendering the Jewish people once more a normal one, which lives on its own soil, and accomplishes all ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... with shaven head and scalping lock—favoured us with a graphic mimicry of a fight, showing the methods in his day. He took the handjar between his teeth and a musket in his hands, yelling and scowling fearfully; then, the last cartridge fired or the moment for hand-to-hand combat arrived, the rifle was thrown away, and brandishing the handjar ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... with the drama, having the feeling for beautiful themes and for new and original topics, adapting them to the stage with sufficient aptitude, delighting, in addition, in pomp, mimicry, and decorativeness, and causing tragedy to lean towards opera, which in his day was no bad thing; but weak in execution, never creating characters because he could not escape from himself, as moderate in psychology and morality as Crebillon himself and replacing ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... creatures; and they will perhaps ask how we account for the brilliant birds, and painted snakes, and gorgeous insects, that occur abundantly all over the world. It will be advisable to answer this question rather fully, in order that we may be prepared to understand the phenomena of "mimicry," which it is the special object of this paper ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... at des Mazes's mimicry of the German teacher's manner and speech. But Napoleon smiled with the air of one who felt himself superior to the ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... a semicircle, while each girl gave her little performance, and, at the conclusion, was applauded enthusiastically. Nora had a real talent for mimicry; she convulsed her audience with imitations of some of the High School teachers. When it came Miriam's turn she sat down at the piano with a ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... after this scene, which Europe related far more amusingly than it can be written, because she told it with much mimicry, Carlos and Lucien were ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... syllables fanned the flame of Jimmy's rage. He felt impotent, moreover, which never serves as a poultice to anger. But he got himself in hand, though imitation courtesy was not much in his line. He tuned his big hearty voice to a pitch with the Frenchman's nasal pipe, and clipped off his words in mimicry. ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... jack with which he had pulled off his wet boots, and waited for a good chance to launch it at Joe's head. But Joe kept behind his grandmother, and proceeded with his mimicry. ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... everything. He walked, spoke, laughed exactly like him; it was the same language as that of the Jesuits correct but rather harsh French. I thought that excess of imitation perfectly scandalous, and I could not help telling De la Haye that he ought to change his pupil's deportment, because such servile mimicry would only expose him to bitter raillery. As I was giving him my opinion on that subject, Bavois made his appearance, and when he had spent an hour in the company of the young man he was entirely of the same mind. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and roar with glee By my transcendent feats of mimicry, And humour wanton as an elvish sprite: I wake from daydreams ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... in general the phenomenon of mimicry, or adaptation for protection, through their color and form, some being green, like the plants upon which they live, others yellowish or grayish, and others brownish ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... difficulty in thinking that any imitation or toy model is just as good as the object or animal imitated, and playing with it as such. Even to call a thing by the name of any object is sufficient with children to establish its identity with that object for the purposes of a game or mimicry, and a large part of children's games are based on such pretensions. They also have not yet clearly grasped the difference between likeness and identity, and between an imitation of an object and the object itself. A large part of the category of ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... forbidden them, though they may lecture authoritatively or debate. But professional mimicry is not only held to be undignified in a man or woman, but to weaken and corrupt the soul; the mind becomes foolishly dependent on applause, over-skilful in producing tawdry and momentary illusions of excellence; it is our experience that actors and actresses as a class ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... never left him. I can still remember the curious twitching and working of his features. The eyes themselves were invisible; it was as though the man were asleep. But his forehead and temples were forever on the move, as if in mimicry ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... completely forgot the shadow that was haunting her, forgot how she looked or felt or acted, forgot that there was or had ever been a terrible old woman who lived in Tavistock Square and whose hold on life was maintained by her horrible mimicry of youth. And then, in a moment, she was lifted out of her dream and cruelly set down on the hard, unsympathetic earth by the sound of her ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... Godwin, seeing in quotation a passage from John Woodvil, takes it for a choice fragment of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to assist him in finding the author. His power of delicate imitation in prose and verse reaches the length of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia on Popular Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of Sir Thomas Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, by disinterested study, of those elements of the man which ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... that can unfold to another person. Yet there is a charm all over the book, which some may place here, some there, but which all will confess. For me it is not so much that Fanny herself is a charming girl, and a girl of shrewd observation, of a pointed pen, and an admirable gift of mimicry. She has all that, and more—she has a good heart. Her sister Susan is as good as she, and there are many of Susan's letters. But the real charm of the book, I think, is in the series of faithful pictures ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... call "a saint;" and she referred to religion often in sanctioned phrase—in phrase which those who possess a perception of the ridiculous, without owning the power of exactly testing and truly judging character, would certainly have esteemed a proper subject for satire, a matter for mimicry and laughter. They would have been hugely mistaken for their pains. Sincerity is never ludicrous; it is always respectable. Whether truth—be it religious or moral truth—speak eloquently and in well-chosen language or not, its voice should be heard with reverence. Let those ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... cease with the war; but I dismally dread the multiplication of these mortals under the ease and luxuriousness of a settled peace, half the blessing of which may be destroyed by them. Their mistake lies certainly here, in a wretched belief, that their mimicry passes for real business, or true wit. Dear sir, convince them, that it never was, is, or ever will be, either of them; nor ever did, does, or to all futurity ever can, look like either of them; but that it is the most cursed disturbance ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... confessing by that sign that not even wings can bear them clear of the stern doom of work. Or, passing to some quiet shade, meditating still on this careworn life, playing still internally with ideal fancies and desires unrealized, there returns upon him there, in the manifold and spontaneous mimicry of nature, a living show of all that is transpiring in his own bosom; in every flower some bee humming over his laborious chemistry and loading his body with the fruits of his toil; in the slant sunbeam, populous nations of motes ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... all her three years of intermittent intimacy with a disillusioning world of mimicry, her dreams were pure romance, proved that Lorraine had still the unclouded ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... now?" Stryker dropped his mimicry and glanced at the clock. "Breakfast," he announced, "will be served in the myne dinin' saloon at eyght a. m. Passingers is requested not to be ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... stopped of his own accord, and, as if he had sufficiently rebuked me by his mimicry, he said, 'But for a' that, ye will play very weel wi' a little practice and some gude teaching. But ye maun learn to put the heart into it, man—to put the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... a god will not, injure a member of the tribe, the distinction is not clear-cut. There are things which both alike may be prayed to do: both may be besought to do good to the individual who addresses them. To this protective mimicry the fetish owes in part its power of survival. For the same reason spell and magic contrive to continue their existence side by side with religion and prayer. What conduces to this result is that at first the god of the community is conceived ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... by thumb and forefinger hard into his throat, while his eyebrows were wrinkled up to their highest elevation. From this attitude, expressive of the accurate balancing of the claims of an internal debate, he emerged into the posture of a cock crowing, and Emilia heard again his bitter mimicry of her miserable broken tones, followed by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of inorganic matter; yet the simplest rustic observer is struck by the resemblance which the examples of it left upon a window by frost bear to vegetable forms. In some crystallizations the mimicry is beautiful and complete; for example, in the well-known one called the Arbor Dianae. An amalgam of four parts of silver and two of mercury being dissolved in nitric acid, and water equal to thirty weights of the metals being added, a small piece of soft ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... and the boys grew very friendly with them. The injury that crippled one of them, Larry Bartlett; the false accusation brought against him by Buck Looker; the way in which the boys succeeded in getting work for Larry at the sending station, where his remarkable gift of mimicry received recognition; how they themselves were placed on the broadcasting program, and the clever way in which they trapped the motor-boat thieves; are told in the third volume of the series, entitled: "The Radio Boys at the Sending ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... the little dogs bred for ladies' laps are the curls of a mother's darling; the pendant love-locks of the old, old maid who, despite of changeful fashions, clings to those memorials of the pensive beauty of her youth, are repeated in solemn mimicry by the dachshund trotting at her heels; but the sensible fur cap of the dignified Newfoundland reminds us of the cold regions from which his forefathers came. Some kinds of terriers still have their ears starched up to look perky, and I have ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... is Cunning's promise good, When she winks the other eye? Noodledom seeks her neighbourhood, And winks its other eye. For no one winks so freely as a fool who thinks he's sly; The dupe of deeper knavery smirks in shallow mimicry Of the smirking JERRY DIDDLER who is sucking him so dry, And who ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... more than ordinary size Retreats suburban please the public eye; But occupants their villa homes disguise And strive to imitate the great and high By striking names and such-like mimicry; They choose them mainly for a good address, We see it as we pass the villa by, And with a smile we mark its rottenness. This evil's ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... of the party, as we sat an hour later on the moonlit terrace, were enough to start off the versatile artist, who was in her gayest humor. She sang us stray bits of opera, alternating her music with scenes burlesqued from recent plays. No one escaped her inimitable mimicry, not even the “divine Sarah,” Calvé giving us an unpayable impersonation of the elderly tragédienne as Lorenzaccio, the boy hero of Alfred de Musset’s drama. Burlesquing led to her dancing some Spanish steps with an abandon never attempted on the stage! Which in turn gave place to an imitation ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... his arms round her and drew her to his shoulder. And the scene of mimicry in his office flashed into his mind, and the blood burned in his cheeks. But he had no such access of insanity as to entertain the ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... scene itself produced in him. Therefore he must not aim at accuracy of reproduction of natural fact nor even of visual fact, but at the transference to another mind of his own mental condition—his inner judgment as to "things seen"—by means of necessarily imperfect pictorial mimicry. He must therefore avoid startling or abnormal truthfulness of observation of the unessential and even more strictly must he refuse to make his picture a scientific diagram demonstrating what "is" rather than what is "seen" or is "thought to ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... between these two senior Normal Students, strong, robust young women, prospering in body as in soul. Pearl Drops, keenly humorous, is a famous mimic and I once had the delight of, unnoticed, joining an audience which she was fascinating by her mimicry of an old man well known to us all. Fragrant Clouds is a more serious type, and entered the High School here in answer to her prayers to God for many months, at a time when innumerable obstacles barred her way. She has proved ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... tried to recover his dignity. The waiter behind him, recognizing only the delightful mimicry of this adorable officer, was in fits of laughter. Nevertheless, the consul managed to ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... the story of the fifty-five-dollar suit that I. Bernstein had wished on him with near-tears of regret at parting from it. The cowpuncher dramatized the situation with some native talent for mimicry. His arms gestured like the lifted wings of a startled cockerel. "A man gets a chance at a garment like that only once in a while occasionally. Which you can take it from me that when I. Bernstein sells a suit of clothes it is shust like he is dealing with his own brother. Qvality, ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... you, mon cher brother," she replied. Then she added with perfect mimicry of his own overbearing voice, "It's a trifle whether I breakfast in bed or not. It is vital that you remember who is mistress ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... present has slipped from me as a garment might, and I see the past like a little show, struggles and heartbreakings of long ago, and watch it with the same indifferent curiosity as I would the regulated mimicry of a stage play. Pictures from the past come and go without an effort of will; many are habitual memories, but the one before me rises for the first time—for fifteen years it has lain submerged, and now like a water weed or flower it rises—the Countess Ninon de ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Cecilia there. A thoroughly happy song, overflowing with life, it gives even its most familiar phrases an air of gracious condescension, as when some great violinist stoops to the "Carnival of Venice." The Red Thrush does not, however, consent to any parrot-like mimicry, though every note of wood or field—Oriole, Bobolink, Crow, Jay, Robin, Whippoorwill—appears to pass in veiled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... other hand, we were quite invisible, even from 300 yards' distance, and would have been more so had we had the whiskers of the "brethren." It was quite evident to me that these same whiskers were a wise provision of nature for this very purpose and part of her universal scheme of protective mimicry. ...
— The Defence of Duffer's Drift • Ernest Dunlop Swinton
... "Mimicry isn't a fair word," he said. "The mimic doesn't interpret. He's a mere thief of expression. You can always see him behind his stolen mask. The actress takes a different rank. This ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... him. The miller's half-grown son, whose ear for any fine distinctions in sound might be presumed to have been destroyed by the clamors of the mill, sat a trifle in the background, and sawed away on an imaginary violin with many flourishes and all the exaggerations of mimicry; he thus furnished the zest of burlesque relished by the devotees of horse-play and simple jests, and was altogether unaware that he had a caricature in his shadow just behind him, and was doing double ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree) |
