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More "Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Jews for their Messiah or of the Portugueze for St. Sebastian more extravagant? But Lord G. ought to know that such a military POWER does already exist upon the Peninsula, formless indeed compared with what under our plastic hands it may become, yet which has proved itself capable of its giving employment during the course of three years to at least five hundred thousand of the enemy's best troops. An important fact has been ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... disuse of such powers of judgment as she had, and long habit of always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake's naturally weak will and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental pulp, plastic to any pressure from without. To men she invariably yielded; and, poor specimen of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had no fibre of personal judgment or decision in the strength of which to oppose his assertions, ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Bidassoa at low tide. From time to time, some fisherman crossed their path, passed near them in silence, without singing as the custom is in rowing, too busy poling, standing in his bark and working his pole with beautiful plastic gestures. ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... had time to perceive that my fairy was a statuette in coloured wax, modeled with much taste and spirit by some novice hand. But the phenomenon, even thus reduced by a rational explanation, did not cease to excite my surprise. How, and by whom, had the Lady of the Cosmography been enabled to assume plastic existence? That was what ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... resource. Aforetime she had devoted her efforts chiefly to Merle as being the better worth saving. Now that she had indeed saved him, made and uplifted him beyond human expectation, she redoubled her attentions to his less responsive, less plastic brother. Almost fiercely she was bent upon making him the moral perfectionist ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... sure I don't know how many heads the little witch is going to turn when she grows up. And her sister, Margaret—I couldn't tell you which of the two I like the better—has quite an extraordinary talent for plastic art. I mean to give her a commission before I return to my place. I'd like for one thing to have a bust of her mother in my study—that would be so inspiring. And long ago I took a fancy to have a nice sphinx. A thing of that kind, you know, is good to remind ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... Ashe—supposing he, Cliffe, persuaded her—there would be no doubt a first shock of wrath and pain—then a sense of deliverance. For her, too, deliverance! It excited his artist's sense to think of all the further developments through which he might carry that eager, plastic nature. There would be a new Kitty, with new capacities and powers. Wasn't that justification enough? He felt himself a sculptor in the very substance of life, moulding a living creature afresh, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... digestible. It is nothing but precipitated casein and fat. In a short time, a deep-seated change occurs. Physically this change is demonstrated in the modification that the curd undergoes. Gradually it breaks down and becomes plastic, the elastic, tough curd being changed into a softened mass. This change in texture of the cheese is also accompanied by a marked change in flavor. The green cheese has no distinctively cheese flavor, but in course of time, with the gradual ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... with an intention most obviously false. He coughed—a cough of pure deception. Not only were his eyes averted from mine, but they were glassed to an uncanny degree. The fingers wrought piteously at the now plastic roll. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... quality of brickwork is that it can be thrown into almost any shape. It is in this respect almost like a plastic material, and this peculiarity it owes chiefly to the very small size of each brick as compared with the large masses of the brickwork of most buildings. Stone is far less easily dealt with than brick in this respect. Think for a moment of the great variety of walls, footings, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... into the controversies among Platonists themselves. All admit the distinction between the rational and the irrational part or principle, the latter including, first, the sensibility, and secondly, the Plastic, or that lower which in obedience to its sympathies enables the soul to attach itself to, and to organize into a suitable body those substances of the universe to which it is most congruous. It is more difficult to determine whether Plato or his ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... he cried, "is to give ourselves into the arms of life, to take it as it comes, to rejoice in its infinite unfoldment, the 'plastic dance of circumstance'; to behold the budding flower and the new-born suns as equal expressions of the joy of becoming. But people are weak, they love themselves, and they set themselves up as the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... a chief influence in the education of the boy Henry in the six years 1848 to 1854, and violently affected his character at the moment when character is plastic. The group of men with whom Mr. Adams associated himself, and whose social centre was the house in Mount Vernon Street, numbered only three: Dr. John G. Palfrey, Richard H. Dana, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Palfrey was the oldest, and in spite of his clerical education, was to a boy often the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... doubtless sacrificed to Octavianus's command to destroy Antony's statues. We are indebted to Herr Dr. Walther, in Alexandria, for an excellent photograph of this remarkable piece of sculpture. Comparatively few other works of plastic art, in which we here include coins, that could render us familiar with our heroine's appearance, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to the river I laid aside bow and quiver, and cutting divers lumps of clay (the which seemed very proper to my purpose) I fell to kneading these lumps until I had wrought them to a plastic consistency, and so (keeping my hands continually moistened) I began to mould and shape a pot to her directions. And now, since I was about it, I determined to have as many as need be and of different sizes. My first was a great ill-looking thing, and my second ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... veriest pilgrim, new come from graded roads and fenced pastures, could have counted the number of their steps—each hoof had stamped its impression in the soft loam as clearly as a steel die-cut in soaked leather. But that was where they had ridden while the land was still plastic from the rain. Farther, wind and sun had dried the ridge-turf to its normal firmness and baked the dobe flats till in places they were of their old flinty hardness. Yet Piegan crossed at a lope places where neither MacRae nor I could glimpse ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Mr. Marwood's reply, "although before it can be sent to the jiggermen to be modeled it must pass through the pug-mill to be made more plastic and workable. It is here that it gets its final kneading, all the air bubbles in it being eliminated by a series ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... of the middle ages, and not of the classics. This we call romanticism. As an artistic product it was developed on strictly national and traditional lines, born of the fields as it were, free as a bird and as sweet, giving birth in England to the drama, in Italy to the plastic arts. It is essentially opposed to the classical movement, for it represents the idea as distinct from the form. Lyly belongs to both movements, for, while he is the protagonist of the romantic drama, in his Euphues we may discover the source of the artificial ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Mr. Hepworth's proposal, made it impossible to secure a vote in favor of a creed. "We want to represent a body," he said, "that presents itself to the forming hand of the Almighty Spirit of God in a fluid, plastic form. We cannot keep our denomination in that state, and yet give it the character of being cast into a positive mould. You must either abandon that great work you have done, as the only body in Christendom ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... screamed to a stop in front of them, the plastic blister was thrown back, and another Solar Guard messenger climbed ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... chain. Freedom of spirit cannot be translated into freedom of action; you may amend laws, and customs, and social entanglements, but you will still have them; for this world is a lumbering mechanism and not, like love, a plastic dream. Wisdom is very old and therefore often ironical, and it has long taught that it is well for those who would live in the spirit to keep as clear as possible of the world: and that marriage, especially a free-love marriage, is a ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Adriatic coast. Its picturesque scenery has formed the background for more than one of his stories. At the age of fifteen, while still a student at Prato, he published his first volume of poems, 'Intermezzo di Rime' (Interludes of Verse): "grand, plastic verse, of an impeccable prosody," as he maintained in their defense, but so daringly erotic that their appearance created no small scandal. Other poems followed at intervals, notably 'Il Canto Nuovo' (The New Song: Rome, 1882), ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... it most powerfully in men's imagination, is to be looked upon as the true owner or creator of the image: to him belongs the crown. The Greeks reckoned it to be the highest merit of the masters of their plastic art when they retained the great traits with which their predecessors had invested a conception; only endeavouring to better those parts in which a lesser success had been achieved—until that section of the work, too, had attained the highest degree of perfection. ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... electro-magnetic Aether. Then in the very centre of the Universe there dwells that Supreme Being whom we call God, who is at once the one real fountain and source of all the light and life of the Universe itself. For it is His universal Spirit that moulds and fashions the plastic matter into the many forms which it assumes, and uses the various modes of motion, as heat, light, electricity and magnetism, as instruments to build up and erect in all their beauty and harmony the innumerable systems that ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... sought something upon the table in the centre of the room, for she continued her progress toward it several steps before realizing the presence of a visitor. She was a year or so younger than the girl who had admitted him, fairer and obviously more plastic, more expressive, more perishable, a great deal more insistently feminine; though it was to be seen that they were sisters. This one had eyes almost as dark as the other's, but these were not cool; they were sweet, unrestful, and seeking; brilliant with a vivacious hunger: and not ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... she could offer; but he saw not her charms; felt not the strong attractions with which she sought to win his admiration. Far away his thoughts were wandering, and in the dim distance Fancy was busy with half-defined shapes, which her plastic hand, with rapid touches, moulded into forms that seemed instinct with a purer life, and to glow with a more ravishing beauty than any thing yet seen in the actual he had made his own. And as these forms became more and more vividly pictured in his imagination, the pace of Edward Markland ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... lord whom nature's plastic pains Would seem to've fashioned for those Eastern reigns When eunuchs flourisht, and such nerveless things As men rejected were the chosen of kings;—[12] Even he, forsooth, (oh fraud, of all the worst!) Dared ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... union with one of the others, is also a gas. In various combinations they form literally the dust of the earth, they make rock and water, vapor and air. In the hand of the Almighty, they are so many plastic elements, that form now a plant of the lowliest condition, now a magnificent oak, now a fish, and now a man. And the germ of each organized being bequeathes to its offspring the power to reproduce its likeness,—so ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... applied, and in a very short time the bowl, instead of being large-mouthed, is made to contract in a beautiful curve, growing smaller and smaller, till it is about one-third of its original diameter, and the metal has seemed to be plastic, and yielded to the moulding tool till a gracefully formed tall vessel is the result, with quite a narrow mouth where ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... extracts published in the volumes before us. I will not call the labours of the biographer final. So great a character will challenge reconstruction. In the coming time some sympathetic spirit, with the requisite strength, knowledge, and solvent power, will, I doubt not, render these materials plastic, give them more perfect organic form, and send through them, with less of interruption, the currents of Faraday's life. 'He was too good a man,' writes his present biographer, 'for me to estimate rightly, and too great ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... besides being a member of one of the top diplomatic families, had worked for a short while as a consultant at the Belt plastic manufactory when it was being set up, and had taken to space life. She shared his enthusiasm about the future of the ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... suit is made of woven lux metal wires of extremely small diameter and airproofed with a rubberoid fluorocarbon plastic, and furnished with air and heating units. Made as it was, it offered protection nothing else could offer; it was almost a perfect insulator and was resistant to the attack of any chemical reagent. Not even elemental fluorine could corrode it. And the extreme strength of the lux ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... the nations grow. Lawgiver thine, and priest, and sage, Lit up the Oriental age. Persuasive groves, and musical, Of love the illumined mountains all. Eagles and rods, and axes clear, Forum and amphitheatre; These in thy plastic forming hand, Forth leapt to life the classic Land. Old and new, the worlds of light, Who bridged the gulf of Middle Night? See the purple passage rise, Many arch'd of centuries; Genius built it long and vast, And o'er it social knowledge pass'd. Far in the glad transmitted flame, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... his biographers, "he has fought his way to consideration and esteem; but he bears upon him the scars of his twelve years' conflict; of the mean sorrows through which he has passed; and of the cheap indulgences he has sought relief and help from. There is nothing plastic in his nature now. His manners and habits are completely formed; and in them any further success can make little favorable change, whatever it may effect for his mind or genius." [Footnote: ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... of their essence dull, but they must sometimes be submitted to, and the truism as to a book's possible influence on the young and impressionable cannot here be avoided. What it is that decides if the book is to stamp itself on the plastic mind, or if the mind is to assert itself and stamp on the book, is a detail that admits less easily of dogmatism. The Companionage of Finn remained in being for but two periods of holiday. Before the boys had returned to school, it had seen its best days; ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... be expressed the peculiar restiveness, fitfulness, and waywardness of thought and feeling that characterise Chopin's individuality. To these unclassical qualities—for classical art is above all plastic and self-possessed—combined as they are with a high degree of refinement and delicacy, his compositions owe much of their peculiar charm. The absence of scorn distinguishes the fourth "Scherzo," Op. 54, from the other three; but, like them, although less closely wrapped, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... because he's smart, Laberius' mimes were products of high art. 'Tis not enough to make your reader's face Wear a broad grin, though that too has its place: Terseness there wants, to make the thought ring clear, Nor with a crowd of words confuse the ear: There wants a plastic style, now grave, now light, Now such as bard or orator would write, And now the language of a well-bred man, Who masks his strength, and says not all he can: And pleasantry will often cut clean through Hard knots that gravity ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... apart; By years of toil you've learned the trick (Like PHEIDIAS with his plastic art) Of slapping mortar on a brick; Touched too the summit Of science with your lore of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... wet hair plastic, and easily obtained the long, even sweep backward from the brow, lacking which no male person, unless bald, fulfilled his definition of a man of the world. But there ensued a period of vehemence and activity ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... gradually formed into the likeness under which it was to appear as a finished product in the Far East. Here it developed magnificently. The enormous frescoes of Murtuq display imposing arrangements of those figures of Buddhas and Bodhisatvas which were to remain unchanged in the plastic formulas of China and Japan. Meanwhile conflicting influences continued to be felt. Sometimes the Indian types prevailed, as at Khotan, at others there were Semitic types and elements originating in Asia Minor, such as were found at Miran, ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... subject under this point of view is enough to strike one dumb with amazement. But our amazement ought to be lessened when we reflect that beings almost infinite in number, during an almost infinite lapse of time, have often had their whole organization rendered in some degree plastic, and that each slight modification of structure which was in any way beneficial under excessively complex conditions of life has been preserved, while each which was in any way injurious has been rigorously destroyed. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... walk,—often pausing,—often leaning over his staff,—and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler's door. The Main Street is still youthful; the coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life in our local history, ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... prominence, the many trials encountered along the road has ripened the always sympathetic nature of Dr. Buckner into a responsive suffer among a suffering people. He has hope that proper influences and sympathetic advice will mould the plastic character of the Afro-American youths of the United States into proper citizens and that their immortal souls inherit the promised reward of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... that Mark was written shortly before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D. "This means that a chasm of 30 or 40 years separates Mark's written document from the ministry of Jesus—a long enough time to create a plastic body of oral teachings and a highly colored ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... moon out from the parent planet on a spiral orbit. Plainly, then, the moon must formerly have been nearer the earth than at present. At some very remote period it must have actually touched the earth; must, in other words, have been thrown off from the then plastic mass of the earth, as a polyp buds out from its parent polyp. At that time the earth was spinning about in a day of from two ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... in Richard Edney to furnish materials for a dozen better books. It has a number of individual sketches that are admirably drawn. We might quote a variety of isolated passages that impress us deeply with the vigor of the writer, and which, if wrought up with as much plastic skill as is usually connected with such inventive talents, would secure his rank among the elite of American authors. He has not yet done justice to his remarkable gifts, not even in the inimitable Margaret—the poem Philo we regard as a dead failure—and if our frank, though friendly ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... concerned with Mr. Ruskin here, for one reason. His disparagement of Coleridge as 'useless' is a survival of the belief that art should be 'useful.' This is the savage's view of art. He imitates nature, in dance, song, or in plastic art, for a definite practical purpose. His dances are magical dances, his images are made for a magical purpose, his songs are incantations. Thus the theory that art is a disinterested expression of ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... world and a gentleman, Mr. Effingham had looked forward to this passage with a good deal of concern, on account of his daughter, while he shrank with the sensitiveness of his habits from the necessity of exposing one of her delicacy and plastic simplicity to the intercourse of a ship. Accompanied by Mademoiselle Viefville, watched over by Nanny, and guarded by himself and his kinsman, he had lost some of his apprehensions on the subject during ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... his skill and daring were his means of evasion. Even without a formal disguise he could elude pursuit. At an instant's warning, his loose, plastic features would assume another shape; out shot his lower jaw, and, as if by magic, the blood flew into his face until you might take him for a mulatto. Or, if he chose, he would strap his arm to his side, and let the police be baffled ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... The rest assume his classification without reserve, and work from the axiom that heat-making, carbonaceous and non-nitrogenous foods (e.g. fat and sugars), necessary to support life in the arctic and polar regions, must be exchanged for the tissue-making, plastic or nitrogenous (vegetables), as we approach the equator. They are right as far as the southern temperates, their sole field of observation; they greatly err in all except the hot, dry parts of the tropics. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... or novels, ever seemed to affect Caroline; and to the romantic descriptions of love she was so indifferent that it might have appeared to a common observer as if she was, and ever would be, a stranger to the passion. By the help of the active and plastic powers of the imagination, any and every hero of a novel could be made, at pleasure, to appear the exact resemblance of each lady's different lover. Some, indeed, professed a peculiar and absolute exclusive attachment, founded on unintelligible or indescribable merits or graces; but these ladies, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... necessity of the carnivorous appetite of replacing the bodily waste, by the azote contained in animal tissues. The lungs are satisfied with a provision of vegetable and farinaceous food. But to be strong and active the body must be supplied with those plastic elements that renew the muscles. Until the Maories become members of the Vegetarian Association they will eat meat, and human ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... uses; in the conscript drawn from the populace of the provinces there was almost always a knowledge of self-help, and often of some trade, coupled with habits of diligence; in the soldier made from the street Arab of Paris there were always inconceivable intelligence, rapidity of wit, and plastic vivacity; in the adventurers come, like himself, from higher grades of society, and burying a broken career under the shelter of the tricolor, there were continually gifts and acquirements, and even genius, that had run to seed and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... round our world, behold the chain of love. Combining all below and all above; See plastic nature working to this end, The single atoms each to other tend; Attract, attracted to, the next in place Formed and impelled its neighbor to embrace, See matter next, with various life endued, Press to one center still the gen'ral good. ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... filling it up. It also helps to make sure that the stomach is empty of any fluid for one hour prior to the colonic. Resume drinking after the colonic sessions is completed. If you are one of these rare people who 'toss their bile', just keep a plastic bucket handy and some water to rinse out the mouth after, ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... important than food. Enough water should be available to give each person at least one quart per day for 14 days. Store it in plastic containers, or in bottles or cans. All should have tight stoppers. Part of your water supply might be "trapped" water in the pipes of your home plumbing system, and part of it might be in the form of bottled or canned beverages, ...
— In Time Of Emergency - A Citizen's Handbook On Nuclear Attack, Natural Disasters (1968) • Department of Defense
... Eglamore; "farewell, poor clay so plastic the least touch remodels you! I had a part in shaping you so bestial; our age, too, had a part—our bright and cruel day, wherein you were set too high. Yet for me it would perhaps have proved as easy to have made a learned recluse of you, Alessandro, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... may be urged, granting that organic beings in a state of nature present some varieties,—that their organisation is in some slight degree plastic; granting that many animals and plants have varied greatly under domestication, and that man by his power of selection has gone on accumulating such variations until he has made strongly marked and firmly inherited races; granting all this, how, it may be asked, have species ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... build with eternities; whence, the vanity of the cry for any thing alike durable and new; and the folly of the reproach—Your granite hath come from the old-fashioned hills. For we are not gods and creators; and the controversialists have debated, whether indeed the All-Plastic Power itself can do more than mold. In all the universe is but one original; and the very suns must to their source for their fire; and we Prometheuses must to them for ours; which, when had, only perpetual Vestal tending ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the absolute proportion of the whole, such as we appear to find in a Greek temple or statue; nor should his works be tried by any such standard. They have often the beauty of poetry, but they have also the freedom of conversation. 'Words are more plastic than wax' (Rep.), and may be moulded into any form. He wanders on from one topic to another, careless of the unity of his work, not fearing any 'judge, or spectator, who may recall him to the point' (Theat.), 'whither ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... importance of wholesome domestic influences cannot be exaggerated. Their part in the formation of character is greater than that of all others, because they touch the powers and faculties of the child during those years in which it is most plastic. Neither the school nor the university can ever entirely counteract the effect of the home. The whole period of childhood is one in which the soul is under tutelage, and in which more is done for it by others than by itself. It can no more select ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... have been written with "Candide" in mind, but not too many. To-day, especially, when new faiths are changing the structure of the world, faiths which are still plastic enough to be deformed by every disciple, each disciple for himself, and which have not yet received the final deformation known as universal acceptance, to-day "Candide" is an inspiration to every narrative ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... an inflamed tissue are first those of congestion, distention of the blood vessels, and exudation of the fluid of the blood into the surrounding fibers, with, however, a more nearly complete stagnation of the blood; fibrin, or lymph, a plastic substance, is thrown out as well, and the cells, which we have seen to be living organisms in themselves, no longer carried in the current of the blood, migrate from the vessels and, finding proper nutriment, proliferate or multiply with greater ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... the child like the parents. Darwin says "the reproductive system is eminently susceptible to changes in the conditions of life; and to this system being functionally disturbed in the parents I chiefly attribute the varying or plastic condition of the offspring. The male and female sexual elements seem to be affected before that union takes place which is to form a new being. But why, because the re-productive system is disturbed this or that part should vary more or less, we are profoundly ignorant. Nevertheless ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... ground inside the breastwork which had been thrown up for our protection by Burgoyne was in a most disagreeable state for any one who wished to repose after the fatigues of the day, being knee-deep in mud of a remarkably plastic nature. I was dead tired, and determined to get a little rest in some more agreeable spot; so calling my sergeant, I told him to give me his knapsack for a pillow; I would make a comfortable night of it on the top of the breastwork, as it was ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... loved best of all was when he could get in a corner by himself, with no one to disturb him, and build castles and things out of some abandoned clay or mortar, or wet sand if there was nothing better. The plastic material took strange shapes of beauty under his hands. It was as if life had been somehow breathed into it by his touch, and it ordered itself as none of the other boys could make it. His fingers were tipped with ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power—On Pedantry and pedantic expressions— Advice to young authors respecting publication—Various anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress of his opinions ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a perfectly pure and holy love from that which does not correspond to itself. So, though sometimes the two may be set against each other, yet at bottom, and in reality, they are one, and the 'anger' is but a mode in which the 'favour' manifests itself. God's love is plastic, and if thrown back upon itself, grieved and wounded and rejected, becomes the 'anger' which ignorant men sometimes seem to think it contradicts. There is no more antagonism between these two ideas when they are applied ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... indeed we are not told of Milton having modeled, or Horace having built up other monuments than his own imperishable fame, still nothing but manual habit and the world's encouragement were wanting to perfect, in the concrete, the conceptions of those plastic minds. Who will deny that Hogarth was a novelist and play-wright, if not indeed a heart-rending tragedian? Who will refuse to those nameless monastic architects who planned and fashioned the fretted towers of Gloucester, the stern solidity of Durham, the fairy steeple of Strasburg, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Brott admitted. "Yes, it is true. But after all," he added cheerfully, "I believe that our disagreements are mainly upon the surface. The Countess is a woman of wide culture and understanding. Her mind, too, is plastic. She has ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and purplous cheeks whose velvet smoothness is like the Venus flower, half in bloom, that new-born flesh which palpitates softly with desire and voluptuousness, that hand which you press so delicately, those round thighs, those plastic buttocks, that voice sweet and touching,—what comparison can be made between all this and pronounced features, rough beard, hard breast, hairy body, and the strong disagreeable voice of man? Juvenal has wonderfully expended all his bile in depicting, as hideous scenes, these mysteries ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... temperamental qualities which they will retain, with few modifications, throughout life. On the other hand, their dispositions are responsive to reason, and are capable of readjustment. Their temperamental characteristics are plastic, and under favorable conditions it is possible for both to evidence a degree of sympathy and toleration that bespeaks future harmony and success. No marriage can result in mutual happiness and success if one of the participants is temperamentally incapable of changing ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... oracle inspired and taught, The lofty and the excellent in mind adores. Then, Saviour! what a paragon art Thou Of all that Wisdom in her hope creates— A model for the universe—Though God Be round us, by the shadow of His might For aye reflected, and with plastic hand Prints on the earth the character of things— Yet He Himself,—how awfully retired Depth within depth, unutterably deep! His glory brighter than the brightest thought Can picture, holier than our holiest awe Can worship,—imaged only in I AM! But Thou—apparell'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... the pigment is made fluent and plastic are quite as important in their effects. They not only have to do with the business of drying, owing to the substances used as dryers, but they may have to do with the chemical action of one pigment ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... As a plastic art it lies between paper construction and clay modeling on one side, and wood and ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... grew up between Spalton and this intense, homely woman, Dorothy ... whose face, like that of all clever, homely women, grew to a beauty in his eyes, that mere beauty which plastic form can never attain. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... however, contributed experiences contradictory to his tacitly accepted boy-views. Sometimes in youth the mental development and conceptions of what seem desirable in life appear to make abrupt advances without apparent bodily changes. More wholesomely and more rarely at the plastic age characteristics strengthen and mind and body both gather virile capacity. When John Penhallow met his cousin on his first arrival, he was in enterprise, vigour, general good sense and normal relation to life, ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... undeveloped forms in the mounds dotted over the southern districts of Mesopotamia, in company with the earliest signs of those types which are especially characteristic of the architecture, ornamentation, and plastic figuration of Assyria. ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... ridden ten miles through the hills on this April morning, at Zindorf's message sent the night before. The clay of the roads was still damp and plastic from the recent rain. There were flecks of mud on him and ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... with the light full on his face and the paper grasped in his hand. The angle of his clean-cut jaw seemed to harden from the plastic texture of flesh to the hardness of granite, and in his narrowed eyes spurted jets of those blue-and-white fires ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... You are in the plastic period of your lives, with the world before you, and the mightier world within to mould as you will; and you can be almost anything you like, I do not mean in regard to externals, or intellectual capacities, for these are only partially in our control, but in regard to the far ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... me ask,—Is it my ingenuity that has imposed upon these structures the conclusion I have drawn from them?—have I so combined them in my thought that they have become to me a plastic form, out of which I draw a Crinoid, an Ophiuran, a Star-Fish, a Sea-Urchin, or a Holothurian at will? or is this structural idea inherent in them all, so that every observer who has a true insight into their organization must ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of Mrs. Van Wycke in throwing off on her partner's trump and swooping down on the last trick with her right bower? Melicent would have thought it beneath her to more than look her contempt as Mrs. Van Wycke rose with a triumphant laugh to take her place at a higher table, dragging the plastic Bloomdale with her. But she did mutter ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... alone, has entailed a vast increase in the amount of cerebral organization that must be left to be completed after birth, and thus has prolonged the period of infancy. And conversely the prolonging of the plastic period of infancy, entailing a vast increase in teachableness and versatility, has contributed to the further enlargement of the cerebral surface. The mutual reaction of these two groups of facts must have gone on for an enormous length of time since man began thus diverging from ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... that the weakness which had made her so plastic a creature in her father's hands had been an injustice to her husband; that it was not herself only she had been bound to consider in this matter. It was one thing to fling away her own chances of happiness; ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... not my object to give a history of the development of the plastic art, but to show the great excellence it attained in the hands of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... always; and when he has set his seal on the aged servant of God, there is a holiness there which every human spirit must bow down before. No matter how rude the form, how coarse the features—with his plastic hand he moulds them into lines of superhuman grandeur. He robs the face of the hues of life, and it becomes as pure as marble. He touches the white hair, and it falls into beautiful repose. He breathes on the distorted ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... the metropolis there does not exist another work of art in the open air. There are many structures and things, no other art. The outlines of the great animals, the bold curves and firm touches of the master hand, the deep indents, as it were, of his thumb on the plastic metal, all the technique and grasp written there, is legible at a glance. Then comes the pose and expression of the whole, the calm strength in repose, the indifference to little things, the resolute view ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... thought she worked out was, that the young mind is plastic, impressionable and accepts without question all that it is told. The young receive their ideas from their elders, and ideas once impressed upon this plastic plate of the ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... spreading plastic wax where the beasts would walk on it, in pathways or before dens. How they did scoff! The simplest ground squirrel knew too much to venture on my waxen snare; around 'it, or if hemmed in, over it, with a mighty bound they went; but never a ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... type which Nietzsche did not altogether dislike, but which he would fain have rendered more subtle and plastic. It is the type that takes life and itself too seriously, that never surmounts the camel-stage mentioned in the first discourse, and that is obdurately sublime and earnest. To be able to smile while speaking of lofty things and NOT TO BE OPPRESSED by them, is the secret of real greatness. ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... have found it out long ago, and there should then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure or to alleviate; so that we are left to infer that the person simply submitted to the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... still kept well within constructional expediency—were doubtless covered with a coating of plaster where they occurred inside of the rooms. At Tusayan and Cibola, on the other hand, the tendency has been rather to elaborate the plastic element of the masonry. The nearly universal use of adobe is undoubtedly largely responsible for the more slovenly methods of building now in vogue, as it effectually conceals careless construction. It is not to be expected that walls would be carefully constructed ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... called her the old baroness. Her hair was very white and she was thin and pale; her bold features, almost emaciated, displayed the framework of departed beauty, and if her high white forehead and waxen face were free from lines and wrinkles, it must have been because time and grief could find no plastic material there in which to trace their story. She was a very tall woman, too, and carried her head erect and high, walking with a firmness and elasticity of step such as would not have been expected in one whose outward appearance conveyed ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... the day and was able to draw comparisons between their conceptions of the art and hers. But when she began the study of ancient history her attention was called to the Greeks' conception of the art, and she soon discovered that modern dancing was a direct violation of that which was most plastic in art, and consisted chiefly of contortions, high kicking and pirouetting on the toes. She also discovered that the conceptions of her own people regarding the art stood nearer that of the ancients ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... suggestions derived from the great theme of nature which occupies his mind, and body, and soul. His acting is invented by himself for purposes of his own, and it is nature that gives him the sign and symbol for the expression of life as a synthesis. He is a genius in plastic expression, and every movement of his is sure to register in the unity of the theme, because he himself is a powerful unit of the group in which he may be performing. He is esthetically a responsible factor, since it concerns him as part ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... proposed by Professor Pancoast, and recommended by Professor Gross, is said to be specially suitable for such plastic operations. It is very complicated, as it requires one edge to be bevelled to a wedge shape, the other being grooved to include the wedge, thus opposing four raw surfaces, which are retained in contact by being transfixed by fine ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... desirous to secure for himself and for his family a favorable place in the midst of these large and free but vanishing opportunities. It took a century for this society to fit itself into the conditions of the whole province. Little by little, nature pressed into her mold the plastic pioneer life. The Middle West, yesterday a pioneer province, is to-day the field of industrial resources and systematization so vast that Europe, alarmed for her industries in competition with this new power, is discussing the policy of forming protective alliances among the nations ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... masses of shade, the separating line between the land and water, or to distinguish the fading objects that seemed sinking into chaos. Now did the busy fancy supply the feebleness of vision, producing with industrious craft a fairy creation of her own. Under her plastic wand the barren rocks frowned upon the watery waste, in the semblance of lofty towers, and high embattled castles; trees assumed the direful forms of mighty giants, and the inaccessible summits of the mountains seemed peopled with ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... of even a partly deflated balloon would have stood out like an elephant. Even before release, the partially inflated gas bags are almost a hundred feet tall. The crowd at the football game would certainly have seen such a monstrous shape above the glare of the floodlights, for the plastic balloons ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... influences must be spoken of now. The third lies in the fact that the English language was still plastic. It had not fallen into such hard forms that its words were narrow or restricted. The truth is that from the point of view of pure literature the Bible is better in English than it is in Greek or Hebrew. That is, the ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... at the record of the lives of artists to find what manner of men as a rule they were, we shall find that, in contradistinction to poets and musicians, they were pre-eminent as men of the world. Skill in plastic art seems a final gift imparted to men very highly constituted. It steals them entirely away from other aims, but exists side by side with, while yet it transcends the ability to achieve remarkable performances ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... possible to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told. He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and plastic form,—feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power, exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he is engaged ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Restauraw won't do,' Texas says, lookin' anxious out of the tail of his eye at Enright an' Peets. 'Mind, I ain't hintin' nothin' ag'inst Missis Rucker, who hasn't got her Southwest equal at flapjacks, but I submits that for a plastic child that a-way, at a time when it receives impressions easy, to daily witness the way she maltreats Rucker, is to go givin' that infant wrong idees of what's coming to husbands as a whole. I'm a hard man, gents; but ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the lawn Jane could discern trouble in Miss Collett's face. But Miss Collett's face was plastic in readjustments, and by the time she was fairly on the scene it had recaptured the habit of its smile. The smile, in greeting, covered and carried off the betraying reluctance of her hand. It implied that, if Miss Holland was to be set up in a high ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... Him, that sense of the immeasurable space between creator and created, is strangely contracted. The gulf between holiness and guiltiness tends also to disappear. For our life would appear to be plastic and indefinite, a process rather than a state, not open then to conclusive moral estimates; incomplete, not fallen; life an orderly process, hence not perverse but defensible; without known breaks or infringements, hence ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... sort. Chemists have pointed out that even in the organic—not to go so far as the organized—science has reconstructed hitherto nothing but waste products of vital activity; the peculiarly active plastic substances obstinately defy synthesis. One of the most notable naturalists of our time has insisted on the opposition of two orders of phenomena observed in living tissues, anagenesis and katagenesis. The role of the anagenetic energies is to raise the inferior energies to their own ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... defiance of it. So for a thousand years gravitation sees the tree rise higher and higher, till the great lesson is taught that it is a weakling compared with the power of life. There is not a place where one can put his finger that there are not a dozen forces in full play, every one of which is plastic, elastic, and ready to yield to any force that is higher. So the tree stands, not mere lumber and cordwood, or an obstacle to be gotten rid of by fire, but an embodiment of life unexhausted for a thousand years. The fairy-fingered ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... political group; and he joined L'Institut Canadien already far advanced in the struggle with the church which was later to result in open warfare. Those two acts revealed his political affiliations and fixed the environment in which he was to move during the plastic twenties. Ten years had passed since a group of ardent young men, infected with the principles and enthusiasm of 1848, of which Papineau returning from exile in Paris was the apostle, had stormed the constituencies of Lower Canada ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... of religious and philosophic speculation. The result of this meeting marks a glorious page in the annals of human thought. Among the monuments of a great historic past, the speculative spirit of the East made love to the plastic beauty of the West, until, at last, they were united in happy union. Hellenic taste and sense of beauty and Semitic speculation not only evolved side by side in Egypt but mixed and commingled; their thoughts were intertwined and interwoven, giving rise to a new intellectual movement, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... accordance with this discipline in heroic common sense, was the influence of those great Romans, whose thoughts and lives were my daily food during those plastic years. The genius of Rome displayed itself in Character, and scarcely needed an occasional wave of the torch of thought to show its lineaments, so marble strong they gleamed in every light. Who, that has ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... starch-gum (or dextrine, as it is called) in its properties, which is very easily converted into sugar. The starch of barley approaches in many properties to cellulose, and is, therefore, less digestible. Oats are particularly rich in plastic substances; Scotch oats are richer than those grown in England or in Germany. This kind of grain contains in its ashes, after deduction of the silica of the husks, very nearly the same ingredients as are found ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... puzzle could be found, the answer to the question that was burning through his mind. Shells were made of steel and chemicals. The tools that made them were also made of steel. Not manganese. Not copper. Not electron relays, nor plastic, nor liquid ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... will be content with our Asa San," he said; "the character is still plastic. In England it is different; but in France and in Japan we say it is the husband who must make the character of his wife. She is the plain white paper; let him take his brush and write on it what he will. Asa San is a ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... to see brought together the work of so many really great sculptors. America has a very large number of talented men expressing themselves on the plastic side - and ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... double marriage, and for that purpose gave directions to Lord Chatham, Lord Warwick, and Dr. Wilmot that the real parentage of the child should be concealed, and that it should be re-baptised as the daughter of Robert Wilmot, whose wife had just been confined. The plastic divine consented to rob the infant temporarily of its birthright but at the same time required that all the proceedings should be certified by the king and other persons as witnesses, in order that at a future time she should be replaced ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... Jurassic Period of pictures, so to speak, this little group of pathfinders tracking under the chieftainship of Mr. Lobel into almost uncharted wilds of artistic endeavor had dabbled in slap-stick one reelers featuring the plastic pie and the treacherous seltzer siphon, also the trick staircase, the educated mustache and the ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... disposition. While, therefore, the conscience must continue to give the same old everlasting testimony as before, and never reverse its judgments in the least, the affections and will, the pliant, elastic, plastic part of man, the seat of vitality, of emotion, the seat of character, the fountain out of which proceed the evil thoughts or the good thoughts,—this executive, emotive, responsible part of man, must be reversed, converted, radically changed into ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... and daubed with bright colours, yet, by a vivacity of attitude and gesture which the mystery of their setting enhanced, conveyed a thrilling impression of the sacred scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the sculptured image is still a mysterious half-sentient thing, denizen of some strange borderland between art and life. It seemed to him, as he gazed through the chapel gratings, that those long-distant episodes of the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... This was the variable beam headlight that could cut a day-bright swath of light through night, fog, rain or snow and could be varied in intensity, width and elevation. Immediately above the headlight strip were two red-black plastic panels which when lighted, sent out a flashing red emergency signal that could be seen for miles. Similar emergency lights and back-up white light strips adorned Beulah's stern. Her bow rounded down like an old-time tank and blended into the track assembly of her dual propulsion ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... who forms the habit of wearing it may some day find his lower lip grown permanently projected beyond the upper, so that he can't get it back, and must go through life looking like the King of Spain. This was once foretold as a probable culmination of Florence Atwater's still plastic profile, if Florence didn't change her way of thinking; and upon Florence's remarking dreamily that the King of Spain was an awf'ly han'some man, her mother retorted: "But not for a girl!" She meant, of course, that a girl ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... been the meaning of his sudden incursion. The more Connie thought of it, the more it thrilled her. It was both her charm and her weakness, at this moment, that she was so plastic, so responsive both for good and evil. She said to herself that she was fortunate to have such a friend; and she was conscious of a new and eager wish to win his praise, ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... been capable of expressing more than displeasure, it would have done so, but he was of no plastic build, mind or body, and "displeasure" was the nearest he could get to ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... composers. "Women of genius are men," said the De Goncourts. A Great Musician is a paradox, a miracle, a multiple-sided man—stern, firm, selfish, proud and unyielding; yet sensuous as the ether, tender as a woman, innocent as a child, and as plastic as potters' clay. And with most of them, let us frankly admit it, the hand of the Potter shook. When people write about musicians, they seldom write moderately. The man is either a selfish rogue or an angel of light—it all depends upon your point of view. And the curious part is, both ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... adorned with emblematic devices and draped with the banners of the seventeen provinces, he was to perform the brief journey; while the third had been filled by the inevitable rhetoric societies, with all the wonders of their dramatic and plastic ingenuity. Rarely had such a complication of vices and virtues, of crushed dragons, victorious archangels, broken fetters, and resurgent nationalities, been seen before, within the limits of a single canal boat. The affection was, however, sincere, and the spirit noble, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... (we here adopt Mr. Vaux's words) is the golden age of Greek art. During this period arose a spirit of sculpture which combined grace and majesty in the happiest manner, and by emancipating the plastic art from the fetters of antique stiffness, attained, under the direction of Pericles, and by the hand of Phidias, its culminating point. It is curious to remark the gradual progress of the arts; for it is clear that it was slowly and not per saltum ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... box on the desk top and released the lid. Like a jack-in-the-box, two small white plastic spheres popped out and began chasing each other about in the air six inches above the box. Presently a third sphere rose up from the ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... the other hand, can only be worked "intensively." Nothing requires more care and attention. To begin with, the aspect of the vine garden influences the quality of the wine immensely. Then there is the soil. The best is the plastic clay (nyirok), which appears to be the product of the direct chemical decomposition of volcanic rock. This clay absorbs water but very slowly, and is, in short, the most favourable to the growth of the vine. As the vines are mostly on the steep hillsides, low walls are ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... prey-cast his eyes down, raised them again to take in something fresh, and after a long gaze looked down again while his fingers and nails moved over the surface of the wax-figure, sinking into the plastic material, applying new pieces to apparently complete portions, removing others with a decided nip and rounding them off with bewildering rapidity to use them ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... should take it into his head to attach any importance to the negation of his birth? A curse upon the folly of our nurses and teachers, who fill our imaginations with frightful tales, and impress fearful images of punishment upon the plastic brain of childhood, so that involuntary shudders shake the limbs of the man with icy fear, arrest his boldest resolutions, and chain his awakening reason in the fetters of superstitious darkness. Murder! What a ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... by asserting that its mammaliferous contents may be somewhat older than itself! The limestone existed, he holds, as but a mere unformed pulp at the time the intertropical animals came floating northwards: they sank into it; the gasses evolved during putrefaction blew up the plastic lime above them into a great oblong bubble, somewhat as a glass-blower blows up a bottle; and hence the Kirkdale cavern, with its gnawed bones and its amazing number of teeth. And certainly a geologic argument of this ingenious character has one signal advantage,—it is in ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... however, that the field of English slang verse and canting song, though not altogether barren, has yet small claim to the idiomatic and plastic treatment that obtains in many an Argot- song and Germania-romance; in truth, with a few notable exceptions, there is little in the present collection ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... they should champion the weak in their own community. We need a power of renewal in our American communities that will carry us across the coming social transition, and social Christianity can supply it by directing the plastic force of the old faith of our fathers to the new ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... of the decadence induced them to take possession of the enormous block of primeval stone of which this second sarcophagus was made, the art of sculpture had already degenerated; all that it could accomplish was to impart to this mass of rock more of an architectural than a plastic shape. The representations with which the sarcophagus is adorned or disfigured, as the case may be, if met with elsewhere would scarcely attract our attention. On the sides are festoons enclosing groups of winged boys gathering grapes; ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... still look on specimens of their method of printing. Upon a revolving roller they engraved, in cuneiform letters, their records, and, running this over plastic clay formed into blocks, produced ineffaceable proofs. From their tile-libraries we are still to reap a literary and historical harvest. They were not without some knowledge of optics. The convex lens found at Nimroud shows that ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... mysteries. The occurrence of an event out of the line of common causation, the advent of a person not plastic to the common moulds of society, causes a great commotion in this little ant-hill of ours. There is perplexity, bewilderment, a running hither and thither, until the foreign substance is assigned a place in the ranks; and if there be no rank to which it can be ascertained ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... period of life beyond which the plastic mind of man becomes incapable of acquiring any new impressions. He merely elaborates and displays the stores he has garnered up in his youth. There are indeed some rare exceptions to the rule; but few, very few, can learn a language after the age of forty. 'Tis true that Cowper did not commence ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... persistently. Herein lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... days I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of my generation. I was a dweller under roofs: the gull of that which we call civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic arts; a cit; and a prop of restaurants. I had a comrade in those days, somewhat of an outsider, though he moved in the company of artists, and a man famous in our small world for gallantry, knee breeches, and dry and pregnant sayings. He, looking on the long meals and ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... over the mantel Natalie's portrait still surveyed the room with its delicate complacence. He looked up at it. Yes, Natalie had been right, he was not the sort to make a woman happy. There were plenty of men, young men, men still plastic, men who had not known shipwreck, and some such man Audrey would ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... events, which, though it may be very incongruous and absurdly impossible from a waking point of view, nevertheless makes a single object for the dreamer's internal vision, and has a certain degree of artistic unity. This plastic force, which selects and binds together our unconnected dream-images, has frequently been referred to as a mysterious spiritual faculty, under the name of "creative fancy." Thus Cudworth remarks, in his Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality: "That dreams are many times begotten ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... stories that are known to human history, the love story of Antony and Cleopatra has been for nineteen centuries the most remarkable. It has tasked the resources of the plastic and the graphic arts. It has been made the theme of poets and of prose narrators. It has appeared and reappeared in a thousand forms, and it appeals as much to the imagination to-day as it did when Antony deserted his almost ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... years because of our orbital position. The servos themselves were beautiful pieces of machinery and just about as close as science had come so far to producing the pure android. Every one of them was plastic hand-molded and of course they were equipped with rationaloid circuits. They had to be to ferry those big cargoes back and forth from the rock belt to Frisco. As rationaloids, Minor Planets had to ...
— The Love of Frank Nineteen • David Carpenter Knight
... of historians and critics, Oulibischeff, sums up the place of Cherubini in musical art in these words: "If on the one hand Gluck's calm and plastic grandeur, and on the other the tender and voluptuous charm of the melodies of Piccini and Zacchini, had suited the circumstances of a state of society sunk in luxury and nourished with classical exhibitions, this could not satisfy a society shaken to the very foundations ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... his double marriage, and for that purpose gave directions to Lord Chatham, Lord Warwick, and Dr. Wilmot that the real parentage of the child should be concealed, and that it should be re-baptised as the daughter of Robert Wilmot, whose wife had just been confined. The plastic divine consented to rob the infant temporarily of its birthright but at the same time required that all the proceedings should be certified by the king and other persons as witnesses, in order that at a future time she should be replaced ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... the trading instinct, the knowledge and sense of the real value of any article. Without it a man need not trouble to enter business at all, but if he possesses it even in a rudimentary form he can cultivate it in the early days when the mind is still plastic, until it develops beyond all recognition. When I was a boy I knew the value in exchange of every marble in my village, and this practice of valuing became a subconscious habit until, so long as I remained in business, I always had an intuitive ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... facts, imagination concerning them, reflexions upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naive, and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... way. The stingaree poses for his picture. The picture is used as a model for making a kite, probably of black plastic. The kite gets flown in ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... we repeat, is expressing mental phenomena by the play of the physical organs. It is the translation, the plastic form, the language of human nature. But man, the image of God, presents himself to us in three phases: the sensitive, intellectual and moral. Man feels, thinks and loves. He is en rapport with the physical ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... grasp of the law, and what had happened to them might happen to most of us. They were essentially men of sound moral stamina, though wearing the prison garb. Then came the largest class, formed of individuals possessing no strong bias, moral or immoral, plastic to the touch of circumstances, which could mould them into either good or evil members of society. Thirdly came a class—happily not a large one—whom no kindness could conciliate and no discipline tame. They were sent into this world labelled 'incorrigible', wickedness ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... nervous temperament, or whose development up to this point has been accompanied by symptoms of nervous disorder, be sent to a boarding-school?" So long as the child remains at home the home environment is the force which alone is concerned in moulding his character. We have seen how plastic the young child is, how imitative, how suggestible, how prone to form habits good or bad. The diversity of type shown by the homes is reflected in the diversity of character and conduct exhibited by the children. The home is the culture medium, and in no two homes is its composition ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... led back from Babylon to the Black Sea shore; the ancestresses of many a man who conquered the East in Alexander's host, and fought with Porus in the far Punjab. And were these women mere dolls? These men mere gladiators? Were they not the parents of philosophy, science, poetry, the plastic arts? We talk of education now. Are we more educated than were the ancient Greeks? Do we know anything about education, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic, and I may say moral likewise—religious education, of course, in our sense of the word, they had none—but do we know anything about ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... babe of three or four years learn in Sabbath-school? sneers the critic. Not much, I grant you, of justification by Faith, or Effectual Calling; but certain elementary precepts can be impressed upon the mind while it is still in a plastic condition that never can be wholly obliterated, come what may in after life. Prime among these elementary precepts is this: "Always ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... the peritoneum in fatal cases varied much. In some a dry peritonitis, or one in which a considerable quantity of slightly turbid fluid was effused, was found. In others a rapid suppurative process, accompanied by the effusion of large quantities of plastic lymph, was met with. My experience suggested that the latter condition was the result of free infection from multiple wounds of the gut, the former the accompaniment of single wounds. Hence I should ascribe the difference mainly to the extent ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... distance by vigorous words of authority and also by a lash of the whip. This perhaps sounds strange to you, dear reader, but you must in truth understand that even in the senseless sphere, thought alone is not efficacious without a certain plastic expression in shape of a visible, audible or palpable form. If this spectral company becomes too much for me I must loudly command them, even shout at them, "begone," and if that does no good I must wish for ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... untrammeled by any sense of the limitations of material, his quick imagination peoples his world with creatures of his fancy, which to him are more real than the things he is able actually to see and touch. For him the external world is fluid and plastic, to be moulded into forms at will in obedience to his creative desire. In the tiny bundle of rags which mother-love clasps tight to her heart, a little girl sees only the loveliest of babies; and a small boy with his stick of lath and ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... and sheltered by man from this great contamination. It is not necessary to the proper influence and to the legitimate power of woman. A cultivated, enlightened, delicate, refined, and virtuous woman at the family altar is the persuasive and at the same time plastic power that sways and fashions the principles and character of her children, and thus makes her impress upon the future men of America, the Phocians, the Timoleons, the Washingtons, who are the honor of the race, and whose ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... not correspond to itself. So, though sometimes the two may be set against each other, yet at bottom, and in reality, they are one, and the 'anger' is but a mode in which the 'favour' manifests itself. God's love is plastic, and if thrown back upon itself, grieved and wounded and rejected, becomes the 'anger' which ignorant men sometimes seem to think it contradicts. There is no more antagonism between these two ideas when they are applied ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... during the plastic years of boyhood and youth, went to shape the outlook of the future Chief Justice high rank must be accorded his pioneer life. It is not merely that the spirit of the frontier, with its independence of ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... too apt to be satisfied with correct drawing and harmony of colors; harmony and keeping of plastic forms; harmony of tones; harmony of thoughts in relation to one another; without considering that to these necessary harmonies two more, primarily essential, must be added: harmony of thought with the eternal, with the divine attributes of truth, infinity, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that of Jesus, into which a supernatural influx of light and life had descended. They are not more wonderful than nature; they are not so wonderful as the change of heart by which a bad man becomes a good man. But they will find their proper place as evidence how plastic the lower laws are to the influence ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... their breakfast. Over the vast forest a brilliant sun was rising and here the leaves and grass were not burned much by summer heat. It looked fresh and green, and the wind sang pleasantly through its cool shadows. It appealed to Robert. With his plastic nature he was all for the town when he was in town, and now in the forest he ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... pointed and ungracious attack on executive policy. It must therefore be softened, modified, qualified, made to sound less harsh to the ears of men in power, and to assume a plausible, polished, inoffensive character. It was accordingly put into the plastic hands of friends of the executive to be moulded and fashioned, so that it might have the effect of ridding the country of the obnoxious order, and yet not appear to question executive infallibility. All this did not answer. The late President is not a man to be satisfied with soft ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... and stood behind the puddlers for a little while, and then through the rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black, half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between the wheels, "Come on," said Horrocks in Raut's ear; and they went and peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyeres, and saw the tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left one eye blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... found in their most primitive and undeveloped forms in the mounds dotted over the southern districts of Mesopotamia, in company with the earliest signs of those types which are especially characteristic of the architecture, ornamentation, and plastic figuration ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... scientist nodded. Tomasite, a revolutionary plastic which Mr. Swift had developed, possessed amazing insulating properties against both heat and radiation. One of its secret ingredients came from certain plants found only in Far Eastern waters. Mr. Swift hoped ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... yard wastes to landfills. These days householders may be offered incentives (or threatened with penalties) by their municipalities to separate organic, compostable garbage from paper, from glass, from metal or from plastic. Individuals who pay for trash pickup by volume are finding that they can save considerable amounts of money by recycling their own organic ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... Hotel in Phoenix. You'll go there and, on your first evening, retire early. Alone, I need hardly add. We'll be waiting for you in your room. There'll be a very carefully prepared duplicate—surgical disguise, plastic fingerprinting tips, fully educated in your habits, tastes, and mannerisms. He'll stay behind and carry out your vacation while we smuggle you away. A similar exchange will be affected when you return, you'll ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... much for decency," and to herself he seemed "infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him. On the whole therefore she was well pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of the plastic stuff in which to riot. Afterwards, in his days of sorrow in London, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at Rome would yield him gold enough to make the brightness ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... different from other climbing trees and plants, but the way the Matador sets about it is peculiar and produces certainly a disagreeable impression. It springs up close to the tree on which it intends to fix itself, and the wood of its stem grows by spreading itself like a plastic mould over one side of the trunk of its supporter. It then puts forth, from each side, an armlike branch, which grows rapidly, and looks as though a stream of sap were flowing and hardening as it went. This adheres closely to the trunk of the ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... to perceive that my fairy was a statuette in coloured wax, modeled with much taste and spirit by some novice hand. But the phenomenon, even thus reduced by a rational explanation, did not cease to excite my surprise. How, and by whom, had the Lady of the Cosmography been enabled to assume plastic existence? That was what remained ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... good, or evil hour, To show to man the empire of thy power, If fortune, at thy wild impetuous sway, The blossoms of my fame must drop away, Then was the time the obedient plant to strain When life was warm in every vigorous vein, To mould young nature to thy plastic skill, And bend my pliant boyhood to thy will. So might I hope applauding crowds to hear, Catch the quick smile, and HIS attentive ear. But ah! for what has thou reserv'd my age? Say, how can I expect the approving stage; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... still to contemplate the most beautiful piece of mechanism, of nature's plastic hand, in the formation of man, for whose convenience and use, all things else seem created. A careless observer looks upon man, and sees in the general outline a beautiful piece of mechanism, moving in grace and dignity, ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... spirit of observation is naturally high at the Salon, quickened by a thousand artful or artless appeals, but it need have put forth no great intensity to take in the characters I mention. As a solicitation of the eye on definite grounds these visitors too constituted a successful plastic fact; and even the most superficial observer would have marked them as products of an insular neighbourhood, representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on the recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a holiday—Christmas ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... at a fete appeared as Joan of Arc, armed cap-a-pie, riding a snow-white stallion. Romney, the portrait-painter, spending a week-end with Sir Henry, was struck with the picturesque beauty of the child and painted her as Diana. Romney was impressed with the plastic beauty of the girl, her downcast eyes, her silent ways, her responsive manner, and he begged Sir Harry to allow her to go to London ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... that you will be content with our Asa San," he said; "the character is still plastic. In England it is different; but in France and in Japan we say it is the husband who must make the character of his wife. She is the plain white paper; let him take his brush and write on it what he will. Asa San is a very sweet girl. She ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... a replica of the ship in plastic was less than a two-hour job. The materials were at hand; a special foam plastic is used as insulation from the chill of the lunar substrata. The foam plastic was impregnated with ammonium nitrate and foamed up with pure oxygen; since it is catalyst-setting, ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... older generation to a younger, and the younger that generation is the less it is entrusted with opportunity to make its own first hand inquiries. That is, the lower schools which deal with a generation at its most plastic time, furnish the higher schools with minds inured to the pressure of accepting subject matter ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... illustrates Sir Thomas's peculiar mysticism. The external world was not to him the embodiment of invariable forces, and therefore capable of revealing a general law in a special instance; but rather a system of symbols, signatures of the Plastic Nature, to which mysterious truths were arbitrarily annexed. A Pythagorean doctrine of numbers was therefore congenial to his mind. He ransacks heaven and earth, he turns over all his stores of botanical knowledge, he searches all sacred and profane literature to discover anything ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... painters are thus, satisfying with magnificent models an impetuosity of temperament which does not mount from the senses to the heart. Accustomed to regard the human form from a certain point, they find in beauty, which would appear to us simply animal, principles of plastic emotion which at times suffice for their amorous requirements. They are only more deeply touched by it, when to that rather coarse intoxication is joined, in the woman who inspires them, the refined graces of mind, the delicacy of elegance and the subtleties ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... affinities and inner consciences:—whereas the old idea of education was that the baby material of you, however accidentally or inevitably born, was at least to be by external force, and ancestral knowledge, bred; and treated by its Fathers and Tutors as a plastic vase, to be shaped or mannered as they chose, not as it chose, and filled, when its form was well finished and baked, with sweetness of sound doctrine, as with Hybla ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... to the finest perceptions and emotions. The Greek has the same perceptive, emotional temperament as the Celt; but he adds to this temperament the sense of MEASURE; hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in which the Celtic genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual straining after mere emotion, has accomplished nothing. In the comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches, crosiers, relic-cases, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... more perfect method than this. The eye lens is plastic, like a piece of india-rubber. Its edges are attached to ligaments (L L), which pull outwards and tend to flatten the curve of its surfaces. The normal focus is for distant objects. When we read a book the eye adapts itself to the work. The ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... early days I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of my generation. I was a dweller under roofs: the gull of that which we call civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic arts; a cit; and a prop of restaurants. I had a comrade in those days, somewhat of an outsider, though he moved in the company of artists, and a man famous in our small world for gallantry, knee breeches, and dry and pregnant ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... look back at the record of the lives of artists to find what manner of men as a rule they were, we shall find that, in contradistinction to poets and musicians, they were pre-eminent as men of the world. Skill in plastic art seems a final gift imparted to men very highly constituted. It steals them entirely away from other aims, but exists side by side with, while yet it transcends the ability to achieve remarkable performances in dissimilar directions. Perhaps it is because, of all men, the true artist regards ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... what shall we say when we reflect that from hence have sprung, directly or indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human intellect; that from hence were the vast accomplishments and the brilliant fancy of Cicero, the withering fire of Juvenal, the plastic imagination of Dante, the humour of Cervantes, the comprehension of Bacon, the wit of Butler, the supreme and ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... buttons and a printed chip of plastic extruded from a slot on the desk top. "Your fingerprint, please?" He pressed my finger into the still-soft surface of the plastic, indelibly recording the print; waited a moment for it to harden, ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power—On Pedantry and pedantic expressions— Advice to young authors respecting publication—Various anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress of his ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... perceives the inmost. Hence she becomes, as it were, the soul of his thought; she is the will and he the intellectual principle; she is governed and guided by him, while he in all things is modified by her will, and scarce recognises his own crude thought in her plastic feminine representation of it; hence he thinks oftentimes that he acts from her wisdom, forgetting that she has no ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... But there is a dignity in mere perpetuity, a strength in the narrowest affinities. This dignity and strength were theirs. They are still vital in our rural population. Occasionally something fine is their result; an aboriginal reappears to prove the plastic powers ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... plastic objects, carved in stone or ivory, cast or beaten in metals (gold, silver, copper and bronze), or modelled in clay, faience, paste, &c. Very little trace has yet been found of large free sculpture, but many examples exist of sculptors' ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... strange pranks with snow; snow is the most plastic medium it has to mould into images and symbols of its moods. Here one of these promontories would slope down, and the very next one would slope upward as it advanced across the open space. In every case there had been two walls, as it were, of furious blow, and between the two a lane of comparative ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... hundreds of thousands of layers of crystallized plastic came a reddish, three-dimensional landscape, as if viewed from a height. Orange dust swirled across a gaunt, clawed plain under a transparent pink haze. A feeling as of sub-visual vibration, emanating from the ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... hung up the suit he had taken off, and sealed his shirt, socks and underwear in a laundry envelope bearing his name and identity-number, tossing this into one of the wire baskets provided for the purpose. Then, naked except for the plastic identity disk around his neck, he went over to the desk, turned in his locker key, and passed ...
— The Mercenaries • Henry Beam Piper
... long ago, and there should then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure or to alleviate; so that we are left to infer that the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... must have felt the pain of erasing some happy line, some striking stanza, which, however excellent in itself, did not exactly suit the place for which it was destined. How curiously does an author mould and remould the plastic verse in order to fit in the favourite thought; and when he finds that he cannot introduce it, as Corporal Trim says, any how, with what reluctance does he at last reject the intractable, but still cherished offspring of his brain! Mr. Tennyson manages this delicate matter in a new ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... of the Germanic tribal organizations. Military type of society on the Continent. Old Aryan self-government happily preserved in England. Strategic position of England favourable to the early elimination of warfare from her soil. Hence the exceptionally normal and plastic political development of the English race. Significant coincidence of the discovery of America with the beginnings of the Protestant revolt against the asiaticizing tendency. Significance of the struggle between Spain, France, and England for ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... the pictorial art holds equally true of the plastic art. As Prof. Veblin of the University of Chicago has scathingly declared, our ideals of the beautiful are so mingled with worship of expense that few of us can see the genuine beauty in any object apart from its expensiveness. For this reason as well ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... Cuba, but was educated and has resided in France. He attracted notice among the Parnassiens by the degree of perfection with which he rendered in words the element of plastic beauty and the rare finish and precision of his style. He has used almost exclusively the form of the sonnet, to which he has given a new ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... however, it receives certain impressions before birth from the mother's thoughts: an influence capable either of forwarding or hindering its work. The ancient Greeks were well acquainted with this fact when they assisted Nature to create beautiful forms by placing in the mother's room statues of rare plastic perfection, and removing from her sight every suggestion of ugliness. More than this; certain intense emotions of the pregnant woman are capable of momentarily effacing the image of the model which the builder has to reproduce, and replacing certain of ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... "Confessions":[106] "Formerly I felt little affection for Moses, probably because the Hellenic spirit was dominant within me, and I could not pardon the Jewish lawgiver for his intolerance of images, and every sort of plastic representation. I failed to see that despite his hostile attitude to art, Moses was himself a great artist, gifted with the true artist's spirit. Only in him, as in his Egyptian neighbors, the artistic instinct was exercised solely upon the colossal ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... denied its value. Gradually I perceived that only as a man grew deeper and broader could he wear the coat and submit to the etiquette and obey the laws which society demands. Now I feel that no new order is demanded, but that the universe is plastic to the ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... you; how you shaped coming out depended upon what was hidden in the core of you. You could not in any case be the same as your father before you; education in a new country is too powerful a stimulant for that, working upon material too plastic and too hypothetical; it is not yet a normal force, with an operation to be reckoned on with confidence. It is indeed the touchstone for character in a new people, for character acquired as apart from that inherited; it sometimes reveals surprises. Neither Lorne ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the features of his mother he reads her mood. But he very early becomes quiet and develops for himself, "out of unconscious gesticulation, the gesture language, which at first is not conventional, nay, is not in the strict sense quite a sign-language, but a mimetic-plastic representation of the influences experienced from the external world," since the deaf-mute imitates movements perceived, and the attitude of persons and the position of objects. Upon this pantomime alone rests the possibility of coming to an understanding, within a certain range, with ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... accomplished of historians and critics, Oulibischeff, sums up the place of Cherubini in musical art in these words: "If on the one hand Gluck's calm and plastic grandeur, and on the other the tender and voluptuous charm of the melodies of Piccini and Zacchini, had suited the circumstances of a state of society sunk in luxury and nourished with classical exhibitions, this could not satisfy a society shaken to the very foundations of its faith ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... that our lines had fallen in anything but pleasant places. The flying years, with their changes and anxieties, like the constant dripping of water on a stone, have worn off the rough edges that wounded and worried during their progress, and only the sunny spots, burned in the plastic ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... see Miss Halkett was gratified. You know my taste was formed in France; I agree with Captain Beauchamp in his more than admiration of Frenchwomen; ours, though more accomplished, are colder and less plastic. But Miss Halkett is surpassingly beautiful, very amiable, very generous, a perfect friend. She is our country at its best. Probably she is shy of speaking French; she frequently puts the Italian accent. Madame de Rouaillout ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... any real sense of the term, and which could have but the most superficial influence upon their future conduct. But, worst of all, he permitted bad and inadequate habits to be developed at the most critical and plastic period of life. His pupils had followed the lines of least effort, just as he had followed the lines of least effort. The result was a well-established prejudice against everything that was not superficially ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... be really in love with Dom Manuel. But there was no doing anything with his obstinacy and his incomprehensible notions, Alianora had found, and so she set about disposing of herself and of the future through more plastic means. Her methods were altered perforce, but her aim remained unchanged: and she still intended to get everything she desired (which included Manuel) as soon as she and the King of England had settled down to some sensible way ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... before her eyes, who knows what plans for domestic reform might have taken shape in the girl's plastic brain? Emeline had never seen one example of real affection and cooperation between mother and daughters, of work quickly and skilfully done and forgotten, of a clean bright house and a blossoming garden; she had never heard a theory otherwise than that she was ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... footwear; wood pulp, paper, and cork; metals and metalworking; oil refining; chemicals; fish canning; rubber and plastic products; ceramics; electronics and communications equipment; rail transportation equipment; aerospace equipment; ship construction ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... one great city is as another—commercial travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... over his staff,—and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler's door. The Main Street is still youthful; the coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of fourscore, yet shall retain a sort ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... horrible, whom Jove from heav'n Yet threatens, when his mutt'ring thunder rolls. Of one already I descried the face, Shoulders, and breast, and of the belly huge Great part, and both arms down along his ribs. All-teeming nature, when her plastic hand Left framing of these monsters, did display Past doubt her wisdom, taking from mad War Such slaves to do his bidding; and if she Repent her not of th' elephant and whale, Who ponders well confesses her therein ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Algonkin, the Aztec, and the Qquichua, attests how sedulously their resources have been cultivated. Father Olmos, in his grammar of the Aztec, gives many examples of twenty and thirty synonymous expressions, all in current use in his day. A dictionary, in my possession, of the Maya, one of the least plastic of American tongues, gives over thirty thousand words, and scarcely a hundred ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... earthen vessels the only attempts at domestic art; and where later but an individual here and there was required to design a king's palace or a god's temple or to ornament it with statues or paintings, today a mighty army of men, a million strong, is employed in producing plastic art alone, both high and low, from the traceries on wall-paper and the illustrations in penny journals, to the production of the pictures and statues which adorn the national collections, and a mighty new field of ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... of brickwork is that it can be thrown into almost any shape. It is in this respect almost like a plastic material, and this peculiarity it owes chiefly to the very small size of each brick as compared with the large masses of the brickwork of most buildings. Stone is far less easily dealt with than brick in this respect. Think for a moment of the great variety of walls, footings, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... Great ordained that the Frankish songs should be collected and written down makes a neat pendant to the renaissance art of Aachen. People who begin to collect have lost the first fury of creation. The change that came over plastic art in France towards the end of the twelfth century is reflected in the accomplished triviality of Chretien de Troyes. The eleventh century had produced the Chanson de Roland, a poem as grand and simple ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... In her childhood and girlhood, Leslie had gone out to school, and although always somewhat marked and individual in character, she had companions, friends, sufficient sympathy and intercourse for an independent, buoyant nature at the most plastic period of its existence. This stage of life was but lately left behind; Leslie had not long learnt that now she was removed from classes and masters, and must in a great measure confine her acquaintances to those who returned her visits ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... as well as fame. Think of that subtle, all-embracing, plastic, mysterious, irresistible thing called public opinion, the god of this lower world, and consider what a State, or a cluster of States, of marked and acknowledged literary and intellectual lead might do to color and shape that opinion to ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... gives to the people concrete, pictorial images to quicken their faith. How ritual grew in mediaeval times into full-fledged drama we shall see in the next chapter; here let us consider that cult of the Christ Child in which the scene of Bethlehem is represented not by living actors but in plastic art, often most ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... physiologically. The rest assume his classification without reserve, and work from the axiom that heat-making, carbonaceous and non-nitrogenous foods (e.g. fat and sugars), necessary to support life in the arctic and polar regions, must be exchanged for the tissue-making, plastic or nitrogenous (vegetables), as we approach the equator. They are right as far as the southern temperates, their sole field of observation; they greatly err in all except the hot, dry parts of the tropics. Why, a Hindoo will drink at a sitting ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the new and more expansive evolutionary views came mainly from the museum and laboratory type of naturalists in London and Paris, the official exponents of dry bones, who knew nature only through books and preserved specimens, or through her impoverished and far less plastic developments in northern lands. The battle of organic evolution has been waged by the Darwins, the Huxleys, and the Muellers on the one hand, against the Cuviers, the Owens, and the Virchows ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... been mine. And the woman I had loved, and who perhaps loved me in return—I could forget her too. A daughter of civilization and of that artificial life, she could never experience such feelings as these and return to nature as I was doing. For women, though within narrow limits more plastic than men, are yet without that larger adaptiveness which can take us back to the sources of life, which they have left eternally behind. Better, far better for both of us that she should wait through ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... lectures, sermons, addresses prepared for oral delivery: (d) dramatic or dramatico-musical compositions; (c) musical compositions; (f) maps; (g) works of art; models or designs for works of art; (h) reproductions of a work of art; (i) drawings or plastic works of a scientific or technical character: (j) photographs; (k) prints and ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of address to the public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a vase. It ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... other they are in the neutral state. We may suppose that the presence of this charge brings about modifications as extensive as one pleases in the chemical properties of the atom. Thus the hypothesis will be removed from all discussion of a chemical order, since it will have been made plastic enough beforehand to adapt itself to all the known facts; and if we object that sodium cannot subsist in water because it instantaneously decomposes the latter, the answer is simply that the sodium ion does not decompose water ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... this short sketch of my system by pointing out the intimate relations which exist between movements in time and movements in space, between rhythms in sound and rhythm in the body, between Music and Plastic Expression. ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... theory, of a demi-man. Or it might have been that of an old Irish gentleman, gentle in truth;—in the formative stage of society it is the monster that leaves traces of himself, as in an old geologic period the huge reptile left his tracks in the plastic earth, which afterward ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the sport of seeming chance, The plastic shapes of circumstance, What might have been we fondly guess, If earlier ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... greatly in appearance, organization and life-history. They are so very plastic that they can adapt themselves readily to their various hosts, hence we have a great variety of forms. But they all agree in certain characters; all take their food and oxygen and carry on excretory ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... of the sacrament of love and faith and sorrow that makes Christ the very life-blood of our being and doing? And has not James Marvyn also his lesson to be taught? We foresee him drawn gradually back by Mary from his recoil against Puritan formalism to a perception of how every creed is pliant and plastic to a beautiful nature, of how much charm there may be in an hereditary faith, even if ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... child an orderly sequence of development of mental traits. While these powers are in their earlier, so to speak embryonic, stages of development, they can be fostered and increased or retarded. They are still plastic. Very early in a child's life acquisitiveness shows itself; he begins to say "I," and "mine," and desires things to be his "very own." And this can be fostered so that the child will grow up a "covetous machine." Or he may be taught ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... domestic influences cannot be exaggerated. Their part in the formation of character is greater than that of all others, because they touch the powers and faculties of the child during those years in which it is most plastic. Neither the school nor the university can ever entirely counteract the effect of the home. The whole period of childhood is one in which the soul is under tutelage, and in which more is done for it by others than by itself. It can no more select its own environment than ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... Industries: small-scale consumer goods (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, soap, cigarettes, flour), processing agricultural products; ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... yet trace some phases of its secret. Its reverence for organization appears in the practice of embalming. The bodies of men and of animals seemed to it to be divine. Even vegetable organization had something sacred in it: "O holy nation," said the Roman satirist, "whose gods grow in gardens!" That plastic force of nature which appears in organic life and growth made up, in various forms, as we shall see in the proper place, the Egyptian Pantheon. The life-force of nature became divided into the three groups of ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... experienced man of the world. Though as an artist he is now held in little regard, his reputation was great in his own day,[34] and he had a reflected glory in being the friend of Winckelmann, who was reputed to have profited by his teaching in art. Under the inspiration of Oeser Goethe's interest in the plastic arts in general, which had received its first impulse at home, became a permanent preoccupation for the remainder of his life. He took regular lessons in drawing from Oeser, made acquaintance with all the collections, public and private, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... seem to hear her. He waved an impatient hand for her assistance. "Outside my experience," he muttered, "no heart-beat discernible, no breath ... yet it is indubitably alive." He depressed the soft, plastic ribs and gave the feeble ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the HABIT of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort just ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... together, and quietly saw what was to be seen. It was Miss Becky Chattesworth who involved the poor general in this hypocrisy. It was not exactly her money; it was her force of will and unflinching audacity that established her control over an easy, harmless, plastic old gentleman. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... expressions are what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib's hair, just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of primaeval art was already hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying, already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess authentic records of man's abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten epochs—an ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... The structuralizations are not so definite. If they were, evolution would not have been possible for the living stream of energy which is utilized by mind-stuff cannot be confined if it would advance to more complex integrations. Hence the products of mind in evolution are more plastic—more subtle and more changing. They are to be found in the myths and the folk-lore of ancient peoples, the poetry, dramatic art, and the language of later races. From age to age however the strivings continue ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... erratic character of the form and these spasmodic movements, could be expressed the peculiar restiveness, fitfulness, and waywardness of thought and feeling that characterise Chopin's individuality. To these unclassical qualities—for classical art is above all plastic and self-possessed—combined as they are with a high degree of refinement and delicacy, his compositions owe much of their peculiar charm. The absence of scorn distinguishes the fourth "Scherzo," Op. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... They are important solely on account of their numbers. For them the census enumerator labours; they form majorities; they crowd voting booths; they make the money; they do the ordinary work of the world. They are valuable when well officered. They are plastic matter to be shaped by a workman's hand; and are built with as bricks are built with. In the aggregate, they form public opinion; but then, in every age, public opinion is the disseminated thoughts of some half a dozen men, who ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... saying in his mellow bass. "How are you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia's approach, where woman, das ewig Weibliche, enters into conflict with fate. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... to the walls by invisible spurs at their heels, or, as is not infrequently the case, are standing or hung on nothing, as though they were graven of some bewitched magnetic stone. Here for the first time is seen, in the sculptured figures of the three great portals, the plastic forms which were to add so greatly to the Gothic architecture: male and female saints, Evangelists, and Apostles in great array, all somewhat more than life-size. Only one adverse impression is cast: that of petrifaction. The figures, almost without ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... back upon this scene as he grew older as the mere expression of a whim of dissolution, but it had made so deep an impression upon him at the time that insensibly the words sank into his plastic mind creating a superstition that refused to yield to reason. The ruby was Helene's birthstone and she was passionately fond of it. She had begged and coaxed to wear this jewel, and upon one occasion had stamped her little foot and sulked throughout the evening. He had given ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to his tacitly accepted boy-views. Sometimes in youth the mental development and conceptions of what seem desirable in life appear to make abrupt advances without apparent bodily changes. More wholesomely and more rarely at the plastic age characteristics strengthen and mind and body both gather virile capacity. When John Penhallow met his cousin on his first arrival, he was in enterprise, vigour, general good sense and normal relation to life, ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... is of the same plastic kind as his conception of character or passion. "It glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." Its movement is rapid and devious. It unites the most opposite extremes; or, as Puck says, in boasting of his own feats, "puts a girdle round about the earth ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... white clay the Chinese call kaolin, and it is to the discovery of veins of the soft white plastic material in England that the wonderful strides in our ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... that I could keep my attention fixed hour after hour on the same train of thought, go backwards and forwards along it, change and modify its gradations, just as if I were dealing with some material and plastic formation. Since that time I have become acquainted with a doctrine that teaches that thoughts are in the nature of things—that a definite thought is a formation in some tenuous medium of matter, just as a cathedral is a structure in gross matter. This ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... itself so charmingly, and at last so passionately and profoundly, in sculpture, where design, drawing, that integrity of the plastic artist, is everything, and colour almost nothing at all, shows itself in painting, where it is most characteristic, either as the work of those who were sculptors themselves, or had at least learned from them—Giotto, Orcagna, Masaccio, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... be remembered here, that though Faraday lived amid such speculations he did not rate them highly, and that he was prepared at any moment to change them or let them go. They spurred him on, but they did not hamper him. His theoretic notions were fluent; and when minds less plastic than his own attempted to render those fluxional images rigid, he rebelled. He warns Phillips moreover, that from first to last, 'he merely threw out as matter for speculation the vague impressions of his mind; for he gave nothing as the ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... of a descendant of one of the Academic Races. Other things being equal, he will take more naturally, more easily, to his books. His features will be more pliable, his voice will be more flexible, his whole nature more plastic than those of the youth with less favoring antecedents. The gift of genius is never to be reckoned upon beforehand, any more than a choice new variety of pear or peach in a seedling; it is always a surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which it springs has ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... everybody was over by the landing-stage escalators. Harkaman would have said more, but at that moment he saw half a dozen of Sesar Karvall's uniformed guardsmen run past. They were helmeted and in bullet-proofs; one of them had an auto-rifle, and the rest carried knobbed plastic truncheons. The Space Viking set ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... artistic, the plastic view, as it somehow appeared, of Pansy's innocence—her own appreciation of it being more anxiously moral. She was perhaps not the less pleased when he told her a few days later that he had communicated the fact to his daughter, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... upward. There is a growing tendency, moreover, to recognize the importance of gravitation in producing eruptions. The weight of several miles of rock is almost inconceivable, and it certainly ought to compel "potentially plastic" matter to rise through any crevice that might be newly formed. Russell, Gilbert and some other authorities regard this as the chief mechanical agent in an eruption, at least when there is a ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... and stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own. He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... hers, were fixed on the thronging streets, but, unlike hers, they reflected the restless animation, the pathetic hunger, which made each of those passing faces appear to be the plastic medium of an insatiable craving for life. Handsome, well-preserved, a little over-coloured, a little square of figure, with his look of worldly importance, of assured material success, he stood to-day, as Cyrus had stood a quarter of a century ago, as an imposing example ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... thee 'mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the beautiful South Gardens. (See p. 23.) These form an animated and effective foreground for the Exposition palaces. Except for their fountains, the gardens and the structures in them are less notable for sculpture than the central courts of the Exposition. Most of the plastic work here is purely decorative. The gardens are formal, French in style, laid out with long rectangular pools, each with a formal fountain, and each surrounded by a conventional balustrade with flower receptacles and lamp standards. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... interest do we still look on specimens of their method of printing. Upon a revolving roller they engraved, in cuneiform letters, their records, and, running this over plastic clay formed into blocks, produced ineffaceable proofs. From their tile-libraries we are still to reap a literary and historical harvest. They were not without some knowledge of optics. The convex lens found at Nimroud shows that they were not unacquainted with magnifying ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... its appearance its history in adventure; it had the grim, grave, battered look that comes only to features—whether of rock or of more plastic human mold—that have been carved by the rough ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... manner animate. Instead of Dryads presiding over trees, producing and regulating their phaenomena, every plant or animal has now a Vegetative Soul, the [Greek: Threptike phyge] of Aristotle. At a later period the Vegetative Soul has become a Plastic Force, and still later, a Vital Principle. Objects now do all that they do because it is their Essence to do so, or by reason of an inherent Virtue. Phaenomena are accounted for by supposed tendencies and propensities of the abstraction ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... beginning, the photoplay consists of a series of flat pictures in contrast to the plastic objects of the real world which surrounds us. But we may stop at once: what does it mean to say that the surroundings appear to the mind plastic and the moving pictures flat? The psychology of this difference is easily misunderstood. Of course, when ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... allow itself to be fettered to the dulness of every-day decorum, her opportunity would be lost; but if she could hold the delicate equilibrium where she stood,—self-poised, and yet swaying to the influences which must work on every soul for its highest development, plastic yet firm,—then he believed, firmly believed, that there might lie in her a power for which the world would be the ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... By the force and plastic power of my imagination, I could have turned and moulded Lady de Brantefield, with all her repulsive haughtiness, into a Clelia, or a Princess de Cleves, or something of the Richardson full-dressed ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... his wet hair plastic, and easily obtained the long, even sweep backward from the brow, lacking which no male person, unless bald, fulfilled his definition of a man of the world. But there ensued a period of vehemence and activity caused by a ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... the long power tubes of the Ceres. The lock door hung open, making an improvised landing porch fifty feet above the charred ground. Lord paused for a moment at the head of the runged landing ladder. Below him, in the clearing where the ship had come down, he saw the rows of plastic prefabs which his crew had thrown up—laboratories, sleeping quarters, a kitchen, and Ann ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... purified, sterilized, filtered air, thirty years of drinking distilled water and swallowing synthetic food tablets had changed us. The only things we weren't allergic to were the metal and plastic and synthetics of our ship, this ship. We're allergic to Earth. That's ...
— Homesick • Lyn Venable
... now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... been carried in suspension in water and deposited in geologic basins according to their specific gravity and degree of fineness (see CLAY). These deposits have been formed in all geologic epochs from the "Recent" to the "Cambrian," and they vary in hardness from the soft and plastic "alluvial" clays to the hard and rock-like shales and slates of the older formations. The alluvial and drift clays (which were alone used for brickmaking until modern times) are found near the surface, are readily worked and require little preparation, whereas the older sedimentary deposits are ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... indulged serious anxiety. Once the Hebraic shoals and snags were safely passed, both examiner and examined could disport themselves with a jaunty self-confidence born of a thorough acquaintance with the Shorter Catechism received during the plastic years ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... Sienkiewicz's psychological novels is the synthesis so seldom realized and as I have already said, the plastic beauty and abstract thoughts. He possesses also an admirable assurance of psychological analysis, a mastery in the painting of customs and characters, and the rarest and most precious faculty of animating his heroes with intense, personal life, which, ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... history of our planet shows us first an incandescent nebula dispersed over vast infinitudes of space; later this condenses into a central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets hardly yet consolidated from the plastic primordial matter; then succeed untold millenniums of slow geological formation; an earth peopled by the lowest forms of life, whether vegetable or animal; from which crude beginnings a majestic, unceasing, unhurried, forward movement brings things stage by ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Paolo loved best of all was when he could get in a corner by himself, with no one to disturb him, and build castles and things out of some abandoned clay or mortar, or wet sand if there was nothing better. The plastic material took strange shapes of beauty under his hands. It was as if life had been somehow breathed into it by his touch, and it ordered itself as none of the other boys could make it. His fingers were tipped with genius, but he did not know ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... see, it is ze expansion of coloured forms in space, combined with the co-penetration of plastic masses which ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... hoof, by its brittleness, has become chipped and ragged at the lower margin of the wall, it may perhaps be more advantageous to use, in place of the compress of tow, the huflederkitt of Rotten. This is a leather-like, dark brown paste. When warmed in hot water, or by itself, it becomes soft and plastic, and may readily be pressed to the lower surface of the foot, so as to fill in all little cracks and irregularities, and furnish a complete covering to the sole and frog, and to the bearing surface of the wall. When cold it hardens, without ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... taproot, going down into the dune. Then the thing contracted, pulling itself lower into the sand. At the same instant something thin and sharp lashed out through a fold in the skin, striking at Brion's boot and withdrawing. There was a scratch on the hard plastic, beaded with drops of ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... away his razor and went through the little door leading to the living quarters. The partition was crystal clear plastic so I could see him pulling himself along by the hand rail toward the bookcase. I knew he would presently find himself something to read ...
— The Minus Woman • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... you tell me of any plastic young botanist who would come in all there glory and no pay, though I think pay may be got if the concern is properly ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... connected with himself and family, which, though amusing from its very simplicity, afforded at the same time a certain indication that the good old grandfather whom they all loved so well, and whose benignant character had been only mellowed by age into a more plastic affection for them all, was soon to be removed from before their eyes, never again to diffuse among them that charm of domestic truth and love, and the holy influences of all those fine old virtues which ancestral integrity sheds over the heart, and transmits ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... remarkable. Every man, when he begins his reasonable life, finds certain general opinions current in the world. He is shaped by these opinions in one way or another, either directly or by reaction. If he is soft and plastic, like the majority of people, he takes the opinions that are about him for his own. If he is self-asserting and defiant, he takes the opposite of these opinions and gives to them his vehement adherence. We ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... drink, and sleep. If you are wise, you will not look upon the long period of time thus occupied in actual movement as the mere gulf dividing you from the end of your journey, but rather as one of those rare and plastic seasons of your life from which, perhaps, in after times you may love to date the moulding of your character—that is, your very identity. Once feel this, and you will soon grow happy and contented in your saddle-home. As for me and my comrade, however, in this part of our journey we often ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... answer to those who allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the "Orlando Furioso." Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... It was a heavy plastic irising door. It was locked and naturally would not respond to the whorl patterns of ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance
... every child left to his own mode of development is to make, in some plastic material, what he has seen. Trying to fashion the hills and valleys with which he is familiar excites his interest, and leads to closer observation. This may be followed by the reproduction in molder's sand, or in clay, of the forms seen in pictures or learned from description. ...
— Home Geography For Primary Grades • C. C. Long
... Suddenly the battle was done, victory easily gained. We were cheered by a gush of level sunlight. Even the dull, gray vapor became a transfigured and beautiful essence. Dull and uniform it had hung over the land; now the plastic winds quarried it, and shaped the whole mass into individuals, each with its character. To the cloud-forms modelled out of formlessness the winds gave life of motion, sunshine gave life of light, and they hastened through the lower atmosphere, or sailed lingering across the blue breadths ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... of faith," he cried, "is to give ourselves into the arms of life, to take it as it comes, to rejoice in its infinite unfoldment, the 'plastic dance of circumstance'; to behold the budding flower and the new-born suns as equal expressions of the joy of becoming. But people are weak, they love themselves, and they set themselves up as the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... it was not possible to be jealous of his host. Whatever truth there was about his past failure, he could never fascinate Sylvia. She appreciated too fully the plastic side of life; she was a romanticist, and therefore she attached immense importance to the material. (Are not all romantic heroes and heroines beautiful to look at, and always either beautifully or picturesquely dressed?) Sylvia cared far more about her own admiration ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... capital, Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric, the peristyle and fair entablature, whose harmony of form is to the eye as musical concord to the ear!—farewell to sculpture, where the pure marble mocks human flesh, and in the plastic expression of the culled excellencies of the human shape, shines forth the god!—farewell to painting, the high wrought sentiment and deep knowledge of the artists's mind in pictured canvas—to paradisaical scenes, where trees are ever vernal, and the ambrosial air rests ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... aesthetic; the yen for symmetry and balance; the love of beauty; the desire for harmony; the quest for excellence; the lure of magnificence; the search for truth. Out of these urges have arisen the pictorial and plastic arts, architecture, music, the dance, science, and philosophy, providing outlets, occupations and professions that have colored and shaped ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... none of the characteristics of the Andalusian. His lyrical genius is not only at odds with that of Southern Spain, but also with his own inclination for the plastic arts, says Blanco Garcia. "How could a Seville poet, a lover of pictorial and sculptural marvels, so withdraw from the outer form as to embrace the pure idea, with that melancholy subjectivism as common in the gloomy regions bathed by the Spree as it is unknown on the banks of the Darro and ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... statue of Nathan Hale is much less academic than the other sculptures arranged in this gallery. Compared with the high standard of American small plastic art his works are somewhat dry, though ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... preservation, and shows a young and attractive face. The male figure was doubtless sacrificed to Octavianus's command to destroy Antony's statues. We are indebted to Herr Dr. Walther, in Alexandria, for an excellent photograph of this remarkable piece of sculpture. Comparatively few other works of plastic art, in which we here include coins, that could render us familiar with our heroine's appearance, have ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the things which are most surely believed' in their day. They 'bear record of what they have seen and heard.' I know not how stronger words could have been used to prevent the notion of that plastic, growing myth which Strauss conceives to ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... otherwise a statue so imbued with true classical feeling and so correct in technical finish as that of Sigilgaita in Ravello Cathedral could never have been produced; yet the names of the artist or artists who thus anticipated the great plastic revival remain undiscovered. Portrait-busts, similar in treatment and idea to that of the so-called Sigilgaita, are to be found here and there in museums, but this effigy in remote Ravello remains unique amidst ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... wife’s sisters) of his appearance in youth. With the single exception of Tennyson, he was the most poetical-looking poet I have ever seen. And circumstances put to the best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic period of his life that he met the best people on the Continent and in England. I suspect, indeed, that after the plastic period in a man’s life is passed it is not of much use for him to come into contact with what used to be called “the great world.” To be, or to ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... not such an invariable destroyer as he is represented. If he pulls down, he likewise builds up; if he impoverishes one, he enriches another; his very dilapidations furnish matter for new works of controversy, and his rust is more precious than the most costly gilding. Under his plastic hand trifles rise into importance; the nonsense of one age becomes the wisdom of another; the levity of the wit gravitates into the learning of the pedant, and an ancient farthing moulders into infinitely more ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... in which the reaction against plastic beauty in poetry has reached such a height that it is almost vain to appeal against it. There is scarcely a single English poet of consequence in the younger school who does not treat the strings ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... food processing, medical equipment, textiles and clothing, construction materials, fertilizer, plastic products ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Dodsley, or in the rarer single editions where they occur, is again an interest of curiosity—a desire to trace the various shiftings and turnings of the mighty but unorganised genius which was soon to find its way. Next to the difficulty of inventing a conveniently plastic form seems to have been the difficulty of inventing a suitable verse. For some time the swinging or lumbering doggerel in which a tolerably good rhyme is reached by a kind of scramble through four or five feet, which are most like a very shuffling anapaest—the verse which appears in the comedies ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... life.[34] According to the latter writer, "the Semitic race is to be recognized almost entirely by negative characteristics; it has no mythology, no epic poetry, no science, no philosophy, no fiction, no plastic arts, no civil life; everywhere it shows absence of complexity; absence of combination; an exclusive sentiment of unity."[35] It is not very easy to reconcile these two views, and not very satisfactory to regard a race as "characterised ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... to suppose if the facts point that way that there are the following layers in the earth's masses:—First, the external, rigid and brittle layer; second, a layer under such temperature and pressure that it is above its plastic yield point and may be considered as a viscous fluid. The pressure must continue to increase toward the center. We do not know what is the temperature, but it is perfectly possible that at a greater depth the earth may become rigid once more if the effect of pressure in promoting solidity ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... bust of his godfather was his acknowledged masterpiece, so far, in the modelling line, which he preferred to brush or pencil. But first and foremost, literature claimed him: poetry, essays, and the despised novel—truest and most plastic medium for interpreting man to man and race to race: the most entirely obvious medium, thought Roy, for promoting the cause he had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... and mosaics, and the Roman paintings, of which unfortunately very few specimens have come down to us, show that the further developments of this form were most manifold, and indeed they form in conjunction with the Roman achievements in plastic art the highest point that this form reached in its development, a point that the Renaissance, which followed hard upon it, did not ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... Building was a soaring, chastely white structure of silicoid plastic, dazzling in the hot morning sun. It crossed Allen's mind fleetingly that everything built nowadays would long outlast the builders. That seemed right, but ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage
... smashing glass, such songs as never were sung in Carmelo before; an infernal clash of sound which mingled incongruously with the solemn mass of the surf. Chonita's eyes flashed. Even Estenega's face darkened: the traditions planted in plastic youth arose and ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... infallibly have left some trace of it in his dramatic works and that the contemporaries who mention him would not have preserved a profound silence as to his artistic talent[28]; yet Men['e]ndez y Pelayo himself speaks of Vicente's alma de artista[29] and of the plastic character which the most fantastic allegorical figures receive at his hands[30]. If we were assured that the dreamy Bernardim Ribeiro had fashioned the Belem monstrance we might well remain sceptical, but Vicente stands out from among the vaguer poets of ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... escape is once opened the stuff would soften and ooze upward. There is a growing tendency, moreover, to recognize the importance of gravitation in producing eruptions. The weight of several miles of rock is almost inconceivable, and it certainly ought to compel "potentially plastic" matter to rise through any crevice that might be newly formed. Russell, Gilbert and some other authorities regard this as the chief mechanical agent in an eruption, at least when there is a considerable outpouring ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... swelling, which is either barely visible or sometimes very decided. Everywhere else the two organs may be contiguous, or more or less near together, but they are free from any adherence whatever. If the plastic matters contained in the conjugated cells influence one another reciprocally, no notable modification in their appearance results at first. The large appendiculate cell seems, however, to yield to its consort a portion of the plasma it contains. One thing ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... particular. And yet Jenkins seemed anxious and disturbed, notwithstanding the apparent interest he displayed in the artist's work, or rather in the artist herself, in the queenly grace of that mere girl, whose style of beauty seemed to have predestined her to the study of the plastic arts. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the hammer is a gracious bearded figure, clad in Gaulish dress, and he carries also a cup. His plastic type is derived from that of the Alexandrian Serapis, ruler of the underworld, and that of Hades-Pluto.[82] His emblems, especially that of the hammer, are also those of the Pluto of the Etruscans, with whom the Celts had been in contact.[83] He is thus a Celtic Dispater, ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... former case first. After selecting her pebble, the Mason-bee of the Walls arrives with a little ball of mortar in her mandibles and lays it in a circular pad on the surface of the stone. The fore-legs and above all the mandibles, which are the mason's chief tools, work the material, which is kept plastic by the salivary fluid as this is gradually disgorged. In order to consolidate the clay, angular bits of gravel, the size of a lentil, are inserted separately, but only on the outside, in the as yet soft mass. This is the foundation of the structure. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... itself didn't look too complicated from the outside. It was a black plastic box about an inch and a half square and maybe three and a half long. On one end was a lensed opening, half an inch in diameter, and on two sides there were flat, silver-colored plates. On the top of it, there was a dial which was, say, an inch in diameter, and it was marked ...
— ...Or Your Money Back • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and stability under ordinary circumstances: to these obvious qualities we may add those which especially adapt it to the use of the chemist, namely, that it is unaffected by most acids or other fluids contained within it. At certain temperatures it becomes more ductile and plastic than wax, and may be made to assume in our hands, before the flame of a common lamp, the form of every vessel we need to contain our materials, and of every apparatus required ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... happened that M. le Clerc had inserted in his Select Library an extract from the Intellectual System of the late Mr. Cudworth, and had explained therein certain 'plastic natures' which this admirable author applied to the formation of animals. M. Bayle believed (see the continuation of Divers Thoughts on the Comet, ch. 21, art. 11) that, these natures being without cognition, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... the one Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world compelling there All new successions to the ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... languishing, will continue all the same on the express condition that the respiratory organs and the nervous filaments be respected. It is as it were the flame of the lamp, which, whether full or empty, continues to give light so long as the wick is soaked in oil. Nothing but fluids, the plastic materials held in reserve, can be distilled by the Anthrax' sucker through the unpierced skin of the grub; no part of the respiratory and nervous systems passes. As the two essential functions remain unscathed, life goes on until exhaustion is completed. On the other ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... be studied with the greatest profit. Not that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen's routine of composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play. The great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen's practice is that the play should be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become immutably fixed, either in the author's mind or on paper, before it has had time to grow and ripen. Many, if not most, of Ibsen's greatest individual inspirations came ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Athenians, Romans, Corinthians—doubtless all these and many others have transmitted their blood down to our ages, and are now living amongst us by representation. But why do we not perceive this? Why do the Athenians seem to have perished utterly? Simply for this reason: they were a plastic, yielding, unobstinate race. An Athenian lived in a port of Italy, married an Italian woman; thence threw out lines of descent to Milan, thence to Paris; and because his Attic usages were all local, epichorial, and tied to a particular mythology which has given way, or to a superstition ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... in Cuba, but was educated and has resided in France. He attracted notice among the Parnassiens by the degree of perfection with which he rendered in words the element of plastic beauty and the rare finish and precision of his style. He has used almost exclusively the form of the sonnet, to which he has given a ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... For, were a bard a bard because he's smart, Laberius' mimes were products of high art. 'Tis not enough to make your reader's face Wear a broad grin, though that too has its place: Terseness there wants, to make the thought ring clear, Nor with a crowd of words confuse the ear: There wants a plastic style, now grave, now light, Now such as bard or orator would write, And now the language of a well-bred man, Who masks his strength, and says not all he can: And pleasantry will often cut clean through Hard knots that gravity would scarce undo. On this ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd, 45 That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with aversion, which ended in assassination, the poor young orphan girl who recalled to the popular memory his slender pretensions to hereditary empire, and whom he regarded as a possible rival, if her cowed and plastic nature should ever become a tool in the hands of more powerful intriguers. But we do not hear of any attempt on Seneca's part to urge upon Nero the fulfillment of this high duty, and we find him sinking into the degraded position ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... at waist height. Inside was a hand grip. A two-foot plastic globe a quarter full of chips hung in the center. Apparatus was mounted at the top of ...
— Gambler's World • John Keith Laumer
... you will be content with our Asa San," he said; "the character is still plastic. In England it is different; but in France and in Japan we say it is the husband who must make the character of his wife. She is the plain white paper; let him take his brush and write on it what he will. Asa San is a very sweet girl. She is very easy to manage. She has a beautiful disposition. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... was over by the landing-stage escalators. Harkaman would have said more, but at that moment he saw half a dozen of Sesar Karvall's uniformed guardsmen run past. They were helmeted and in bullet-proofs; one of them had an auto-rifle, and the rest carried knobbed plastic truncheons. The Space ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... to artistic impressions, musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... in or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in anticipating a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse of him is lecturing on "rubber and rubber substitutes," to the Society of Arts—he had become manager to a great plastic-substance manufactory—and at that time, it is now known, he was a member of the Aeronautical Society, albeit he contributed nothing to the discussions of that body, preferring no doubt to mature his great conception without external assistance. And within two years of that paper ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... pulp, paper, and cork; metals and metalworking; oil refining; chemicals; fish canning; rubber and plastic products; ceramics; electronics and communications equipment; rail transportation equipment; aerospace equipment; ship ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... about books all the time. Even the man whose business it is to express himself in black and white has eyes like other people, and with them he perceives and observes the variegated visible world: its landscapes, cities, plain and cultivated men, plastic art. For him too does Nature exist; he too is moved at sight of such simple happenings as the fall of the leaves in October; he too is stirred as he gazes upon a waterfall, a mountain region, a sunlit glacier, a Dutch ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... missionaries built laboriously and well, but they were doomed to build on a failing foundation. The Indians melted away, not because civilization destroyed them, but because their own ferocity and intractable indolence made it impossible that they should exist in its presence. Either the plastic energies of a higher race or the servile pliancy of a lower one would, each in its way, have preserved them: as it was, their extinction was a foregone conclusion. As for the religion which the Jesuits taught them, however Protestants ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... some one person should have found it out long ago, and there should then be some evidence to present in relation thereto. There are cases reported in some of the older surgeries wherein an attempt has been made, in the absence of a prepuce, to restore or manufacture one by means of a plastic operation. Vidal describes such an operation,[89] but there is no reason given as to why the operation was undertaken; there is no record of any diseased condition which it was intended either to cure or to alleviate; so that we are left to infer that the person simply submitted ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... in. Now everything becomes fluid. We can redraw the map of the world. A week ago we were all quarrelling bitterly about things too little for human impatience. Now suddenly we face an epoch. This is an epoch. The world is plastic for men to do what they will with it. This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation.... And ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... has fought his way to consideration and esteem; but he bears upon him the scars of his twelve years' conflict; of the mean sorrows through which he has passed; and of the cheap indulgences he has sought relief and help from. There is nothing plastic in his nature now. His manners and habits are completely formed; and in them any further success can make little favorable change, whatever it may effect for his mind or ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... from the parent planet on a spiral orbit. Plainly, then, the moon must formerly have been nearer the earth than at present. At some very remote period it must have actually touched the earth; must, in other words, have been thrown off from the then plastic mass of the earth, as a polyp buds out from its parent polyp. At that time the earth was spinning about in a day of from two ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... skill and daring were his means of evasion. Even without a formal disguise he could elude pursuit. At an instant's warning, his loose, plastic features would assume another shape; out shot his lower jaw, and, as if by magic, the blood flew into his face until you might take him for a mulatto. Or, if he chose, he would strap his arm to his side, and let the police be baffled by a wooden mechanism, decently finished with a hook. Thus ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Bringing its Thought to birth in human grace, The soul of the grand form, upstarting, when Thou openest thus thy mysteries to our ken, Striking a marble window through blind space. But God, who mouldeth in life-plastic clay, Flashing his thoughts from men with living eyes, Not from still marble forms, changeless alway, Breathed forth his human self in human guise: Thou didst appear, walking unknown abroad, The son of man, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... class feeling and class hatred and altogether anarchistic in spirit; a new and highly indigestible contribution to the American moral and intellectual synthesis. It is remarkable chiefly as the one shrill exception in a world of plastic acceptance. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... had made; then her dark, troubled gaze and the sullen droop of her mouth returned to give the lie to what he could but feel to be a possible misjudgment. In the end, he concluded wisely enough that, like the most of us, she was probably but plastic matter for the mark of circumstance—that her development would be, after all, according to the events she was called upon to face. The possibility that Destiny, which is temperament, should have already selected her as one of those who come into their spiritual heritage only through ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Plastic compositions of papier-mache are essential, especially in mammal and game-head work, for properly finishing the details of ears, face, and feet of specimens after the body has been filled. These are applied partly as a last detail before ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray
... technical term for working clay to a plastic state in an inclosed space, until it is of the requisite consistence for arresting the flow of water. A term in iron ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Latimer's exhortation to his companion at the stake rang like a trumpet note through the Protestant world. Ridley was the learned theologian and keen controversialist who more than any other man had moulded the plastic mind of the Archbishop since he had been released from the thraldom of Henry's moral and intellectual domination: who had led the campaign against "idolatry" but stood fast against the extravagances of the Nonconformists: who had without hesitation opposed Mary's accession. No one ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; Solomon Barkin, Director of Research for the Textile Workers Union of America; L. S. Buckmaster, General President, United Rubber, Cork, Linoleum & Plastic Workers of America; James B. Carey, Secretary-Treasurer of CIO; Albert J. Hayes, International President of International Association of Machinists; and ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... into Egypt, India, Asia Minor, sowing colonies of intelligence wherever they went; but the chief place to which they flocked was Rome. At Rome the hold they gained was such that even tyranny itself could not loosen it. Their light spirits and plastic nature made them adapt themselves to every fashion without difficulty and without regret; even under Tiberius or Domitian there was always something for a cultured Greek ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the cause of the savage, and of the slave, before men who feel no sympathy, and are as castles locked and barred. But the love for the poor shines in Wendell Phillips' eyes, trembles in his voice, pleads in his thinking, until the multitude become all plastic to his thought, and his smile becomes their smile, his tear their tear, the throb of his heart the throb of the whole assembly. Here is the Scottish girl, in love with truth, standing midst the sea, within the clutches of the incoming tide. She is bound down midst ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... incomplete control, and which, therefore, so far from having been called into being by Him, must be thought of as existing independently of Him. Had He really created the raw material from which He was to frame the universe, He would of course have created some medium perfectly plastic to His hand and adapted to His purposes; but if He merely operates on matter from without, finding it stubborn and unamenable, He is only a secondary Deity or Demiurge, and we have still to answer ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... ethnological distinction, is a republican of this country because he is a man. Here he is to find safety, cooperation, and welcome. His very ignorance and debasement are to be welcomed by a country eager to exhibit the plastic power of its divine idea,—how animal restrictions can be gradually obliterated, how superstition and prejudice must die out of stolid countenances before the steady gaze of republican good-will, how ethnic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... progress inevitable and easy. The importance of wholesome domestic influences cannot be exaggerated. Their part in the formation of character is greater than that of all others, because they touch the powers and faculties of the child during those years in which it is most plastic. Neither the school nor the university can ever entirely counteract the effect of the home. The whole period of childhood is one in which the soul is under tutelage, and in which more is done for it by others than ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... magnificent models an impetuosity of temperament which does not mount from the senses to the heart. Accustomed to regard the human form from a certain point, they find in beauty, which would appear to us simply animal, principles of plastic emotion which at times suffice for their amorous requirements. They are only more deeply touched by it, when to that rather coarse intoxication is joined, in the woman who inspires them, the refined graces of mind, the delicacy of elegance ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... see brought together the work of so many really great sculptors. America has a very large number of talented men expressing themselves on the plastic side - and a ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... professional historian, and awakens the reader's lively interest in him, is not so much the matter of his books, as the manner of presentation. It is rare to meet with an historian in whom scientific objectivity and thoroughness are so harmoniously combined with an ardent temperament and plastic ability. Mr. Dubnow's scientific activity, first and last, is a striking refutation of the widespread opinion that identifies attractiveness of form in the work of a scholar with superficiality of content. ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... "adore him everywhere far too much for decency," and to herself he seemed "infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him. On the whole therefore she was well pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of the plastic stuff in which to riot. Afterwards, in his days of sorrow in London, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at Rome would yield him gold enough to make the brightness of a year; he longed for the smell of the wet clay in ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire, nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we commonly find that the men ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Blyth had been speaking, Mat's hands had been gradually stealing down deeper and deeper into the pockets of his trousers, until his finger and thumb, and a certain plastic substance hidden away in the left-hand pocket came gently into contact, just as Valentine left off speaking. "Let's have another toast," cried Mat, quite briskly, the instant the last word was out of his guest's mouth. ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... would have stood out like an elephant. Even before release, the partially inflated gas bags are almost a hundred feet tall. The crowd at the football game would certainly have seen such a monstrous shape above the glare of the floodlights, for the plastic balloons gleam brightly ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... the beginning of life, take childhood, for that is where the human material is least protected, most plastic, and where most injury to-day is done. In the way of general suggestion, I would say, exclude children from formal disciplinary life, such as that of all industry and most schools, up to the age of eighteen. After excluding them, what shall we do with them? Ask John Dewey, I suggest, or read ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... says Henry James, "but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literateness, wiped out." One of our latter day philosophers tells us that "happiness is a matter of habit; and you had better gather it fresh every day or you will never ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... an active agent in the holy work of evangelisation. But opposed as he was to prevailing influences, he was yet a man of his time. We can hardly fancy the John Wesley whom we know living in any other century than his own. Spending the most plastic, perhaps also the most reflective period of his life in a chief centre of theological activity, he was not unimpressed by the storm of argument which was at that time going on around him. It was uncongenial to his ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... others to a state of misery almost of distraction, which awakens the most poignant sympathy for his situation. Deserted, as he imagines, by the object of his dearest affections, Rosalie Summers, who is supposed to have eloped with a villain of high rank of the name of Plastic, he goes to London and finds his brother in the last stage of ruin and despair by gambling, and stops his hand just at the moment he is attempting suicide. In the end he reforms the brother, discovers his Rosalie, and finds that she is innocent and faithful; and by a series ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... features of the nervous system. One such characteristic is the plasticity of the nervous substance. If I bend a piece of paper and crease it, the crease will remain even after the paper is straightened out again. The paper is plastic, and plasticity means simply that the substance offers some resistance to adopting a new form, but that when the new form is once impressed upon the substance it is retained. Some effort is required to overcome the plasticity of the paper and to form the crease, but when it is ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... called the "beautiful" Braschi, well deserved that epithet. No nobler or more plastic beauty was to be seen; no face that more reminded one of the divine beauty of ancient sculpture, no form that could be called a better counterfeit of the Belvedere Apollo. And it was this beauty which liberal Nature had imparted to him as its noblest gift, which helped Juan ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... endoscopic evisceration with sliding punch forceps. Anterior commissure twice afterward cleared of cicatricial tissue as in the other case shown in Fig. 15. Ultimate result shown in Fig. 8. 5, Same patient as Fig. 1; sketch made two years after decannulation and plastic. 6, Same patient as Fig. 2; sketch made four years after decannulation and plastic. 7, Same patient as Fig. 3; sketch made three years after decannulation and plastic. 8, Same patient as Fig. 4; sketch made one year ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... means are formed, organised, and established for the attainment of various ends of felt value. The establishment of these systems of means is only possible because in the human infant the nervous system is relatively unformed at birth, is relatively plastic, and so is capable of being organised in such and such a definite manner. On the other hand, in many animals the nervous system of each is definitely formed at birth; it is so organised that experience does little to add to or aid in its further ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... civilization, it gets information by literature. The latter operation, however, affects only the literary classes, not the masses, and society never consciously sets about the task of making mores. In the early stages mores are elastic and plastic; later they become rigid and fixed. They seem to grow up, gain strength, become corrupt, decline, and die, as if they were organisms. The phases seem to follow each other by an inherent necessity, and as if independent ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... there, but in the holy calm of the Temple courts it unfolded unstained. A Christian home should breathe the same atmosphere as surrounded Joash, and it, too, should be a temple, where holy peace rules, and where the first impressions printed on plastic little minds are of God and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... clear. From biological truths it is to be inferred that the eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan race forming the population, will produce a finer type of man than has hitherto existed; and a type of man more plastic, more adaptable, more capable of undergoing the modifications needful for complete social life. I think that whatever difficulties they may have to surmount, and whatever tribulations they may have to ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... that unloosed this horror upon the world. One of the grim ironies of this war is that the Hohenzollerns and the junkers are so constituted mentally that they never will be haunted with awful visions like those that visited the more plastic conscience of Charles IX after St. Bartholomew; but at least it will be some compensation to picture them rending the air with lamentations over their own downfall and hurling curses ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... rub in the butter. Mix with water to plastic dough. Divide dough into two cakes, 1 inch in thickness. Cover one evenly with currants, lay the other on top, and roll out to the thickness of one-third of an inch. Cut into sections, and bake in a hot oven for ...
— The Healthy Life Cook Book, 2d ed. • Florence Daniel
... abysm-born vapours of doubt; at another, radiant with the sun-fires of faith made perfect by fruition; it can amaze no considerative fraction of humanity, that the explorer of the indefinite, the searcher into the not-to-be-defined, should, at dreary intervals, invent dim, plastic riddles of his own identity, and hesitate at the awful shrine of that dread interrogatory alternative—reality, or dream? This deeply pondering, let the eager beginner in the at once linear and circumferent course of philosophico-metaphysical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... of his essence could admit the infinite variety of distinct and successive ideas which compose the model of the intellectual world; how a Being purely incorporeal could execute that perfect model, and mould with a plastic hand the rude and independent chaos. The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties, which must ever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold modification—of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... elected in November, 1868, proved no less plastic in the hands of the Boss, who again corrupted the tax levies. After allowing every just item the committee coolly added six millions,[1226] an amount subsequently reduced to three.[1227] This iniquity was immediately denounced and exposed through pamphlets, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... animal paroxysm, who should take it into his head to attach any importance to the negation of his birth? A curse upon the folly of our nurses and teachers, who fill our imaginations with frightful tales, and impress fearful images of punishment upon the plastic brain of childhood, so that involuntary shudders shake the limbs of the man with icy fear, arrest his boldest resolutions, and chain his awakening reason in the fetters of superstitious darkness. Murder! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... endeavoured to establish be disputed or not, the absolute correspondence between the Moral and the Physical is, at any rate, the essential ground of the Plastic arts; which could not else exist, since through Form alone they have to convey, not only thought and emotion, but distinct and permanent character. For our own part, we cannot but consider their success in this ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... it gradually wears out its pistons, its rods, its wheels, its boiler-tubes, all of which have to be made good from time to time. The founder and the smith repair it, supply it, so to speak, with 'plastic food,' the food that becomes embodied with the whole and forms part of it. But, though it have just come from the engine-shop, it is still inert. To acquire the power of movement it must receive from the stoker a supply of 'energy-producing food'; in other words, he ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... of breathing purified, sterilized, filtered air, thirty years of drinking distilled water and swallowing synthetic food tablets had changed us. The only things we weren't allergic to were the metal and plastic and synthetics of our ship, this ship. We're allergic to Earth. That's funny, ...
— Homesick • Lyn Venable
... lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... absorbed, and, by the decomposing action of the air, the alkaline silicate is gradually rendered soluble, and at length entirely washed away, leaving a substance which, when mixed with water, becomes plastic, and has all the characters of common clay. The nature of this change will be best seen by the following analysis of the clay produced during this composition, which is employed in the manufacture of porcelain under the name of ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... acknowledge the fascination of the romantic school, and the works of Herold (1791-1833) show how powerfully the new leaven had acted. But Weber was not the only foreigner at this time who helped to shape the destiny of French music. The spell of Rossini was too potent for the plastic Gauls to resist, and to his influence may be traced the most salient features of the school of opera comique which is best represented by Auber. Herold, though divided between the camps of Germany and Italy, had individuality enough to write music which ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... States with whom I became acquainted. Even after I had seen a good deal of her work, I could not feel wholly attracted by her talent, which sometimes expressed itself rather in a pictorial than a plastic form, and had a fondness for emotional effects. But she was a true artist, and a true woman, and I have never, in any woman, encountered a will like hers. She was uninterruptedly busy. Although, now that the time of her departure was so near, a few boxes ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... searchlight were playing on his magnificent bigness. His deep black eyes, set in a face whose strength had been emphasized by its exposure to sun and wind, gleamed joyous with his mood. His mouth, large, expressive, the plastic mouth of the orator, was curving into a smile as he gave heed to the speech of the prelate beside him. Once he shook his head as the great man, oblivious of their coming before a crowd of intent watchers, continued the words he had been saying on ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... however great his plastic skill, can hope to mould and shape a work of art to suit his fancy, unless the stuff on which he works be first prepared and made ready to obey the craftsman's will. Nor certainly where the raw material consists of men, will you succeed, unless, under God's ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon
... boneless chops, cream soup, peas, carrots, and fried potatoes—they weren't labeled at all but you could generally guess the contents from the shape of the can. Eggs that heated when you touched them and were soft-boiled evenly and barely firm by the time you had the shell broke. And small plastic bottles of strong coffee that heated up hospitably too—in this case the tops did a five-second hesitation in the middle ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... of oxygen to more than sixteen pounds of hydrogen and carbon. Now as oxygen is the grand supporter of animal heat, the consumption of so large a quantity of it, aids in producing the extraordinary heat which always accompanies comb-building, and which is necessary to keep the wax in the soft and plastic state requisite to enable the bees to mould it into such exquisitely delicate and beautiful shapes! Who can fail to admire the wisdom of the Creator in ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... to his brother man on His behalf? He was behind it once, and it had efficacy, had power. But now—what if all these processes of so-called destruction and decay were but the mere workings of that divine plastic force which is for ever moulding human society? What if these beautiful venerable things which had fallen from him, as from thousands of his fellows, represented, in the present stage of the world's history, not the props, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... burst of laughter, he set very adroitly to the mimicry of beasts and birds upon his frets. Never have I seen a face so consummately the action's. His every fibre answered to the call; his eyebrows twitched like an orator's; his very nose was plastic. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... tone brought back thoughts too fast to be tabulated, and his accent was slightly English. She divined from this he had been out of the country—possibly had returned to New York on a British ship. How well she knew his plastic intelligence! It was so characteristic and easy for him—this little affectation.... She was quite cold to him. Bedient had put him away upon the far-effacing surfaces of ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... possible, too, that a third person had been in the house last night; but if so, one of the two men had lied. The bit of candle found by me on the rear stairs had adhered to somebody's shoe while still plastic; if either Burke or Maillot had used these stairs at or about the time of the murder, then both had studiously kept the fact from me. It was possible that one of the two could have made fast the front door behind a fugitive, without the other's knowledge; Burke, for example, before ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... could willingly have pursued the argument in relation to all the subtler results of civilization. As before we showed that the law of progress to which the organic and inorganic worlds conform, is also conformed to by Language, the plastic arts, Music, &c.; so might we here show that the cause which we have hitherto found to determine progress holds in these cases also. Instances might be given proving how, in Science, an advance of one division presently ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... strength and safe foundation and stability. On this ground, man's biological make-up has a legitimate sphere of growth and expansion shared by no other type of being. We pass into every new moment of time with a preparedness shown in adaptive and constructive activity as well as structure, most plastic and far-reaching in the greatest feat of man, that of imagination. Imagination is not a mere duplication of reality in consciousness and subjectivity; it is a substitute in a way, but actually an amplification, and often a real addition to what we might otherwise call the "crude world," ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... a most fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An unfathomable Somewhat, which is Not we; which we can work with, and live amidst,—and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name World.—But if the very Rocks and Rivers (as Metaphysic teaches) are, in strict language, made ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... claped the towel across his mouth and nose. The others had secured him, and the more he roared and kicked the more they drenched him with chloroform. Walker was very nice about it, and made the most handsome apologies. He offered to do a plastic on the spot, and make as good an ear as he could, but M'Namara had had enough of it. As to the patient, we found him sleeping placidly under the table, with the ends of the blanket screening him on both sides. Walker sent M'Namara round his ear next day in a jar of methylated ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Rapoport, one of the first and profoundest of Jewish historians, and Nahman Krochmal, the saintly philosopher. Into this circle of "shining ones" Levinsohn was introduced, and each and all left an impression, some greater, some less, upon his plastic soul. It was there and then, in the congenial company of friends of about his own age, that Levinsohn determined to devote himself to improving the educational system of his people and began to plan his work ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... finger-nail. And look at the faces of us—what atrocious mockeries most of them are of any kind of image! But we know our bodies change—age, sickness, thought, passion, fatality. It proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a theory it is not in the least untenable that by force of some violent convulsive effort from outside one's body might change. It answers with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of Nature, they ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... authentic the mighty frame of him hidden under loose dungaree pants and cotton shirt, buttonless, open from midriff to Adam's apple, exposing a chest matted with a thatch of hair as white as that of his head and face. The depth and breadth of that chest, its resilience, and its relaxed and plastic muscles, tokened the knotty strength that still resided in him. Further, no bronze and beat of sun and wind availed to hide the testimony of his skin that he was all haole—a ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... bigotry. His body was almost forgotten, while the philanthropists were trying to decide what to do with his soul. Few of the reverend gentlemen "would be content unless they could seize him when his young nature was plastic and try to imprint on immortal clay the trade-mark of some ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the river I laid aside bow and quiver, and cutting divers lumps of clay (the which seemed very proper to my purpose) I fell to kneading these lumps until I had wrought them to a plastic consistency, and so (keeping my hands continually moistened) I began to mould and shape a pot to her directions. And now, since I was about it, I determined to have as many as need be and of different sizes. My first was a great ill-looking thing, and my second little better, but as I progressed ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... aware of what is being done for the improvement of badly-formed noses, crooked mouths, and such defects, by what its practitioners call 'plastic surgery,' or 'facial' or 'feature surgery.' From the 'beauty shops,' then, as the newspapers call them, he got the idea of changing his nose by cutting and folding back the skin, surgically eliminating the hump, and rearranging the skin over the altered bridge so as to produce perfect straightness ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... of his botanical studies from 1768 to 1793, and being puzzled, as systematic botanists are, by the variations of the more plastic species of plants, led to deny the ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... certainly had all the appearance of a trapped criminal, with his nervous movements, his restless lowered eyes, and his faint, hard voice that he could scarcely fetch up from his throat. Nervousness lined with resentment forms excellent material for the plastic art of a cross-examining counsel, and Pennington, K.C., itched to be at work. Crepitude, K.C., Oxford's counsel, was in less joyous mood. Priam was Crepitude's own witness, and yet a horrible witness, a witness who had consistently and ferociously ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... saffron standard gay and spears upheld Flashing through thickets green. These kept not line, For Alp was still recounting battles old, Aodh of wizards sang, and Ir of love; While bald-pate Conan, sharpening from his eye The sneering light, shot from his plastic mouth Shrill taunt and biting gibe. The younger sort Eyed the dense copse and launched full many a shaft Through it at flying beast. From ledge to ledge Clomb Angus, keen of sight, with hand o'er brow, Forth gazing on some far blue ridge of war With nostril wide outblown, and snorting ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... Enterprises Incorporated and bring this letter and suitable identifications?" Kennon chuckled. Would he? There was no question about it. The address, 200 Central Avenue, was only a few blocks away. In fact, he could see the building from his window, a tall functional block of durilium and plastic, soaring above the others on the street, the sunlight gleaming off its clean square lines. He eyed it curiously, wondering what ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... Tomasite, a revolutionary plastic which Mr. Swift had developed, possessed amazing insulating properties against both heat and radiation. One of its secret ingredients came from certain plants found only in Far Eastern waters. Mr. Swift ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... of 1825 included many of Russia's ablest minds. The influence of these exiles upon the intelligence, habits, and manners of the Siberians, has left an indelible mark. As a new civilization is more plastic than an old one, so the society of Northern Asia may have become more polished ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... leaning over his staff,—and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler's door. The Main Street is still youthful; the coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hardly responsible, they considered, and her last incredible assertion had gone far to nullify the effect of her previous testimony. She was overcome by the nervous shock, or had told less than she knew and was still concealing somewhat, or was so credulous and plastic and fanciful as to be hardly worthy of belief. She was dismissed earlier than she had dared to hope: and with this deterioration of the testimony of the witness who was nearest the time and place of the disaster, the jury presently went to work to evolve out of so slender a thread of fact ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Charles Dickens was reporter on the staff of a newspaper; he had written a book which, although successful, had created no very intense excitement; he was moreover a young man, and consequently plastic, and fifteen pounds a month would be a small fortune to him; so at least argued the artist and his friends. How little they understood the resolute, self-reliant character of this unknown writer! The result was altogether ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... no doubt that this encyclopaedic diversity has turned to the great advantage of his glory. It is precisely because Goethe is an elusive Proteus that all doctrines may equally claim him. Romanticists turn with predilection to the creator of Werther or the first "Faust." Classicists admire the plastic beauty of Tasso and Iphigenia. The cosmopolitan sees in Goethe the Weltbuerger, the citizen of the world, the incarnation of die Weltweisheit. The patriot acclaims in him the poet who has sung the myths and legends dear to the German ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... of his identity, that's all I wish to know," said the Chief. "I don't want to be trapped by a Marscorp trick with plastic surgery. But if this man is Dark Kensington, it's the best fortune the Phoenix has met with in ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... some strong good man had often passed this way. I saw the mystic sign of him deep-lettered in the hearthstone of a home; I heard it speaking bravely from the weak lips of a friend; it is carved in the plastic heart of many a boy. No, I do not doubt the immortalities of the soul; in this community, which I have come to love so much, dwells more than one of John North's immortalities—and will continue to dwell. I, too, live more deeply because John ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... a look at the landscape. I had scarcely gone a few steps when a wondrous sight met my astonished eyes: before me was the Nile, old Hapi, to give it its ancient Egyptian name, the inexhaustible Father of Waters. Through one of those involuntary plastic impressions which act upon the imagination, the Nile called up to my mind the colossal marble god in one of the lower halls of the Louvre, carelessly leaning on his elbow and, with paternal kindliness, allowing himself to be climbed over by the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... in her lap and pondered deeply the things he had told her. Now and again she gazed into the bearded face, calm, masklike in its repose of unconsciousness, as if to penetrate behind the mask and read the real nature of him. She realized with a feeling almost of fear, that here was no weakling—no plastic irresolute—whose will could be dominated by the will of a stronger; but a man, virile, indomitable; a man of iron will who, though he scorned to stoop to defend his position, was unashamed to vindicate it. A man whose words carried conviction, and whose eyes ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... at first sight to be reversed; for Mr. Browning rejects the dramatic theory which would convert it into a direct expression of human thought. Here, however, the poet in him comes into play. He leaves the plastic arts to express what may be both felt and thought; and calls on music to express what may be felt but not thought. In this sense he accepts it as an independent science subject to its own ideals and to its own laws. But this only means that, in his opinion, the relation of music ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... great point—living together. And I do not mean living together when people are mature or old but when young—when minds, sympathies, etc., are plastic and pliable. As long as the young Germans are kept home—never sent abroad unless as spies in some ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... smaller apartment, separated from the former room by a corridor, that could be closed, and by a heavy curtain. Here a table, at which the five girls might easily have found room, was placed in a favorable light for Ulrich. He was to draw from plastic models, and there was no lack of these in the Alcazar, for here rose a high, three-story wing, to which when wearied by the intrigues of statecraft and the restraints of court etiquette, King Philip gladly retired, yielding himself to the only genial impulse ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... (not obligatory). (1) Language (vocabulary, syntax, phonetics, semasiology). Handwriting. (2) Arts: A. Plastic arts (conditions of production, conceptions, methods, works). B. Arts of expression, music, dance, literature. (3) Sciences (conditions of production, methods, results). (4) Philosophy and Morals (conceptions, precepts, actual practice). (5) ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... played. Father Hudson resumes the plastic, immobile, and almost invisible attitude which he occupied at the opening of the play. The Choruses file silently out, one on each side of ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... complains of their painting Chimaeras {94} (by the vulgar unaptly called grotesque) saying that men who were born truly to study and emulate Nature did nothing but make monsters against Nature, which Horace so laughed at. {95} The art plastic was moulding in clay, or potter's earth anciently. This is the parent of statuary, sculpture, graving, and picture; cutting in brass and marble, all serve under her. Socrates taught Parrhasius and Clito (two noble ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... in his mellow bass. "How are you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia's approach, where woman, das ewig Weibliche, enters into conflict with ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and the lesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world they have interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would no doubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time more fantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particular to their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classic legends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters of the golden prime disdained to represent—or it may be unconsciously shrank from representing—the mere dramatic moment, the mere ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... of sculpture in clay may be summed up under the word 'Plastic,' and all of those in stone, under the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... their Creator and Fashioner? Is the expectation of the Jews for their Messiah or of the Portugueze for St. Sebastian more extravagant? But Lord G. ought to know that such a military POWER does already exist upon the Peninsula, formless indeed compared with what under our plastic hands it may become, yet which has proved itself capable of its giving employment during the course of three years to at least five hundred thousand of the enemy's best troops. An important fact has been proved, that the enemy ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... of like-mindedness grew up between Spalton and this intense, homely woman, Dorothy ... whose face, like that of all clever, homely women, grew to a beauty in his eyes, that mere beauty which plastic form ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... circle of Boston transcendentalists, who hoped in a few years to transform our selfish, competitive civilization into a Paradise where all the altruistic virtues might make co-operation possible. But alas! the material at hand was not sufficiently plastic for that higher ideal. In due time the community dissolved and the members returned to their ancestral spheres. Margaret Fuller, who was a frequent visitor there, betook herself to matrimony in sunny Italy, William Henry ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... that followed Marcia's stroke of independence (for which he was not without a secret admiration at times), Jocelyn threw into plastic creations that ever-bubbling spring of emotion which, without some conduit into space, will surge upwards and ruin all but the greatest men. It was probably owing to this, certainly not on account of any care or anxiety for such a result, that he was successful ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... hallway that led to Colonel Mannheim's suite. The hallway had been purposely designed for watching from the gun tower. To one who was inside, it looked like an ordinary hallway, stretching down the length of the building. But it was walled with a special plastic that, while opaque to visible light, was perfectly transparent to infra-red. To the ordinary unaided eye, the walls of the building presented a blank face to the gun tower, but to the eye of an infra-red scope, the hallways of all five floors looked as though they ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... sometimes intensely miserable, sometimes supremely happy, sometimes pensively sad, but always feeling a special intensity of existence: that elation common to artists, poets, and lovers, to men haunted by a great passion, by a noble thought or a new vision of plastic beauty. ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... jurisdiction was merely concurrent; but the greater certainty of conviction and the greater severity of punishment rendered it incomparably more formidable than the ordinary benches of justice. The law of libel grew up in this unwholesome atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of successive judges and attorneys-general. Prosecutions of this kind, according to Hudson, began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when Coke was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture what kind of interpretation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Glazzard had returned to his old amusement of modelling in clay. He drew and painted, played and composed, at intervals; but plastic art seemed to have the strongest hold upon him. Through April he was busy with a head for which he had made many studies—a head of Judas; in Italy he had tried to paint the same subject, but ineffectually. ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... tresses and the drapery were most skillfully arranged to look like the work of the chisel. It is significant of the measure of Miss Anderson's art, that in her animated moments subsequently she should not have excelled the plastic grace of this first picture. At the same time, to her credit it must be said, that she never fell much below it. Her movements on the stage, her management of her drapery, her attitudes were full of classic beauty. Actresses there have been who have given us much more ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... to the readers in his bag. The cards were plastic, and should be good for a week or so of use before they showed wear. During that time, by playing it carefully, he should have his stake. Then, if the gaming tables here were as crudely run as an oldtimer he'd known on Earth had said, he ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... was too spiritual and too volatile. Painting, an art which one could hold fast with one's eyes, and follow step by step with the external senses, seemed more favorable for such an end: the English and French had already theorized about plastic art; and, by a comparison drawn from this, it was thought that poetry might be grounded. The former presented images to the eye, the latter to the imagination: poetical images, therefore, were the first thing which ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... All enduring forms establish a modus vivendi with their surroundings. They can do this because both they and the surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but somewhat narrow limits. They are plastic because they can to some extent change their habits, and changed habit, if persisted in, involves corresponding change, however slight, in the organs employed; but their plasticity depends in great ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... invented before anybody can be bored with it. And I do not believe, although I find it stated in a ten-volume Science-History of the Universe, that 'language is an internal necessity, begotten of a lustful longing to express, through the plastic vocal energy, man's secret sense of his ability to interpret Nature.' An internal necessity, yes—except in the case of the Bore Negative, who prefers to listen; but quite as likely begotten of man's anything but secret sense of ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... gravitation to retain them, then the final catastrophe must have been as swift as it was inevitable. Accepting Darwin's hypothesis, that the moon was separated from the earth by tidal action while both were yet plastic or nebulous, we may reasonably conclude that it began its career with a good supply of both water and air, but did not possess sufficient mass to hold them permanently. Yet it may have retained them long enough for life to develop ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... which all effective education is based. They recognized that in the plastic days of childhood and youth ideals and character and efficiency could best be developed, and that education was not the work of a moment, but a gradual, ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... written verse but must have felt the pain of erasing some happy line, some striking stanza, which, however excellent in itself, did not exactly suit the place for which it was destined. How curiously does an author mould and remould the plastic verse in order to fit in the favourite thought; and when he finds that he cannot introduce it, as Corporal Trim says, any how, with what reluctance does he at last reject the intractable, but still cherished offspring of his brain! Mr. Tennyson manages this ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... unhelpful, because of the mass of unanalysed and scarcely suspected assumptions upon which it rested. The facts were ignored that trade is a bye-product and not an essential factor in social life, that property is a plastic and fluctuating convention, that value is capable of impersonal treatment only in the case of the most generalised requirements. Wealth was measured by the standards of exchange. Society was regarded as a practically ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... was all himself again, glad, hopeful, expectant, with the sense of being once more under a roof, touched by a woman's hand. Then he looked keenly into the face before him—such a strange face! He was tempted to cry out in terror; but the mind is plastic in early youth: he had learned the lesson that now his protests and shrieks availed naught. A strange face, of a copper hue, with lank black hair hanging straight on both sides, a high nose, a wide, flat, thin-lipped mouth, and great, dark, soft eyes amidst many wrinkles. He ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... youth includes travelling for six years in foreign countries under private tutors, studying human history, ethnic, social, political, industrial, aesthetic, religious; gems of poetry; the elements of geometry; mechanics; art, plastic, and graphic; reading Confucius, Sakya-muni, Themistocles, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Paul, Mahommed, Charlemagne, Alfred, Gregory VII., St. Bernard, St. Francis, Savonarola, Luther, Queen Elizabeth, Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Homer, Virgil, ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... moment's escape. In the case of a murderer who has been apprehended, tried, condemned and executed, the whole of the tragedy and its sequel would be, not only lived over in imagination but repeated automatically, in fact, and worked out in full detail in the plastic matter of the astral region. Probably few people have the imagination to comprehend what the murderer feels of apprehension and fear at his trial when his life is in the balance; or what he suffers while hiding from justice and making futile efforts to escape ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... young,' he thought, thrilling. And youth was plastic—he, the sculptor, could surely mould her. Besides, was she not Sir Asher's daughter? She must surely have inherited some of his love for Palestine and his people. It was this Philistine set that had spoiled her. Julius, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... when we are young, but if we have already passed the youthful plastic period the time to start to control our habits is right now, as we will never ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... attractive, aristocratic-looking girl, Shirley Rossmore had no serious claims to academic beauty. Her features were irregular, and the firm and rather thin mouth lines disturbed the harmony indispensable to plastic beauty. Yet there was in her face something far more appealing—soul and character. The face of the merely beautiful woman expresses nothing, promises nothing. It presents absolutely no key to the soul within, and often there is no soul within to have ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... evangelisation. But opposed as he was to prevailing influences, he was yet a man of his time. We can hardly fancy the John Wesley whom we know living in any other century than his own. Spending the most plastic, perhaps also the most reflective period of his life in a chief centre of theological activity, he was not unimpressed by the storm of argument which was at that time going on around him. It was uncongenial ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... a cloud of rapidly-moving, evanescent forms, has already been described; we have now to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish. The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a living being of appropriate form—a being which when once thus created is in no way under the control of its creator, but lives out a life of its own, the length of which ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... late, the long, hot day declining. There had been nine hours of fighting. "Nine hours—ninety hours—ninety minutes?" thought Edward. "Time's plastic like everything else. Double it, fold it back on itself, stretch it out, do anything with it—" He took the cartridges from a trunk of a man, crept on to a soldier shot through the hip. The latter clutched him with a blackened hand. "Has Marse ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... alluded to the flash song of Jerry Juniper, I may, perhaps, be allowed to make a few observations upon this branch of versification. It is somewhat curious, with a dialect so racy, idiomatic, and plastic as our own cant, that its metrical capabilities should have been so little essayed. The French have numerous chansons d'argot, ranging from the time of Charles Bourdigne and Villon down to that of Vidocq and Victor Hugo, the last ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... patrons, the Burgomaster Tulp. Of the masters who have striven pre-eminently after truth he is, beyond all question, one of the greatest that ever lived. In order to succeed in this aim, he acquired a correctness of drawing, a kind of modelling which imparts an almost plastic effect to his animals, an extraordinary execution of detail in the most solid impasto, and a truth of colouring which harmonises astonishingly with the time of day. In his landscapes, which generally consist of a few willows in the foreground, and of a wide view over meadows, the most delicate ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... kind of French centralisation in the world of fashion has been established, which has over-ridden and obliterated all the dress boundaries of civilised nations. All the upper and middle classes of Christendom centre themselves to one focus of taste and merge into one plastic commonwealth, to be shaped and moulded virtually by a common tailor. Their coats, vests, pantaloons, boots and shoes are made substantially after the same pattern. For a while, hats stood out with some show ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... volumes before us. I will not call the labours of the biographer final. So great a character will challenge reconstruction. In the coming time some sympathetic spirit, with the requisite strength, knowledge, and solvent power, will, I doubt not, render these materials plastic, give them more perfect organic form, and send through them, with less of interruption, the currents of Faraday's life. 'He was too good a man,' writes his present biographer, 'for me to estimate rightly, and too great a philosopher for me to understand ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... largely to her growing up. The sight of his work and his methods; the occasional talks she overheard between him and his scientific comrades; the tones of irony and denial in the atmosphere about him; his antagonisms, his bitternesses, worked strongly upon her still plastic nature. Moreover she felt to her heart's core that he was unsuccessful; there were appointments he should have had, but had failed to get, and it was the religious party, the "clerical crew" of Convocation, ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dwelt in the seventh century before our era on the banks of Tigris and Euphrates flourished in literature as well as in the plastic arts, and had an alphabet of its own. The Assyrians sometimes wrote with a sharp reed, for a pen, upon skins, wooden tablets, or papyrus brought from Egypt. In this case they used cursive letters of a Phoenician character. But when they wished to preserve their written documents, they employed ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... clearly it is in some sense true that the child's whole nature, its modicum of plasticity included, is handed on from its parents. Our business in this chapter, however, is on the whole to put out of our thoughts this plastic side of the inherited life-force. The more or less rigid, definite, systematized characters—these form the hereditary factor, the race. Now none of these are ever quite fixed. A certain measure of plasticity has to be counted in as part of their ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... and speed of limb to escape it. In other words, increase of brain and sense-power and increase of speed were the primary requisites. The clumsy early Condylarthra failed to meet the tests, and perished; the other branches of the race were more plastic, and, under the pressure of a formidable enemy, were gradually moulded into the horse, the deer, the ox, the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... Saunderson's face had been capable of expressing more than displeasure, it would have done so, but he was of no plastic build, mind or body, and "displeasure" was the nearest he could get to ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... capacity for, and love of, liquid refreshment. Perhaps the archdeacon thought that the West was a sort of kindergarten, where children like The Babe are given, at small expense, object-lessons and exercises peculiarly adapted to young and plastic minds. In Central America certain tribes living by the seaboard throw their children into the surf, wherein they sink or learn to swim, as the ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... confirm the first impression she had made; then her dark, troubled gaze and the sullen droop of her mouth returned to give the lie to what he could but feel to be a possible misjudgment. In the end, he concluded wisely enough that, like the most of us, she was probably but plastic matter for the mark of circumstance—that her development would be, after all, according to the events she was called upon to face. The possibility that Destiny, which is temperament, should have already selected her as one of those who come into their spiritual heritage only through ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... resembling starch-gum (or dextrine, as it is called) in its properties, which is very easily converted into sugar. The starch of barley approaches in many properties to cellulose, and is, therefore, less digestible. Oats are particularly rich in plastic substances; Scotch oats are richer than those grown in England or in Germany. This kind of grain contains in its ashes, after deduction of the silica of the husks, very nearly the same ingredients as ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... good citizen must begin at the cradle, and be continued through the plastic period of boyhood and carried forward by his parents, until the youth crosses his native threshold to act his part and assume his responsibilities in the broader field of his ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... of the characteristics of the Andalusian. His lyrical genius is not only at odds with that of Southern Spain, but also with his own inclination for the plastic arts, says Blanco Garcia. "How could a Seville poet, a lover of pictorial and sculptural marvels, so withdraw from the outer form as to embrace the pure idea, with that melancholy subjectivism as common in the gloomy regions ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... in all the graces of sex—histrionic, plastic, many-faceted—Berenice debated for the fraction of a minute what she should do and say. She did not love the Lieutenant as he loved her by any means, and somehow this discovery concerning her mother ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... impulse to do. But now he came forth from all reserves, and offered himself to whomever the chances of the way offered to him, with a ready sensibility that made its way through every barrier that even English exclusiveness, in whatever rank of life, could set up. The plastic character of Middleton was perhaps a variety of American nature only presenting itself under an individual form; he could throw off the man of our day, and put on a ruder nature, but then it was with a certain fineness, that made this only [a] distinction between it and ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... alteration of elasticity, a third state, geometrically defined and describable as a period of fluidity, corresponding to the possibility of a continuous deformation under the constant action of the same strain. This particular condition is only realized with very malleable or plastic bodies; and it may even be regarded as characteristic of such bodies, since its absence is noticeable in all non-malleable or fragile bodies, which break without being deformed. It is already known that the period of altered elasticity for hard or tempered steel is much less than for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... he'd seen one, the time he'd asked the tech what its name was. The tech had been picking some of them and putting them into plastic bags, and the faint spark of MacNeil's dim curiosity had been brought to feebly ...
— Cum Grano Salis • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of these poets, among whom Vida, with his 'Christiad' and Sannazaro, with his three books, 'De partu Virginis' hold the first place. Sannazaro (b. 1458, d. 1530) is impressive by the steady and powerful flow of his verse, in which Christian and pagan elements are mingled without scruple, by the plastic vigor of his description, and by the perfection of his workmanship. He could venture to introduce Virgil's fourth Eclogue into his song of the shepherds at the manger without fearing a comparison. In treating of the unseen world, he sometimes gives proofs of a ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... the righteousness of the kingdom is "poor in spirit." Then the next is a little deeper, "they that mourn." Because now you must get plastic, you must get broken, you must get like the metal in the fire, which the Master can mould; and so, it is not enough to see your unrighteousness, but deeply to feel it, deeply to regret it, deeply to mourn over it, to own it not a little thing that sin has come into your life. ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An unfathomable Somewhat, which is Not we; which we can work with, and live amidst,—and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name World.—But if the very Rocks and Rivers ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... among Italians or Frenchmen they were received with tumultuous welcome. They spoke the language of the people; and in the vulgar speech of the people—rugged, plastic, and reckless of grammar—the message came as glad tidings of great joy. When they tried the same method in Germany, we are told, they signally failed. The gift of tongues, alas! had ceased. That, at any rate, was denied, even ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... its mature and final stage. This adult form was regarded not merely as the goal actually reached through successive stages of growth. It was conceived as the end aimed at, and achieved through the force of some vital or ideal principle shaping the plastic material and directing the process of growth. In short, evolution implied ideal ends controlling physical means. Yet we find with Spencer, as prevailingly also with others in the study of the natural sciences, the ideas of end and of cause looked at askance. They ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: 165 Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... herself he seemed "infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him. On the whole therefore she was well pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of the plastic stuff in which to riot. Afterwards, in his days of sorrow in London, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at Rome would yield him gold enough to make the brightness ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... spring-time of civilizations, seems to grow abundant as a nation gets older, individuality fades, and education spreads; that is, his brain had extraordinary receptive powers, and no great creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he saw around him, and having a plastic adaptability more common in woman than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the society he found himself in assumed a higher and more artificial tone. He had not many original ideas, and yet there was scarcely an idea to which, under proper training, ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... sculpture in clay may be summed up under the word "Plastic," and all of those in stone, under the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... and beauty by the electro-magnetic Aether. Then in the very centre of the Universe there dwells that Supreme Being whom we call God, who is at once the one real fountain and source of all the light and life of the Universe itself. For it is His universal Spirit that moulds and fashions the plastic matter into the many forms which it assumes, and uses the various modes of motion, as heat, light, electricity and magnetism, as instruments to build up and erect in all their beauty and harmony the innumerable systems ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... and groove suture proposed by Professor Pancoast, and recommended by Professor Gross, is said to be specially suitable for such plastic operations. It is very complicated, as it requires one edge to be bevelled to a wedge shape, the other being grooved to include the wedge, thus opposing four raw surfaces, which are retained in contact by being transfixed by ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... casting the slabs, and while they are in a plastic state, mouldings (if required) or other ornaments, having a suitable key, are inserted in the plastic surface, which is finished off to them (Figs. 7, 8, and 10). The slabs may also be cast with ornaments, etc., complete at one operation (Fig. 11), but it is more economical to have ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world compelling there All new successions to the forms ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... thoughts: an influence capable either of forwarding or hindering its work. The ancient Greeks were well acquainted with this fact when they assisted Nature to create beautiful forms by placing in the mother's room statues of rare plastic perfection, and removing from her sight every suggestion of ugliness. More than this; certain intense emotions of the pregnant woman are capable of momentarily effacing the image of the model which the builder ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... stage is that of catalepsy, certainly not a healthy condition to be in. Its grand feature is a plastic immobility by which the subject maintains all the attitudes given to his body and limbs, but with this peculiarity, that the limbs and features act in unison. Join the hands of the patient as if in devout ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... madnesses, the one refusing feeling to the organs of feeling, the other lodging a pure spirit in a bug, somebody thought of a middle path. It was instinct. And what is instinct? Oh, oh, it is a substantial form; it is a plastic form; it is I do not know what! it is instinct. I shall be of your opinion so long as you will call the majority of things, "I do not know what"; so long as your philosophy begins and ends with "I do not know what", ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... cowed,—we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... between life and death, turning an exquisite shade of purple and black as each new coughing fit seized him. This not unusual phenomenon impressed its vivid seal upon the plastic wax of his unfledged memories with extraordinary precision. In after life, for a long while, he was quite unable to gaze at an ordinary muscat grape or a coal-scuttle without either biting his comforter right ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... Puritans; that their rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic literature of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; that they had little poetry or music and no architecture and plastic art. But we must never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of human passion ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... she lay in the utility bed, the squeaking of the springs became the sound of turning wheels. The plastic walls and ceiling of the eightieth-floor apartment turned to billowing canvas, and the thunder of the passing jets transformed itself into the drumming ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... operating persistently. Herein lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the little lax figure among the pillows. Then she took the rug from him and covered the child, with quick, capable movements of her beautiful worn hands. Raven, watching her, felt a clutch at his throat. Surely there was nothing in the known world of plastic action so wonderful as these movements of mothers' hands in their work of easing a child. With a last quick touch on the rug, drawing it slightly away from the baby cheek, she returned to her chair, and Raven again ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... out the fairy tale is to rob human beings of their childhood, that transition period in which breadth and richness are given to human life so that it may be full and plastic enough to permit the creation of those exacting efficiencies which increasing knowledge and responsibility compel. We cannot omit the adventures of fairyland from our educational program. They are too well adapted to the restless, active, ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... fears: the pot-maker knows quite well how matters stand. She takes good care not to close the top with the plastic earth which supplied her with the walls. At some distance from the tip of the nipple, the clay ceases to play its part and makes way for fibrous particles, for tiny scraps of undigested fodder, which, arranged one above the other with a certain order, form a sort of thatched roof over the egg. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... will hardly now be popular. It involves too much mutilation and too much transformation. When it has done its work little is left but bone and muscular tissue, and these are so transfused with foreign substances that a form moulded from plastic matter or sculptured from stone could almost as truly be considered that of the lamented dead as this. Moreover, indefinite preservation of the dead is not desirable, and is not desired. The uses to which the Egyptian Pharaohs and their humbler subjects have been put in these days of indelicacy ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... held out to endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then, with her ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... with a start how unchanging and conventionalized is the face of the living man and woman of these parts, handsome, but motionless as pure form. There is also an underlying meanness, secretive, cruel. It is all part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the Christus is stiff and conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in proportion, and in the static tension which makes it unified into one clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The being is fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... daughter of an industrious dyer in purple, the calm, refreshing charm of divine women? I at least am neither foolish nor unjust enough to do so. The degree of beauty Althea possesses would entirely satisfy me for the Arachne. But when I imagine a plastic work faithful to the model of yesterday evening—though I have seen a great deal with my own eyes, and am always ready to defer to riper judgment—I would think, while looking at it: This statue came to the artist from the stage, but never from Nature. Such would be my view, and I am not one ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... his pace at the 17th floor as two other mechs turned in ahead of him. They were obviously butchers or meat-cutters; where the right hand should have been on each of them there stuck out a wicked, foot-long knife. As they approached the foot of the stairs they stopped to slip the knives into the plastic sheaths that were bolted to their chestplates. Jon followed them down the ramp into ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... the defects of his predecessors, succeeded, by virtue of his "plastic energy and power of harmonious modulation" in recreating the measure. He found it "monotonous, monosyllabic, and divided into five feet of tolerably regular alternate short and long [i. e., unstressed and stressed]. He left it various in form and structure, sometimes ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... for good, was the indispensable antecedent to any general and energetic endeavour to modify the conditions that surround him. The omnipotence of early instruction, of laws, of the method of social order, over the infinitely plastic impulses of the human creature—this was the maxim which brought men of such widely different temperament and leanings to the common enterprise. Everybody can see what wide and deep-reaching bearings such a doctrine possessed; how it raised all the questions connected with psychology and the formation ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... craters there has been much discussion. Some have considered them to be evidence of violent volcanic action in the dim past; others, again, as the result of the impact of meteorites upon the lunar surface, when the moon was still in a plastic condition; while a third theory holds that they were formed by the bursting of huge bubbles during the escape into space of gases from the interior. The question is, indeed, a very difficult one. Though volcanic action, such as would result ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... circumstance that inflammation may attack these in any situation and produce the same effect, is the permanent or organic stricture. Of this disease the forms are as various as the situations are, for as certainly as it may reasonably be supposed that the plastic lymph, effused in an inflamed state of the urethra from any cause, does not give rise to stricture of any special or particular form, exclusive of all others; so as certainly may it be inferred that, in a structurally uniform canal, inflammation points to no one particular place ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... most accomplished of historians and critics, Oulibischeff, sums up the place of Cherubini in musical art in these words: "If on the one hand Gluck's calm and plastic grandeur, and on the other the tender and voluptuous charm of the melodies of Piccini and Zacchini, had suited the circumstances of a state of society sunk in luxury and nourished with classical ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... it is for a parent or teacher to ruin a child's constructive ability, to change a naturally, positive creative mind to a negative, non-producing one, by chilling the child's enthusiasm, by projecting into his plastic mind the idea that he is stupid, dull, lazy, a "blockhead" and good-for-nothing; that he will never amount to anything; that it is foolish for him to try to be much, because he has not the ability or physical stamina to enable him to accomplish what many others ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... chemistry. It is now found that only a small number of substances ever enter into the composition of animal bodies.20 The food of man consists of nitrogenized and non nitrogenized substances. The latter are the elements of respiration; the former alone compose the plastic elements of nutrition, and they are few in number and comparatively limited in extent. "All life depends on a relatively small quantity of matter. Over and over again, as the modeller fashions his clay, are plant and animal formed out of the same material." The ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... shapes our thoughts for us;—the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little. I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic,—you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily when you work that soft material, that there is nothing like it for modelling. Out of it come the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... issued a rocket pistol and a plastic water tube. Chief Slichow emphasized that the keepers of rations could hardly, in an emergency, give even the appearance of favoring themselves in regard to food. They would go without. Kolin maintained a standard expression as the ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... a revolutionary plastic which Mr. Swift had developed, possessed amazing insulating properties against both heat and radiation. One of its secret ingredients came from certain plants found only in Far Eastern waters. Mr. Swift hoped to transplant ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... goods (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, soap, cigarettes, flour), agricultural products; oil refining, aluminum, steel, lead, cement; ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... that fellow's throat! Let her be happy, if she could keep her lover from him! And suddenly, he stopped in his tracks, for there on a sandwich-board just in front of him were the words: "Daphne Wing. Pantheon. Daphne Wing. Plastic Danseuse. Poetry of Motion. To-day at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was the exact opposite of Zhukovsky, being the first to grasp the real significance of the mood of the ancient classical poets, and to appropriate not only their views on life and enjoyment, but even their plastic and thoroughly artistic mode of expression. While Zhukovsky removed poetry from earth and rendered it ethereal, Batiushkoff fixed it to earth and gave it a body, demonstrating all the entrancing charm of tangible reality. Yet, in language, point of ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... much? Haven't you spoiled anything?" "Oh, I don't think so," he replied; "when I have a work that demands a particular tension of the mind, I am in a state of extraordinary nervous excitement; images are clearer, my senses are more alert, and for the form, why, the style is plastic, and steadily becomes better in proportion as the tension becomes stronger." She sighed, and added: "You are exhausting yourself and you will ruin your health. Just look at S. He spent two years in writing one ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... vehicles by which the pigment is made fluent and plastic are quite as important in their effects. They not only have to do with the business of drying, owing to the substances used as dryers, but they may have to do with the chemical action of one pigment ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... hollows and slopes, that carry at once the air of vegetative dilatation and expansion:—Or, was there even a time when these immense masses of calcareous matter were thrown into fermentation by some adventitious moisture, were raised and leavened into such shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs into the sky, so much above the less animated clay of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... actions only are wanting, And to awake the glad harp, only a welcoming ear. Happy bards of a happy world! Your life-teeming accents Flew round from mouth unto mouth, gladdening every race. With the devotion with which the gods were received, each one welcomed That which the genius for him, plastic and breathing, then formed. With the glow of the song were inflamed the listener's senses, And with the listener's sense, nourished the singer the glow— Nourished and cleansed it,—fortunate one! for whom in the voices Of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... artist's eye. A vigorous bust of his godfather was his acknowledged masterpiece, so far, in the modelling line, which he preferred to brush or pencil. But first and foremost, literature claimed him: poetry, essays, and the despised novel—truest and most plastic medium for interpreting man to man and race to race: the most entirely obvious medium, thought Roy, for promoting the cause ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... development theory, of a demi-man. Or it might have been that of an old Irish gentleman, gentle in truth;—in the formative stage of society it is the monster that leaves traces of himself, as in an old geologic period the huge reptile left his tracks in the plastic earth, which afterward hardened ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ages of the filmic cosmos, the Jurassic Period of pictures, so to speak, this little group of pathfinders tracking under the chieftainship of Mr. Lobel into almost uncharted wilds of artistic endeavor had dabbled in slap-stick one reelers featuring the plastic pie and the treacherous seltzer siphon, also the trick staircase, the educated mustache and the ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... world or with spiritual relations? Keep bugbears to frighten more timid and credulous persons. But only see how he uses the world, and plays his scheme, and foils his adversary and twists and bends his plastic morality, all because he is not troubled with scruples, and has no ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... inherent qualities in the matter which it draws round it. Only thought-forms of this third class can usefully be illustrated, for to represent those of the first or second class would be merely to draw portraits or landscapes. In those types we have the plastic mental or astral matter moulded in imitation of forms belonging to the physical plane; in this third group we have a glimpse of the forms natural to the astral or mental planes. Yet this very fact, which makes ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... by some abnormal mode of cerebral activity, the trance-speaker won strange sympathies from his auditors. Certain faculties in Clifton had reached an expansion not permitted to the healthy man. A plastic power came from him and took the impress of other minds. Old experiences groped out of forgotten corners and haunted the discourse. At one time it seemed as if all that was potential in the culture of the medium ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... The change that had come to his old pupil was marked enough. Strickland's mind dwelt on the old laird. Was that the personality, not of one, but of two, of the whole line, perhaps, developing all the time, step by step with what seemed the plastic, otherwise, free time of youth, appearing always in due season, when its hour struck? Would Alexander, with minor differences, repeat his father? How of the mother? Would the father drown the mother? In the enormous all-one, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... in alimentary diet only the plastic part of reconstruction of used-up corporal matter, it might be advantageous to ingest but one albumin the composition of which is very similar to our own. By virtue of the law of least effort such a one in ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... required in perfect riveting is that the metal of the rivet while hot and plastic shall be made to flow into all the irregularities of the rivet holes in the boiler sheets; that the surplus metal be formed into heads as large as need be, and that the pressure used to produce these results should ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... esteem; but he bears upon him the scars of his twelve years' conflict; of the mean sorrows through which he has passed; and of the cheap indulgences he has sought relief and help from. There is nothing plastic in his nature now. His manners and habits are completely formed; and in them any further success can make little favorable change, whatever it may effect for his mind or genius." ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... owner of Woodbine Lodge with every enticement she could offer; but he saw not her charms; felt not the strong attractions with which she sought to win his admiration. Far away his thoughts were wandering, and in the dim distance Fancy was busy with half-defined shapes, which her plastic hand, with rapid touches, moulded into forms that seemed instinct with a purer life, and to glow with a more ravishing beauty than any thing yet seen in the actual he had made his own. And as these forms became more and more vividly pictured in his imagination, the pace of ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... on a man. I have mentioned his dark locks—they were brushed sideways above a white and sufficiently expansive forehead; his cheek had a rather hectic freshness; his features might have done well on canvas, but indifferently in marble: they were plastic; character had set a stamp upon each; expression re-cast them at her pleasure, and strange metamorphoses she wrought, giving him now the mien of a morose bull, and anon that of an arch and mischievous girl; more frequently, the two semblances were blent, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... native heath of London; but—hardly the garment of good writing. Good writing is only the perfect clothing of mood—the just right form. Shakespeare's form, you will say, was extraordinarily loose, wide, plastic; but then his spirit was ever changing its mood—a true chameleon. And as to the form of Mr. Shaw—who was once compared with Shakespeare—why! there is none. And yet, what form could so perfectly express Mr. Shaw's glorious crusade against stupidity, his wonderfully sincere ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... specimen of a young woman from the United States with whom I became acquainted. Even after I had seen a good deal of her work, I could not feel wholly attracted by her talent, which sometimes expressed itself rather in a pictorial than a plastic form, and had a fondness for emotional effects. But she was a true artist, and a true woman, and I have never, in any woman, encountered a will like hers. She was uninterruptedly busy. Although, now that the time of her departure was so near, a few boxes were ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... has always an interest in improving his condition, is it not futile to forbid him to re-make his world as beat he can? Why prematurely claim to have reached finality, when unexpected novelties may shatter any system before it is even completed? Our world is plastic, it is most 'really' what we can make of it, and the process of our making is not ended. Whether a decree of Fate has fixed any ultimate limits to our efforts we have no means of knowing, and no occasion to assume. ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... been drawn to the classical nobility from which Berlioz's art so spontaneously springs. It is not fully acknowledged that he was, of all nineteenth-century musicians, the one who had in the highest degree the sense of plastic beauty. Nor do people always recognise that he was a writer of sweet and flowing melodies. Weingartner expressed the surprise he felt when, imbued with current prejudice against Berlioz's lack of melodic invention, he opened, by chance, the score of the overture of Benvenuto and found in that ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... the East, I had fallen into a holy lethargy and calm contemplation of the everlasting substances, more especially of yours and mine. Greatness in repose, most people say, is the highest aim of plastic art. And so, without any distinct purpose and without any unseemly effort, I thought out and bodied forth our everlasting substances in this dignified style. I looked back and saw how gentle sleep overcame us in the midst of our embrace. Now and then one of us would open an ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... before he replaced it, he drew the back of his soft leather glove across his dripping forehead. The unconventional action touched her keenly. She was sensitively subject to outward impressions, and "the plastic" had long been her delight, ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... time were not neglected. When she was at school, the father wrote her regularly, and did not allow one of her letters to wait a day for its affectionate answer. He corrected her spelling and her grammar, instilled sound truths into her mind, and formed her habits. From this plastic clay, with inexpressible love and patient toil, he ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... effort, for a husband. And as she listened to his tale of "I done this" and "I done that" and "I will do this and that" she thought how she, a woman of tact and judgment and refinement, might take into her hands this thing and, in a sense, make it plastic clay, and use its elements of life, and power, and energy, and unscrupulousness, and nerve, and egotism, and mountain courage, and almost make a man like ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... third theory supposes that the worship of stones was derived from the unskilfulness of the primitive sculptors, who, unable to frame, by their meagre principles of plastic art, a true image of the God whom they adored, were content to substitute in its place a rude or scarcely polished stone. Hence the Greeks, according to Pausanias, originally used unhewn stones to represent their deities, thirty of which that historian says he saw ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... indirect division). On the other hand, the egg-substance of the female germ-cell, which is assimilated by the chromosomes, and which is turned into their substance by the process of organic chemistry, loses its specific plastic vital energy completely. It is in the same way that food eaten by the adult has absolutely no effect on his qualitative organic structure. We may eat ever so many beef-steaks without acquiring any of the characteristics of an ox. And the ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... soaring, chastely white structure of silicoid plastic, dazzling in the hot morning sun. It crossed Allen's mind fleetingly that everything built nowadays would long outlast the builders. That seemed right, but he didn't ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage
... a daze, hoping against hope, he saw a thread hanging from the crevice between door and frame. He pulled at it, and drew out a tiny strip of scandium, the new compressible metal that had become fashionable for engagement rings. Plastic, all but invisible, it could be compressed to the thickness of a sheet of paper: it was the token of secret lovers, and Kay had given Ruth a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... England. Shells, Nummulites, Fish and Reptiles of the Bracklesham Beds and Bagshot Sands. Plants of Alum Bay and Bournemouth. Lower Eocene of England. London Clay Fossils. Woolwich and Reading Beds formerly called "Plastic Clay." Fluviatile Beds underlying Deep-sea Strata. Thanet Sands. Upper Eocene Strata of France. Gypseous Series of Montmartre and Extinct Quadrupeds. Fossil Footprints in Paris Gypsum. Imperfection of the Record. Calcaire Silicieux. Gres de Beauchamp. Calcaire Grossier. Miliolite Limestone. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... waiting in the concourse surged through the gate leading to Track Seven, three boys in the royal-blue uniforms of the Space Cadet Corps slowly picked up their plastic space bags and joined the mass ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... powers of judgment as she had, and long habit of always giving way, had helped to convert Mrs. Lake's naturally weak will and unselfish disposition into a sort of mental pulp, plastic to any pressure from without. To men she invariably yielded; and, poor specimen of a man as the Cheap Jack was, she had no fibre of personal judgment or decision in the strength of which to oppose his assertions, and every instant she became more and more convinced that wares ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... tape off six months from now in Johannesburg on Terra, they could look in the cargo holds of the ship that had brought it across five hundred light-years of space. Ingots of gold and platinum and gadolinium. Furs and biochemicals and brandy. Perfumes that defied synthetic imitation; hardwoods no plastic could copy. Spices. And the steel coffer full of sunstones. Almost all luxury goods, the only really ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... influences cannot be exaggerated. Their part in the formation of character is greater than that of all others, because they touch the powers and faculties of the child during those years in which it is most plastic. Neither the school nor the university can ever entirely counteract the effect of the home. The whole period of childhood is one in which the soul is under tutelage, and in which more is done for it by others than by itself. It can no more select its own environment than it ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... life. He has been in England already (1743-17—?); he is a great unknown. Nobody can accuse him of anything dishonest or dishonorable. When he was here before we were all mad about music, and so he enchanted us with his violin. But Italy knows him as an expert in the plastic arts, and Germany admires in him a master in chemical science. In France, where he was supposed to possess the secret of the transmutation of metals, the police for two years sought and failed to find any normal source of his opulence. A lady of forty-five ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... poet; S.L. Rapoport, one of the first and profoundest of Jewish historians, and Nahman Krochmal, the saintly philosopher. Into this circle of "shining ones" Levinsohn was introduced, and each and all left an impression, some greater, some less, upon his plastic soul. It was there and then, in the congenial company of friends of about his own age, that Levinsohn determined to devote himself to improving the educational system of his people and began to plan his work on Learning in Israel (Te'udah be-Yisrael), which procured for ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... heels, or, as is not infrequently the case, are standing or hung on nothing, as though they were graven of some bewitched magnetic stone. Here for the first time is seen, in the sculptured figures of the three great portals, the plastic forms which were to add so greatly to the Gothic architecture: male and female saints, Evangelists, and Apostles in great array, all somewhat more than life-size. Only one adverse impression is cast: that of petrifaction. The figures, almost without ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... been confined, burst into an uproar; and, having vented itself at first in opprobrious words, laughs, hisses, and gestures, betook itself at last to certain missile weapons; which, though from their plastic nature they threatened neither the loss of life or of limb, were however sufficiently dreadful to a well-dressed lady. Molly had too much spirit to bear this treatment tamely. Having therefore—but hold, as we are diffident of our own abilities, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... a gobble, and wagged his tail, as if the feat must surely please his new masters; that he had long had the benefit of civilized cooking, and knew a gentleman by his toggery; that, moreover, he was of a teachable, plastic nature, and was meant to lie down in due time upon the hearth rug before the fire, in any gentleman's sitting room in the land. It may be true. I believe all this myself, and a good deal more, about him; and I take renewed hope also for this great republic—which is the hope of the world!—that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the literary Renaissance, French but transfigured by Italy, middle-north of the plains but looking southward to the Mediterranean, came to one soul and concentrated upon it, as the plastic expression of the same influence concentrated in Goujon. Very central in time, half soldier, half priest, all student; traveller and almost adventurer, a pilgrim throughout of the Idea, everything about him is symbolic ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... were winged creatures, the forms derived immediately from Phoenicia, ultimately from Babylonia; they appear only in the great public cult, probably did not enter into the religious life of the people at large, and there is no evidence that they ever received divine worship.[2012] The Hebrews had no plastic art of their own, seem to have had small disposition in their earlier history to make images, and later such forms were excluded by the antagonism of the prophets to foreign cults and by refined ideas of the deity.[2013] The absence of images in the Zoroastrian cult may ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... have endeavoured to establish be disputed or not, the absolute correspondence between the Moral and the Physical is, at any rate, the essential ground of the Plastic arts; which could not else exist, since through Form alone they have to convey, not only thought and emotion, but distinct and permanent character. For our own part, we cannot but consider their success in this as having ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... least developed, and in some respects still the least important part of the real self: that whole man of impulse, thought and desire, which it is the business of religion to capture and domesticate for God. That whole man is an animal-spirit, a living, growing, plastic unit; moving towards a racial future yet unperceived by us, and carrying with him a racial past which conditions at every moment his choices, impulses and acts. Only the most rigid self-examination will disclose to us the ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... affected by sporadic apparitions of riotous religious monomaniacs called Santones (vide p. 189). These conditions, therefore, favoured the nefarious work of the cunning Tagalog and Panay refugees, who found plenty of plastic material in the Negros inhabitants for the fruitful dissemination of the wildest and most fantastic notions anent the horrors awaiting them in the new Anglo-Saxon domination. They found no sympathy with the native ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... in an inflamed tissue are first those of congestion, distention of the blood vessels, and exudation of the fluid of the blood into the surrounding fibers, with, however, a more nearly complete stagnation of the blood; fibrin, or lymph, a plastic substance, is thrown out as well, and the cells, which we have seen to be living organisms in themselves, no longer carried in the current of the blood, migrate from the vessels and, finding proper nutriment, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... conclusions. All the facts presented to us in the natural world tend to show that none of the variations produced in the fixed forms of animal life, when seen in its most plastic condition under domestication, give any promise of a true transmutation of species; first, from the difficulty of accumulating and fixing variations within the same species; secondly, from the fact ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... while developing the scenes and music of Young Siegfried, that I had only increased the necessity for a clearer presentation of the whole story to the senses. I now see that, in order to become intelligible on the stage, I must work out the whole myth in plastic style. It was not this consideration alone which impelled me to my new plan, but especially the overpowering impressiveness of the subject-matter which I thus acquire for presentation, and which supplies me with a wealth of material for artistic fashioning which it would be a sin to leave ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... of oratory, we repeat, is expressing mental phenomena by the play of the physical organs. It is the translation, the plastic form, the language of human nature. But man, the image of God, presents himself to us in three phases: the sensitive, intellectual and moral. Man feels, thinks and loves. He is en rapport with the physical world, with the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... what any of us know, from the reels, and the latest development from the box when you're ready to start out. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. The paper we use is a digestible plastic, so make a meal off all orders and confidential communications you receive. The box always contains a supply for your reports or requests for specific information ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... the beginning of this century referring to a century earlier and a promiscuous date upon one chapel, can carry but little weight. I shall assume, therefore, henceforward, that we have here groups designed in a plastic material by Tabachetti, and reproduced in wood by the best local wood-sculptor available, with the exception of a few figures cut ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... for Sir Charles, and he was not afraid to say so. But his liberty of appreciation owed something also to the circumstances of his education. The fact that he had never been at a public school—thus missing, in the plastic years of a sensitive boyhood, the influences which make most strongly for conventionality of outlook among men of a certain class—made it easier for him than it might otherwise have been to examine literary questions with his own eyes, and not through ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... my face, but could not distinguish by sight that it was there. A few pale, phosphorescent gleams, that seemed to be wandering in the air, I was convinced were only the remembrances of the optic nerve,—eidolons of the retina; but they seemed to some extent plastic to my thoughts, and ready to become the subjective creations of the brain, outlined in the dark. I could conceive then how the brain, excited by fear, or stimulated by emotion, might multiply these phantasms, moulding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... trying to do or effect something, an attitude that involves anticipatory forecasts which stimulate their present responses. The anticipated result, however, is rather a subsequent action than the production of a specific change in things. Consequently play is free, plastic. Where some definite external outcome is wanted, the end has to be held to with some persistence, which increases as the contemplated result is complex and requires a fairly long series of intermediate adaptations. When the intended act is another activity, it is not necessary to look far ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... iron horse performs its work, it gradually wears out its pistons, its rods, its wheels, its boiler-tubes, all of which have to be made good from time to time. The founder and the smith repair it, supply it, so to speak, with 'plastic food,' the food that becomes embodied with the whole and forms part of it. But, though it have just come from the engine-shop, it is still inert. To acquire the power of movement it must receive ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... fete appeared as Joan of Arc, armed cap-a-pie, riding a snow-white stallion. Romney, the portrait-painter, spending a week-end with Sir Henry, was struck with the picturesque beauty of the child and painted her as Diana. Romney was impressed with the plastic beauty of the girl, her downcast eyes, her silent ways, her responsive manner, and he begged Sir Harry to allow her to go to London and sit for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... green bowl held in the hands of the clustered hills; shallow, circular, as though, while plastic still, the thumb of God had run round its rim, shaping it. Around it the peaks crowded, craning their lofty heads to ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... crocks were turned out in the following manner: The potter's wheel was rotated about sixty turns a minute, and the clay, in a plastic state, was put in the cup-shaped top, and the hands used to force the clay up the side wall. When the crock was formed in as even a manner as it could be by hand, the blade described was used to ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... earth, and is slowly elaborated into an independent concept. As many words in ancient languages have an undefined meaning, and lend themselves to various purposes according to the various intentions of the speakers, the names of the gods also share in this elastic and plastic character of ancient speech. There are passages where Parganya means cloud, there are passages where it means rain. There are passages where Parganya takes the place which elsewhere is filled by Dyaus, the sky, or by Indra, the active god of the atmosphere. This may seem very wrong ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... Wycke in throwing off on her partner's trump and swooping down on the last trick with her right bower? Melicent would have thought it beneath her to more than look her contempt as Mrs. Van Wycke rose with a triumphant laugh to take her place at a higher table, dragging the plastic Bloomdale with her. But she did mutter ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... why he still lived, breathed: a suit. A yellow, plastic, water-tight suit, with an orange-on-black shield on the left breast pocket, and a clear bubble-helmet. He felt weight on his back and examined it: two air tanks and their regulator, a radio, and ...
— Cully • Jack Egan
... said Eglamore; "farewell, poor clay so plastic the least touch remodels you! I had a part in shaping you so bestial; our age, too, had a part—our bright and cruel day, wherein you were set too high. Yet for me it would perhaps have proved as easy to have made a learned recluse of you, Alessandro, or a ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... statuette in coloured wax, modeled with much taste and spirit by some novice hand. But the phenomenon, even thus reduced by a rational explanation, did not cease to excite my surprise. How, and by whom, had the Lady of the Cosmography been enabled to assume plastic existence? That was what remained for ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... felt himself dwarfed by the hauteur of certain of her glances, by the imposing expression of a face that was wholly aristocratic, by a sort of pride which women know how to express in slight motions, turns of the head, and slow gestures, effects less plastic and less studied than we think. The false situation in which Beatrix had placed herself compelled her to watch her own behavior, and to keep herself imposing without being ridiculously so. Women of the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... is not a usable substitute for a patch bud cutter. It seems to do very well. The patches are small, but as an aid in tieing them in I prepared short strips of painter's masking tape with a thin coat of a plastic grafting wax on one side. In the center of each piece of tape is a hole just large enough for the bud to show through. The tape is pressed on over the bud patch, after which the usual binding ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... problems which remain perpetually interesting are those which deal with the influence of environment on races, and that of races on environment. What happens when the people are plastic and their circumstances rigid? What when the people are rigid and unyielding, and their surroundings fluent and unabiding? And does character depend on what is outside, or does the dominant quality of a race remain, as some vainly think, for ever? These are puzzling questions, ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... and gently with his uncle, struggling to win the old man's consent to his departure. But Spicer South's brain was no longer plastic. What had been good enough for the past was good enough for the future. He sought to take the most tolerant view, and to believe that Samson was acting on conviction and not on an ingrate's impulse, but that was the best he could do, and he added to himself that Samson's was an abnormal ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... book invited him to consult the wants of the Norwich festival and to write in the cantata style. In the first act, however, there is little to praise outside of the settings of the two Anacreonic odes and the song to the shell. There is much striving, but a paucity of plastic ideas. What might have been an unconstrained lyrical outpouring, the prologue, mere thundering in the index, because of the composer's mistaken impression that it ought to be tragic, and in the "Ercles vein." When the rites begin and a swelling paean is expected, there ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... dislikes, sympathies and antipathies, tastes and feelings, in common with all human nature. The sooner he perceives this fact, and adapts himself accordingly, the easier will be his journey among the several races of the interior. The more plastic his nature, the more prosperous will be ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... statement; and, naturally, more than all the rest, you come to me that way. But as a child—who knows why?" he relinquished the answer with an opened palm. "And young like that, perhaps ten, I love you more sharply, more unutterably, than at any other age. What is it I love? Not your adorable plastic body, not that. ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... heaven, and nothing more vain than the disputes of so-called sages. These were the true models for Varro, a man full of old Roman indignation at the pitiful times and full of old Roman humour, by no means destitute withal of plastic talent but as to everything which presented the appearance not of palpable fact but of idea or even of system, utterly stupid, and perhaps the most unphilosophical among the unphilosophical Romans.(23) But Varro was no slavish pupil. The impulse and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the same fanciful vein. We now know that there can be no cavities more than a few miles below the crust of a planet, simply because, under the enormous pressures which would exist, the most solid matter would be perfectly plastic. But while Whewell's general objection to the theory that Jupiter or Saturn is in the same condition as our earth thus acquires new force, the particular explanation which he gave of the planet's small density is open to precisely ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... was neatly bound in thin, tough, plastic tangle-cord, swathed from chin to boot-bottoms, my arms imprisoned, my feet caught. And tangle-cord is about as easy to get out of as a spider's web is for ...
— The Hunted Heroes • Robert Silverberg
... figures became plastic and tilted at each other menacingly; the woman seized something and threw it; ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... James Melville, whose plastic nature and gentle spirit retained through life the impressions then made, supplements in his Diary the notices in Bannatyne's Memorials, and, in a passage which has been often quoted, gives a very fresh and vivid sketch of the old reformer. "Bot of all the benefites ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... me of any plastic young botanist who would come in all there glory and no pay, though I think pay may be got if the concern is properly worked. How ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... reproduction are that, through the rightly directed wills of the father and mother, preceding and during antenatal life, the child's form or body, character of mind and purity of soul are formed and established. That in its plastic state, during antenatal life, like clay in the hands of the potter, it can be molded into absolutely any form of body and soul the parents ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... didactic and the allegorical; but here, also, the same power of personification comes to his aid, and as, in the one case, he finds a soul for his bodies, so, in the other, he finds a body for his souls. As the ancient poets, and others who have been developed through a plastic sentiment for Art, introduce loftier spirits, related to the gods,—such as nymphs, dryads, and hamadryads,—in the place of rocks, fountains, and trees: so the author transforms these objects into peasants, and countrifies [verbauert] the universe in the most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... considerable freedom from old army tradition; many of its officers are ex-civil engineers and so forth; Headquarters is a little shy of technical direction; and all this in a service that is still necessarily experimental and plastic is to the good. There is little doubt that, given a release from prejudice, bad associations and the equestrian tradition, British technical intelligence and energy can do just as well as the French. Our problem with our army is not to create intelligence, ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... the country fifty thousand reverend gentlemen of every tincture of religious opinion who might ply him with their various theories, yet few of these would be contented unless they could seize him while his young nature was plastic, and try to imprint on immortal clay the trade-mark of ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... curls of Sennacherib's hair, just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of primaeval art was already hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying, already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess authentic records of man's abode upon ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... and happy thoughts build up the body in vigour and grace. The body is a delicate and plastic instrument, which responds readily to the thoughts by which it is impressed, and habits of thought will produce their own effects, good ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... high modelling, in some cases being almost detached from the door. The effect is curious and interesting rather than strictly beautiful, on the whole; but in detail many of the figures display rare power of plastic skill, proportion, and action. They are, at any rate, very individual: there are no other doors at all like them. They are the work of ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... Paper: "Munich, 22 July, 1840.—Much is at present said in the public papers respecting the imitations of medals, reliefs, etc., by means of a galvanic deposition of copper. This art, called Galvano plastic, first discovered by Professor Jacobi of St. Petersburg, and brought to greater perfection by Mr. Spencer, of Liverpool, and by Professor Von Kebel, of Munich, may justly be classed as one of the most useful of modern inventions; and, from its great importance, its employment in ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... The roar became a whining hum. Then for Madeline sound ceased to be anything—she could not hear. The wind was now heavy, imponderable, no longer a swift, plastic thing, but solid, like an on-rushing wall. It bore down upon Madeline with such resistless weight that she could not move. The green of desert plants along the road merged in two shapeless fences, sliding at her from the distance. Objects ahead began to ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
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