"Retentive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... most retentive memory, so that although he has painted so many thousand figures, as may be seen, he has never made one like to another, or in the same pose; indeed, I have heard him say that if ever he draws a line which he remembers to have drawn ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... stad. The Barala might be incorruptible; the weak spot was the native village, nevertheless. And the business of the man from Diamond Town was to lounge about its neighbourhood, using those sharp light eyes of his to excellent purpose, and storing his retentive memory—for it would not do for a stranger to be caught putting pencil to paper in a town under Martial Law, and bristling with suspicion—with the information indispensable for the putting in effect of young ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... After this exploit (enough for one man), Thomas Westwood seems to have subsided into a less hazardous occupation; and in the twenty-fifth year of his age we find him a haberdasher in Bow Lane: yet still retentive of his early riding (though leaving it to rawer stomachs), and Christmasly at night sithence to this last, and shall to his latest Christmas, hath he, doth he, and shall he, tell after supper the story of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... extraordinarily retentive, and he seemed, without conscious effort, to have stored in his mind almost every whimsical or ludicrous narrative which he had read or heard. "On several occasions," says Mr. Brooks, "I have held in my hand ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... my violin and we played. Cecilia's musical memory is prodigious. Mine is also retentive and precise. But she had too much inventive genius for precision, unless the notes were before her, and sometimes I corrected her. Next, this delicious interlude over, I begged that the ladies would do me the honour to ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... adolescence, altruism "appears in the early teens," and the sex instinct "after about a dozen years of life." The child of from four to six is largely sensory, from seven to nine he is motor, from then to twelve the retentive powers are prominent. In the adolescent period he is capable of thinking logically and reasoning, while maturity finds him a man of responsibilities and affairs. Although there is some truth in the belief that ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... quick vein of poetry, and in their language—which is very emphatic—they compose rhyme and verse, both which powerfully affect the fancy. And in my judgment (which is not singular in this matter) with as great force as that of any ancient or modern poet I ever read. They have generally very retentive memories; they see things at a great distance. The unhappiness of their education, and their want of converse with foreign nations, deprives them of the opportunity to cultivate and beautify their genius, which seems to have been formed by nature ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... invention of printing and try to imagine a man who had read all the rolls destroyed in the Library of Alexandria by successive burnings. (Some reckon the number of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further, this man to be gifted with a memory retentive as Lord Macaulay's. Suppose lastly that we go to such a man and beg him to repeat to us some chosen one of the fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of Euripides. It is incredible that he ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Linda. "From the short acquaintance I have with him I should not call him at all imaginative, but he is extremely quick and wonderfully retentive. You have to show him but once from which cactus he can get Victrola needles and fishing hooks, or where to find material ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... read many books and seen much of life, having travelled all over our own country, and visited both Europe and South America; and possessing a retentive memory, fine descriptive powers, a fund of humor, and a decided talent for mimicry, was able, when he chose, to make his conversation exceedingly amusing and interesting, and very instructive. Also, he seemed all that was good and noble, and she soon gave him a ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... certain amount of movement between the ends of a fractured bone favours their union by promoting the formation of callus, and advocated the treatment of fractures by massage and movement, discarding almost entirely the use of splints and other retentive appliances. We were early convinced by the teaching of Lucas-Championniere, and have ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... learned a certain thing, in speaking to them she used English for that thing. The Folk, keen-witted and retentive of memory as barbarians often are, made astonishing strides in ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... to be mentioned, though this catalogue does not claim to be exhaustive. FICUS FASCICULATA, as the title implies, bears its inedible fruit in bundles, branches, trunk, and exposed roots, being alike fertile, and is almost as retentive of life as the cockatoo apple. Opposita is remarkable for varied form of foliage, referred to particularly elsewhere, and for the sweetness of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Heide mit Leben," said Goethe; but it was the life which was everlasting because it was typical: the life not which had been relinquished by the one buried there, but the life which the world danced on, forgetful, round his ashes. The Romans, on the contrary, graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as well as more domestic, less coffee-house living, appear to have inherited from the Etruscans a desire to preserve the effigy of the dead, a desire unknown to the Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where husband ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... and Hardy, the Vivacity of whose Spirits, neither Heat can scorch, or dry up, nor Cold benumb or freez; he is Valiant, Watchfull, and Laborious, naturally Cleanly, and of exquisite Scent; Gentle and Loving to man, docile, and of a retentive Memory, and Apt or Fit for the performing any Service wherein man employes him. And for the Use of which I am now speaking (Racing) he ought to be endued with these Qualifications. That he have the Finest Cleanest Shape ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... eyes pursuing him, he soon discovered where the boat had grounded, by the impress of her keel and forefoot on the stiff retentive mud. He could even see where a hawser had been made fast to a staunch old trunk, and where the soil had been prodded with a pole in pushing her off at the turn of tide. Also deep tracks of some very large hound, or wolf, or unknown ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... under his own eye, till they could discern between good and evil; so, with the assistance of his generous master, my father ventured on a small farm on his estate. At those years, I was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... are thoroughly inoculated with microorganisms that can consume cellulose and lignin. Even though it looks like humus, it has not yet fully decomposed. It does have a water-retentive, granular structure that facilitates the presence of air and moisture throughout the mass creating perfect conditions for ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... abstruse, from the novels of Sylvanus Cobb to Euclid's Elements, both of which I found (to my almost equal wonder) he had managed to peruse: he was taking stock by the way, of the people, the products, and the country, with an eye unusually observant and a memory unusually retentive; and he was collecting for himself a body of magnanimous and semi-intellectual nonsense, which he supposed to be the natural thoughts and to contain the whole duty of the born American. To be pure-minded, to be patriotic, to get culture ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... for foot-ball, cricket, or gymnastics—at that period when they have a good deal of leisure time, when they would regard the thing more as play than work—when their memories are strong and powerfully retentive, and when the principles and practice of military drill would be as thoroughly implanted in them as the power to swim or skate, so that, once acquired, they'd never quite lose it. I speak from experience, for I learned to skate and swim when a boy, and I feel that nothing—no ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... mitigate the ferocity of the people. But they have many things to contend against, and Corsica is still behind the other provinces of France. The people are idle, haughty, umbrageous, fiery, quarrelsome, fond of gipsy life, and retentive through generations of old feuds and prejudices to an almost inconceivable extent. Then the nature of the country itself offers serious obstacles to its proper colonisation and cultivation. The savage state of the island and its internal feuds have disposed the Corsicans to quit the seaboard for ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... selves. We can open the window and look out, and thus gather the facts as we choose. This is true wisdom. "Wisdom is the knowledge of God." Wisdom comes by intuition. It far transcends knowledge. Great knowledge, knowledge of many things, may be had by virtue simply of a very retentive memory. It comes by tuition. But wisdom far transcends knowledge, in that knowledge is a mere incident of ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... Let us consider two sets of words. The first, which is related to the tain group (see below), has a key-syllable that means holding: tenant, tenement, tenure, tenet, tenor, tenable, tenacious, contents, contentment, lieutenant, maintenance, sustenance, countenance, appurtenance, detention, retentive, pertinacity, pertinent, continent, abstinence, continuous, retinue. The second has a key-syllable that means stretching: tend, tender, tendon, tendril, tendency, extend, subtend, distend, pretend, contend, attendant, tense, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Detective-inspector Hawke was very busy. He made no written notes. He relied solely upon his marvellous retentive memory, and it was not long before he was in full possession of the facts ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... knew better than he how little regard John M. Hurd really felt for this mercurial youth. Yet Mr. Hurd had resisted with entire success all other means of approach. After all, family connections counted for something, even with the retentive old trolley magnate. So when at last he spoke, it was with the determination to show a part of his hand, at ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... is excellent," retorted the general, shortly; for a man must resent such an insinuation even from the wife of his bosom. "I've always been remarkable for an unusually strong and retentive memory, as you know very well—but it isn't superhuman. At the lowest computation, I guess I've seen about a million men's faces in the course of my life, and it's ridiculous to expect me to have 'em all sorted out, and ticketed ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... went. Their pace was regulated by her mother's, who advanced on the arm of Gabriel Nash (Nick Dormer was on her other side) in refined deprecation. Her sloping back was before them, exempt from retentive stillness in spite of her rigid principles, with the little drama of her lost and ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... four (not three) wooden bins in three declining sizes: two large, one medium-large and one smaller. Alternatively, bins may be constructed of unmortared concrete blocks with removable wooden fronts. Permanently constructed bins of mortared concrete block or wood may have moisture-retentive, rain-protective ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... Next you have the Retentive in the remotest part of the Place, which, like the Records in the Tower, takes Possession of all Matters, as they are removed from the Classes in the Repository, for want of room. These are carefully Lockt, and kept safe, never to be open'd but upon solemn Occasions, and have swinging ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... well-informed he was, and what an impartial mind he brought to bear on the subjects before him. He read very quickly, he could at a glance grasp the salient points of any question, and, having a wonderfully retentive memory, no important detail was lost sight of. He wrote both quickly and clearly, and had the faculty of presenting his points in a lucid manner. Like many military men, who are, when young, taken from their studies, he did not always write in the best of English, ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... strong natural yearning, not so much for applause as sympathy, which the cold fortune of their lifetime did but scantily supply; so that this unsatisfied appetite may make itself felt upon sensibilities at once so delicate and retentive, even a step or two beyond the grave. Leigh Hunt, for example, would be pleased, even now, if he could learn that his bust had been reposited in the midst of the old poets whom he admired and loved; though there is hardly a man among the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... RODMAN (published by Charles Scribner), is a natural, affectionate, and delightful narrative of early days, purporting to be from a charming old lady, who has both a retentive memory and an enviable gift of genial, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... produce a sensation, and he leaves a permanent disgust not to be got rid of. Who does not remember odious images that can never be washed out from the consciousness which they have stained? A man's vocabulary is terribly retentive of evil words, and the images they present cling to his memory and will not loose their hold. One who has had the mischance to soil his mind by reading certain poems of Swift will never cleanse it to its original whiteness. Expressions and thoughts of a certain character ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... I have to remark, said Campuzano, is, that, as I was very attentive, my apprehension very sensitive, and my memory very retentive (thanks to the many raisins and almonds I had swallowed), I got it all by heart, and wrote it down, word for word, the next day, without attempting to colour or adorn it, or adding or suppressing anything to make it attractive. The ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... is the primary adjunct to memory! The human brain has billions of them, neuronically linked—sort of pathways that get grooved deeper and deeper with constant repetition of thought, until after a while they become completely permanent, retentive and self-functioning. ECAIAC is similarly equipped—not to the degree of the human brain, ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... interested him; he did not study them for complete mastery; and many and varied as are the traces of his literary interests, they have the air of being detached fragments that have stuck in a plastic and retentive mind, not pieces of systematic erudition. It is true that many books have been written to show that Shakespeare had the knowledge of a professional in law, medicine, navigation, theology, conveyancing, hunting and hawking, horsemanship, ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... bloodwood and pandanus, the rain pouring down all day. At two miles from camp a large creek was crossed containing a little rain water, and subsequently nine or ten small deep waterless creeks, their beds too sandy to be retentive. On one of these the wearied party camped at the end of 16 or 17 miles. A range 8 or 9 miles to the East, was sighted during the day. Notwithstanding the rain, barely sufficient water was found at the camp. Distance 17 miles. Course North. ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... waistcoat after bed-time, and go and sit, book in hand, under the gaslight in the passage. This was hard work, doubtless; but it brought its own reward in successful endeavour and an approving conscience. Under this discipline his memory rapidly grew retentive; no difficulty can stand the assaults of such batteries as these, and Walter was soon free from all punishments, and as happy as the day ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... dervish came to his turn to speak, he said: 'My tale is but short, although story-telling is my profession. I am the son of a schoolmaster, who, perceiving that I was endowed with a very retentive memory, made me read and repeat to him most of the histories with which our language abounds; and when he found that he had furnished my mind with a sufficient assortment, he turned me out into the world under the garb of dervish, to relate them in public to ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... bearings of the most intricate case, and contemplating them, as it were, not successively, but simultaneously. His perception was quick as light; and, at the same time—rare, most rare accompaniment!—his judgment sound, his memory signally retentive. Inferior, possibly, to Mr. Subtle in rapid and delicate appreciation of momentary advantages, he was sagacious, where Mr. Subtle was only ingenious. Mr. Attorney-General had as much weight with the judge as Mr. Subtle with the jury. With the former there was a candor and straightforwardness—a ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... of the time—perhaps eighteen months—that he remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading. Thus his whole time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those last months have exhausted the school—library, which consisted principally of abridgments of all the voyages and travels of any note; Mayor's Collection; ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... Philadelphia, March 5th, 1842. His parents died while he was still at a tender age, and he was placed with some relatives who resided in the city. From early years he was characterized by quick perceptions and a retentive memory. In the Philadelphia High School, from which he received the academic degree of Master of Arts, he was considered the best scholar in his class, a marked distinction in view of the large numbers which attend that institution. Besides ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... never deserts him; no harassing anxiety or distraction of mind, though separated from home and kindred, can make him complain. He thinks all will come out right at last, he has such faith in the goodness of Providence. Another thing which especially attracted my attention was his wonderfully retentive memory. His religion is not of the theoretical kind, but it is constant, earnest, sincere, practical; it is neither demonstrative nor loud, but manifests itself in a quiet, practical way, and is always at work. In him religion exhibits its loveliest features; ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... listeners made no comment on Miss Tyler's accusation of Mrs. Vrain, she paused only for a moment to recover her breath, and was off again in full cry with a budget of ancient gossip drawn from a very retentive memory. ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... treasures of fragrant hay and golden grain. The corn-house was filled with its yellow harvest, and the potatoes were heaped high in the cellar. Each different sort had its separate bin, and my memory is not sufficiently retentive to mention the numerous kinds of potatoes by their proper name which I that autumn assisted in stowing away in the old cellar; and potatoes were not the only good things to be found there when the harvest was completed. The apples were of almost as many different ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... Payson was associated with Chancellor Kent of New York, and Governor John Cotton Smith of Connecticut, as a committee to decide upon the rival claims. He is described as possessing a sharp, vigorous intellect, a lively imagination, a very retentive memory, and was universally esteemed as an able and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... ballad, something like "Vilikins and his Dinah," the production of a rural Kentucky bard, and when he had finished he added with a laugh, "I don't believe I have thought of that before for forty years." Mr. Arnold testifies that "although his reading was not extensive, yet his memory was so retentive and so ready that in history, poetry, and in general literature, few if any marked any deficiency. As an illustration of the powers of his memory, may be related the following: A gentleman called at ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... glad I shall be if you can assure me that it is. But, nonsense apart and begged-pardon-for, pray write me a line to say how you are, directing to this pretty place. 'The soil is in general a moist and retentive clay: with a subsoil or pan of an adhesive silicious brick formation: adapted to the growth of wheat, beans, and clover—requiring however a summer fallow (as is generally stipulated in the lease) every fourth year, etc.' This is not ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... expected in due time to become professor of Greek. As professor of the mellifluous and most plastic of all the ancient tongues, he would undoubtedly have been proficient, as his college classics still remain fresh in his warm and retentive memory, and his literary taste is so severe and chaste as to make some of his scientific papers read like a psalm. But nature designed him for another, and some think a better, field, and endowed him with powers as a naturalist ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... past. Despair was unnumbered among the emotions that grew round that child-like heart; shame, fear, and grief, however they might overshadow it for a time, left no taint of their presence on its bright, fine surface. Tender, perilously alive to sensation, strangely retentive of kindness as she was by nature, the very solitude to which she had been condemned had gifted her, young as she was, with a martyr's endurance of ill, and with a stoic's ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... and to be known must be observed; while in other forms of lessons the attention may be diverted for a moment to return to the consideration of exactly what was being observed before. It goes without saying that in one case quick and accurate observation, a retentive memory, and the association of causes and effects follow, and that in the other ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... weak. I do not think, however, that any one would have guessed by looking at me as I then appeared at the age of seven and twenty, that I was an exceedingly hard-working man with extraordinary powers of observation and a really retentive memory. ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... kept either note-book or journal, and as my memory is not a retentive one I have allowed much to escape which I should now vainly attempt to recall. Some things must, however, have made a vivid and durable impression on my mind, as fragments remain, after the lapse of years, far more distinct than occurrences of much more recent date; such, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... the famed statue had defied the most recondite searchers of the past. For the following we are indebted to the retentive memory of that eminently respected authority, the "oldest inhabitant." The statue of Neptune, says the octogenarian, Robert Urquhart, so well remembered at the foot of Mountain Hill, was presented to the landlord of the hotel, George Cossar, formerly butler to Hon. Matthew Bell, who then owned ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Chinese and Japanese use rice very extensively, and this grain is growing in favor with us. White people generally prefer wheat, which is an excellent grain that has been used by man for thousands of years. It has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and it is so retentive of life that it has started to grow after lying dormant for several thousand years. Truly it is a ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... can only say then that, whatever the required amount may be it must be very considerable, for in addition to the above-mentioned losses of manure, we require a considerable amount for the demands of the coffee trees, and that, further, it must vary with the amount of the rainfall, and the retentive or non-retentive character of the soil. The crop, it is true, takes comparatively little from the soil, and Mr. John Hughes, Agricultural Chemist, 79, Mark Lane,—points out in his "Reports on Ceylon Soils and Coffee Manures," that 5 cwt. of ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... Merlin. The circumstance to which you allude was beyond my control, and Mr.—a—Word's share in it without my consent; his service was, I believe, well repaid by my father; and the trouble with me is not that my memory is defective, but rather that it is too retentive. I ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... exercises:—And this was the more remarkable, that having turned his thoughts towards the ministry, he carried on his theological studies at the same time, and made great improvements therein, for his memory was so retentive, that he scarcely forgot any thing had heard or read. It was easy and ordinary for him to inscribe any sermon, after he returned to his chamber, at such a length, that the intelligent and judicious reader, who had heard it preached, would not ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... Possessing a retentive memory, he has been further able to assist me with seven large volumes of newspaper cuttings which he had collected since 1853, while the publishers kindly permit the use of two articles he contributed to Murray's Magazine in May and July 1887. To me the preparation of this ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... well enough, nor is it needful further to explain it to you, that the Utopian men had so rank and fruitful genitories, and that the Utopian women carried matrixes so ample, so gluttonous, so tenaciously retentive, and so architectonically cellulated, that at the end of every ninth month seven children at the least, what male what female, were brought forth by every married woman, in imitation of the people of Israel ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... poison had gone deep. Whenever he could he went to hear old Brutus speak. Eagerly he heard stories of the fearless abolitionist's hand-to-hand fights with men who sought to skewer his fiery tongue. Deeply he brooded on every word that his retentive ear had caught from the old man's lips, and on the wrongs he endured in behalf of his cause ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... it makes wise the simple by keeping the mind in a healthy condition; it enables a man to come off clear from a judicial inquiry; it qualifies him both to learn and to teach the law; it makes him eagerly listened to, to have a retentive memory, etc. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... cases where, in addition to the drain, it may be expedient to bore with an auger in the course of the drain. This, however, would be useful only where, from the peculiar formation, water is pent up upon a retentive subsoil in the manner already indicated. Elkington's method of draining by boring is illustrated ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... neophytes dates by the dozen and proper names—geographical ones in particular—by the score, impressing them on stubborn memories through the aid of some easily-learnt rhyme, or comic association, that made even the dullest comprehension retentive for awhile. ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... highest reward—we employ to exhort us to practise virtues, which, if we had been rightly educated, we should have practised from our earliest youth with as much facility as we read or write. If a child is to learn grammar, let him commence, every one will say, when young, while his memory is most retentive. If we are to teach him those principles which are to shape his destiny in life, and have their home in the heart, should we wait till it is least susceptible of impression? It cannot be denied that too much indifference prevails on this subject. We are apt to shut our eyes to the ...
— Reflections on the Operation of the Present System of Education, 1853 • Christopher C. Andrews
... my difficulty and offered me a second knife. Unfortunately, I misjudged the width of quails, and plunging this second knife into the pie a little farther on, I landed into the middle of another quail no less retentive of cutlery than the first. The dish now began to look more like a game than a pie, and, waving away a third knife, I said (quite truly by this time) that I didn't like quails, and that on second thoughts I would ask the Dowager Countess to lend me ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... artists' models—partly because his chic drawing, like Sir John Tenniel's, came natural to his genius, and his memory was extraordinarily retentive, and partly because when he began to draw for Punch, and for a long while after, it was unheard-of for black-and-white men on comic papers to do anything so seriously academic. But though he said that he had not in his life made half-a-dozen drawings from Nature, he was always sketching "bits" ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic, idiotic piety. I say idiotic piety because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... Sellerhausen near Leipzig. In 1636, his library and MSS. at Sellerhausen having been destroyed by fire, he removed to the Paulinum at Leipzig, where he died on the 17th of September 1658. Barth was a very voluminous writer; his works, which were the fruits of extensive reading and a retentive memory, are unmethodical and uncritical and marred by want of taste and of clearness. He appears to have been excessively vain and of an unamiable disposition. Of his writings the most important are; Adversaria (1624), a storehouse of miscellaneous learning, dealing not ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... academies, who pass their vacation in this way in order to earn enough to buy text-books or pay the winter's tuition. Many of them are more intelligent and well educated than some of the shoddies they wait upon. They are usually quicker in movement and of more retentive memory than the average American waiter; and though each has a great deal to do at times, yet even during the tremendous moment of dinner they contrive to find a few little intervals for harmless flirtations in the dining-room. They are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... dry soils when the winter is of only average severity. But on retentive soils, which are most favourable to the production of fine heads, a severe winter will destroy the plantations unless they have some kind of protection. The usual course of procedure is to cut down the stems and large ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... colours, led them back, undismayed, by a grove of pikes and a shower of missile weapons. With desperate but successful valour he carried the redoubt and escaped with life. All this passed under the immediate observation of Cromwell, whose retentive memory never forgot any signal action, and whose discriminating policy generally placed the man who performed it in a situation suited to his character. He soon found Monthault to be as perfidious and unprincipled ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... us what a librarian ought to be,—the organizing head, the vigilant guardian, the seeker's index, the scholar's counsellor? His work is not merely that of administration, manifold and laborious as its duties are. He must have a quick intelligence and a retentive memory. He is a public carrier of knowledge in its germs. His office is like that which naturalists attribute to the bumble-bee,—he lays up little honey for himself, but he conveys the fertilizing ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... concert engagement and she will jot it down in spite of the roar and vibration of railway travel. As the train rushes on the composition may be completely worked out in the composer's mind before the journey's end, and so retentive is Chaminade's memory that, when she returns to her villa in Vesinet, near the forest of St. Germain not far from Paris, she can seat herself at her table and copy the work from that mental vision of it which ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... tributary of the Ardges), concerning which some very famous verses have been written, proclaiming its waters to be so sweet that any one who drinks of them never desires to leave Bucarest. What its retentive properties may have been in former times we are not able to say, but we can quite imagine any person who ventures to drink of the water being incapable of leaving the city for ever afterwards. However, the ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... to say that the drawing-up of a tentative scenario ought not to be one of the playwright's first proceedings. Indeed, if he is able to dispense with a scenario on paper, it can only be because his mind is so clear, and so retentive of its own ideas, as to enable him to carry in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme. Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... in the virtues of steadfastness and loyalty, on which the social gifts can root deeply and bear perennial fruit. Of these he had rich store. His conversations possessed singular charm; for his melodious voice, facile fancy, and retentive memory enabled him to adorn all topics. His favourite themes were the Greek and Latin Classics. The rooms at Holwood or Walmer were strewn with volumes of his favourite authors, on whom he delighted to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... have been a very wealthy man, and brought his son to Paris, for the purpose of superintending his education, but died white he was still a child. In his youth, D'Holbach appears to have been noted for his studious habits and retentive faculties, and ultimately attained to some eminence in chemistry and mineralogy. He married when very young, and he had not been married one year when his wife died. He afterwards obtained a dispensation from the Pope, and married his deceased wife's sister, by whom ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... new vision still warm in my heart, I became very active in the parish Sunday School. My inability to read relegated me to the children's class; but I had a retentive memory, and before I was able to read, I memorized about three hundred texts from ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... so far as I could judge, had been acquired through the theatre. The unacted plays were not familiar to him. Few people realize what a person of alert intelligence and retentive memory can learn of the best English literature through the theatre-going habit. Measuring Field's opportunity by my own, during the decade from 1873 to 1883, here is a list of Shakespearian plays he could have taken in through eyes and ears without touching a book: ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... of Latin and Greek commonly taught to schoolboys; a waste which has led so many educational reformers to entertain the ill-judged proposal of discarding these languages altogether from general education. If I had been by nature extremely quick of apprehension, or had possessed a very accurate and retentive memory, or were of a remarkably active and energetic character, the trial would not be conclusive; but in all these natural gifts I am rather below than above par; what I could do, could assuredly ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... citations of parallel passages somewhat tend to hide from us the secret of Miltonic language. We are apt to think that the magical effect of Milton's words has been produced by painfully inlaying tesserae of borrowed metaphor—a mosaic of bits culled from extensive reading, carried along by a retentive memory, and pieced together so as to produce a new whole, with the exquisite art of a Japanese cabinet-maker. It is sometimes admitted that Milton was a plagiary, but it is urged in extenuation that his plagiarisms were ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... in close proximity to the scene of the story. Mr. Jones's informant was his mother, a lady whose mind was well stored with tales of by-gone times, and my friend and informant inherits his mother's retentive memory, as well as ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... said Mrs. Parry, a hatchet-faced dame with a venomous tongue and a retentive memory, "Morley's fond of children, although he has ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... happened that, in my schoolboy days, I had joined a class of young fellows who were learning what is called the "Sarvin' of Mass" and had impressed it so accurately on a pretty retentive memory, that I never forgot it. At length, Ned pulled, out his beads, and bedewed himself most copiously with the holy water. He then shouted out, with a voice which resembled that of a man in an ague ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... and Turner; and at the opposite end of the table, a Wake-ful one, but a grosser man than either, and something of the levanter: the bald-headed stag on his right goes by the quaint cognomen of the Japan oracle, from the retentive memory he possesses on all sporting and pugilistic events. The old waiter is a picture every frequenter will recognise, and the smoking a dozer no unusual bit of a spree. Here, my dear Bernard, you have before you a true portrait ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the Bororos were generally long and somewhat confused. They were the outcome of extremely imaginative and extraordinarily retentive minds. Their imagination frequently ran away with them, so that it was not always easy to transcribe the legends so as to render them intelligible to the average reader, unaccustomed to the peculiar way of thinking and reasoning of savages. Yet there was generally a certain amount of humorous ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... seniors, possessed of a knowledge of the scriptures, ready to listen to the instructions and counsels of those that are competent to instruct and give counsel, capable of judging correctly amid different or opposite courses of action suggested to him, intelligent, of a retentive memory, ready to do what is just, self-restrained, always sweet-speeched, forgiving even unto enemies, practising charity personally, possessed of faith, of agreeable features, ready to extend the hand ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... of a strict Jew. A child in such a home would learn by heart large pieces of the Old Testament, and, at the Synagogue school, all the minutiae of the Jewish Law. The pupil was not allowed to write anything down; all was committed to the memory, which in consequence became extremely retentive. The perfect pupil 'lost not a drop from his teacher's cistern.' At the age of about fourteen the boy would be sent to Jerusalem, to study under one of the great Rabbis; in St. Paul's case it was Gamaliel. Under his tuition ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... was young and had a loving bosom companion living, and tears were wiped from the old man's eyes. A new world seemed to unfold itself before the eyes of the happy lovers, and they were completely absorbed in contemplating the future. Furnished by nature with a disposition to study, and a memory so retentive that all who knew her were surprised at the ease with which she acquired her education and general information, Clotelle might now be termed a most accomplished lady. After her marriage with young Devenant, they proceeded to India, where the husband's regiment ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... to reach the school ideal, thus force herself to drive hard nails of fact into her vagrant thoughts. And with success. For she had, it turned out, a retentive memory, and to her joy learning by heart came easy to her—as easy as to the most brilliant scholars in the form. From now on she gave this talent full play, memorising even pages of the history book ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... with the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldee languages, but with philosophy, the mathematicks, canon and civil law, all parts of natural philosophy, and chymistry itself; for his application was unremitted, his head clear, his apprehension quick, and his memory retentive. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... boy, is very positive in them and sure about them; but he gets them from his schoolfellows, or his masters, or his parents, as the case may be. Such as he is in his other relations, such also is he in his school exercises; his mind is observant, sharp, ready, retentive; he is almost passive in the acquisition of knowledge. I say this is no disparagement of the idea of a clever boy. Geography, chronology, history, language, natural history, he heaps up the matter of these studies as treasures for a future day. It is ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... Mr. Boyd Dawkins to pilot me among the caves and cairns. Then I should want a better pair of eyes and a better pair of ears, and, while I was reorganizing, perhaps a quicker apprehension and a more retentive memory; in short, a new outfit, bodily and mental. But Nature does not care to mend old shoes; she prefers a new pair, and a young person to ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... is made lighter and more porous, and the lightest sand is readily made retentive of moisture and extremely productive, by plowing in different kinds of crops as green manure, such as cow peas, soy beans, the vetches, etc.; crimson clover, winter oats, rye, turnips, and numerous other crops may be sown in August or later, ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... the town of Trenton and its neighborhood, and, going about in every direction after cows and oxen, he learned the roads so well that he could make a very good map of them. Everything that could be of service to the American cause was jotted down in Honeyman's retentive memory; and when he had found out everything that he could find out, he thought it was fully time that he should acquaint Washington with the state of affairs in the ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... was silent for a moment; then she sat down by Lambert, and began to talk to him. Unfortunately, my memory, though retentive, is far from being so trustworthy as my friend's, and I have forgotten the whole of the dialogue excepting ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... She proved, too, wonderfully quick at detecting mistakes, and Barry, who had petitioned the heads of the office they had selected not to send him any Council School product, was pleased to find that her spelling was admirable, her grammar passable, and her memory retentive. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... shall deal with the use in reasoning of such curves, either actually 'plotted' or roughly imagined. In this chapter I point out, firstly, that they can be easily remembered (partly because our visual memory is extremely retentive of the image made by a black line on a white surface) and that we can in consequence carry in our minds the quantitative facts as to a number of variations enormously beyond the possibility of memory if they were treated as isolated instances; and secondly, that we can by imagining ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... this morning a singular proof of Dr. Johnson's quick and retentive memory. Hay's translation of Martial was lying in a window. I said, I thought it was pretty well done, and shewed him a particular epigram, I think, of ten, but am certain of eight, lines. He read it, and tossed away the book, saying—'No, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the concentrative chess-player will do very well at whist; while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by "the book," are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of Yuranigh, our own native, was at length made intelligible to our Barwan guide, and he shaped his course accordingly. He took us through scrubs, having in the centre those holes where water usually lodges for some time after rain, where some substratum of clay happens to be retentive enough to impede the common absorption. But the water in these holes had been recently drunk, and the mud trampled into hard clay by the hoofs of cattle. Thus it is, that the aborigines first become sensible of the approach of the white man. These retired spots, where ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... a soil provides for the roots the firmness of which I have spoken, while the gravel insures perfect drainage,—a matter of great importance in Rose-culture. Success cannot be expected in a soil unduly retentive of moisture. Very heavy soils can be lightened by the addition of coarse, sharp sand, old mortar, and cinders. If the location chosen does not furnish perfect drainage, naturally, artificial drainage ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... while Count von Nostitz stood near the hearth to take notes. Opposite to Von Moltke sat De Wimpffen alone; while in rear, 'almost in the shade,' were General Faure, Count Castelnau, and other Frenchmen, among whom was a cuirassier, Captain d'Orcet, who had observant eyes and a retentive memory. Then there ensued a brief silence, for Von Moltke looked straight before him and said nothing, while De Wimpffen, oppressed by the number present, hesitated to engage in a debate 'with the two men admitted to be the most capable of our age, each in his kind.' But he ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Montague, with Hurd, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, and the Rev. Mr. Arnold, as preceptor and sub-preceptor. During his education, common report spoke highly of the prince's quickness of apprehension, retentive memory, and general aptitude for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... reserved, courteous, and as majestic, it is said, in his dressing-gown as in his robes of state. A contemporary wrote that he would have been every inch a king, "even if he had been born under the roof of a beggar." Louis possessed much natural intelligence, a retentive memory, and great capacity for work. It must be added, however, that his general education had been much neglected, and that throughout his life he remained ignorant and superstitious. Vanity formed a striking trait in the character of Louis. He accepted the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... he awoke somewhat late in the afternoon, did not exactly complain of headache, he was free to admit that his faculties were slightly clouded, and that his memory was not to the desired extent retentive of all that passed on the preceding night. Indeed, beyond the fact—which he reiterated with great energy—that 'old Flood, Tory though he was, was a good fellow, an excellent fellow, and had a marvellous bin of port wine,' his son Dick was totally unable to get any ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... my doors oppos'd against my passage? Have I been ever free, and must my house Be my retentive enemy, my gaol? The place which I have feasted, does it now, Like all mankind, show me ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... father dying three years afterwards, the home of the grandparents became their permanent abode. They had one brother, now Judge Breckinridge of St. Louis. Margaret's school-days were pleasantly passed, for she had a genuine love of study, an active intellect, and a very retentive memory. When her school education was over, she still continued her studies, and never gave up her prescribed course until the great work came upon her which absorbed all her time and powers. In the year 1852 her sister married Mr. Peter ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... linger. The water-table should be at least two feet from the surface. If by chance this comes naturally, so much the better, but otherwise the land must be tile-drained. Sloping land is by no means always well drained, many hillsides having a subsoil so impervious or so retentive of moisture that under-drainage is a necessity. The texture of the land is usually improved so greatly by good drainage that the grower has little need to rely on the clemency of the season in carrying on vineyard ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... boots, grasped his stick, and began to climb upward through the thickly growing trees towards the house of the sirens. His instinct had told him upon the terrace that the padrone was there. Uneducated people have often marvellously retentive memories for the things of every-day life. Gaspare remembered the padrone's question about the little light beside the sea, his answer to it, the way in which the padrone had looked towards the trees when, in the dawn, they stood upon the summit of the hill and ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... eternity. The faulty work can not be undone. The mistake can never be wholly rectified, for life never yields up what is given it. The look, the word, the invisible atmosphere of the home and church, the sights and sounds of all the busy days enter the super-sensitive and retentive soul of the child and are woven into life tissue. Character has no other from which to fashion itself. Therefore its final beauty and worth will be determined in large measure by the quality of the material ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... short time. Within three months she could express herself with tolerable ease in English and learned to read almost anything that was put before her either in French or English. How it happened she could hardly explain. It must have been the intuitive grasping of a mind prematurely active and retentive. She could read music as easily as a Boston girl of her age could read the daily papers, and it did not seem to her in any sense difficult to understand the much more simple alphabet of spoken language. She had only one objection to her tutor. He helped her over ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... still remembered by scores of people in Toronto. He has paid the penalty of his misdeeds, and I see nothing to be gained by perpetuating them in connection with his own proper name. In all other particulars the foregoing narrative is as true as a tolerably retentive memory has ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... curiosity, and, after some flattering language about Janet's good nature, retentive memory, and Covenanting lineage, the old crone proceeded to the following purpose; and, as nearly as we can mind, (for it is a tale o' fifty years,) repeated ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... retentive mind had seized, long ago, on Rowlatt's recommendation at the Little Bear Inn, and he had developed, perhaps half consciously, a half sense of humour. A whole sense, however, is not congruous with the fervid beliefs and soaring ambitions of eighteen. Your sense of humour, that delicate percipience ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... manufacturing city then, and the great rim of outlying factories that now besmirch the white stone of its house fronts had not come into existence, the atmosphere being as clear as in the country. A naturally retentive memory is apt to store up perfectly useless items of information. What possible object can there be to my remembering that the engine which hauled us from Calais to Paris in 1865 was built by J. Cail of Paris, on the "Crampton" system; that is, that the axle of the big single ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... rapture, and, after a pause, renewing her lascivious movements in response to my own, we sank in a perfect death-like swoon of thoroughly satiated lust, and gradually and imperceptibly fell into the deepest slumber for many hours, locked as we were in each other's arms. Her wonderfully retentive power of cunt held my happy prick a willing prisoner through our long sleep. I awoke first, to find it standing stiff within the charmed circle which even in her sleep was deliciously grasping it with its nervous ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... loss of self-respect reacts unfavourably on the moral sense. Ingratitude is a vice attributed to Bengalis by people who have done little or nothing to elicit the corresponding virtue. As a matter of fact their memory is extremely retentive of favours. They will overlook any shortcomings in a ruler who has the divine gift of sympathy, and serve him with devotion. Macaulay has branded them with cowardice. If the charge were true, it was surely illogical and unmanly to reproach a community numbering ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... world, keenly interested in the movements of men and in the page of history that unrolled itself before him day by day. To the discussion of things new, as readily as of things old, aided by a capacious, retentive and ready memory, which dispensed with reference to printed pages, he brought also the exquisite keenness and subtlety of his highly analytic and imaginative intellect, the illustrative stores of his vast ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... would, after long intervals, recognize persons whom he had never seen but once or twice. When employed in dictation, he would resume the thread of his discourse without being prompted, after the most vexatious interruptions. His judgment was as sound as his memory was retentive; it was almost infallible,—no one was ever known to have been misled by it. He had a remarkable analytical power, and also the power of generalization. He was a very learned man, and his Commentaries are among the most useful and valued of his writings, showing both ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... right taste is formed, is first, patient. It dwells upon what is submitted to it, it does not trample upon it lest it should be pearls, even though it look like husks, it is a good ground, soft, penetrable, retentive, it does not send up thorns of unkind thoughts, to choke the weak seed, it is hungry and thirsty too, and drinks all the dew that falls on it, it is an honest and good heart, that shows no too ready springing before the sun be ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... luxuriant bush, which will yield little fruit. Decomposing sandstone, and slate, known in Jamaica as rotten rock, mixed with vegetable mould, is one of the most favorable soils. The subsoil should be also carefully examined by a boring augur, for a stiff moist clay, or marly bottom retentive of moisture, is particularly injurious to the plant. A dark, rusty-colored sand, or a ferruginous marl on a substratum of limestone, kills the tree in a few years. In virgin lands, after the wood has been felled and cleared, the land is lined off into rows of from six to seven feet square, and ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... fresh tones which seemed occasionally to tremble with the excess of melody that burdened them played hide-and-seek among the hills, startling whole choruses of deep-throated echoes, and attending and retentive ocean, catching the strains on her beryl strings, bore them whither—and how far? To palm-plumed equatorial isles, where dying auricular nerves mistook them for seraphic utterances? To toiling mariners, tossed helplessly ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... all scholarship, it chanced that this same boy, Grant Harlson, was easily in the lead. His mother, an ex-teacher in another and older State, loving, regardful, tactful, had taught him how to read and comprehend, and he had something of a taste that way and a retentive memory. So, inside the rugged schoolroom, he had a certain prestige. Outside, he took ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... Most retentive to her, as it had passed, of Huggo's share in all that episode had been that she from her expostulation with Huggo had not come away with the same satisfaction as seemingly had Harry. She put before the boy ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... eyes;' long slender hands and fingers are 'especial marks of Mercury,' says Raphael. In character the Mercurial is busy and prattling. But when well affected, Mercury gives his subjects a strong, vigorous, active mind, searching and exhaustive, a retentive memory, a natural thirst for knowledge.[13] The persons signified by Mercury are astrologers, philosophers, mathematicians, politicians, merchants, travellers, teachers, poets, artificers, men of science, and all ingenious, clever men. When he is ill affected, however, he represents ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... shoulder, without heeding the occasional sugary reproof of Dame Hinkley, which bade them "let Brother Stevens be;" and, already had Brother Stevens himself, ventured upon the use of sundry grave saws from the holy volume, the fruit of early reading and a retentive memory, which not a little helped to maintain his novel pretensions in the mind of the brethren, and the worthy teacher, John Cross himself. All things promised a long duration to a friendship suddenly begun; when William Hinkley, the younger, a youth already introduced to the reader, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... And, therefore, the mighty son of Abhimanyu came to be called Parikshit (born in an extinct line). Well-versed in the interpretation of treatises on the duties of kings, he was gifted with every virtue. With passions under complete control, intelligent, possessing a retentive memory, the practiser of all virtues, the conqueror of his six passions of powerful mind, surpassing all, and fully acquainted with the science of morality and political science, the father had ruled over these subjects for sixty years. And he then died, mourned by all ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... their first incentive to ambition and industry and perseverence by reading—when their minds were immature, but fresh and retentive—of the life and achievements of Benjamin Franklin and such other ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... more advanced than that of the mammalia to which we ourselves belong. Accustomed as they are to ceaseless and active intercourse with each other by means of their varied calls, largely endowed with the faculty of attention, and provided with fairly retentive memories, the birds are, on the average, nearer in the qualities of their intelligence to man than are many of the species in his own class. It was long ago remarked that the birds of remote islands, such as the Galapagos, which had never seen man, were at first not in the least ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... have not met for many years, I love her as dearly now as when she took me by the hand when a child of eleven years. She conducted her school in a very systematic and orderly manner, and was very particular to require perfect recitations from her pupils; but as I possessed a retentive memory, I found my tasks much lighter than did ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... material for self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry, a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with a mixture of contempt for my want of taste, and astonishment at my presumption. But before the reply had time to burst out from lips, at no time too retentive, I was told, that at the end of one week more I should be suffered to take my way; that week being devoted to a round of especial entertainments in honour of my brother's election; the whole to be wound up by that most preposterous of all delights, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... and duration of the impression depends upon the size, purity, and hardness of the wax. Fichte says, "The spirit does not conserve its products,— the single ideas, volitions, and feelings are conserved by the mind and constitute the ground of its inexhaustibly retentive memory. . . . The possibility of recalling what has once been independently done, this remains in the spirit.'' James Sully compares the receptivity of memory with the infusion of dampness into an old MS. Draper also brings a physical ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... painted from a model. Instead of getting a man or woman to sit for him in the pose he required, he would go out into the meadows and look at the men and women at their actual daily occupations; and so keen and acute was his power of observation, and so retentive was his inner eye, that he could then recall almost every detail of action or manner as clearly as if he had the original present in his studio before him. As a rule, such a practice is not to be recommended to any one who wishes to draw with ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... under the covert of the dark, for fear seeing should fasten too quick an impression of the images of such actions upon the fancy and thereby too frequently inflame the desire. But these gentlemen account it the highest accomplishment of a philosopher to have a clear and retentive memory of all the various figures, passions, and touches of past pleasure. We will not now say, they present us with nothing worthy the name of philosophy, while they leave the refuse of pleasure in their wise man's mind, as ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... perceive, remember, and comprehend that significant sounds or words are the commuted representatives of the objects of intelligence. The perceptive organs of many animals are more exquisitely endowed than man, and their local memory more retentive; yet they are wholly incapable of comprehending language or calculating numbers;—capacities by which the Creator has exclusively dignified the ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... set myself to thwart your will Withholding aught of what ye crave to know. First to thee, Io, will I tell and trace Thy scared circuitous wandering mark it well, Deep in retentive tablets of the soul. When thou hast overpast the ferry's flow That sunders continent from continent, Straight to the eastward and the flaming face Of dawn, and highways trodden by the sun, Pass, till thou come unto the windy land Of daughters ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... being in her company alone, and attending to her. I can never feel weary in trying to repay the kindness she has shown me. She has taught me much of what I know, even more than her sister has, and her memory is so retentive that she can talk over the books we have read together, and remind me often of portions which I ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... to be given in arranging the young shoots, disbudding and thinning. A knowledge of the state of the border is necessary, whether retentive or porous, that no serious errors may be made by withholding a sufficient supply of water, or by giving too much. The temperature of the early house to be from 55 to 60 by night, ranging from 75 to 80 by sun heat, and allowing ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... than those of busy men. The idler, passing his time in search of amusement, can hardly fail to communicate it when he yields up his store of experiences. Being disengaged, his mind is more observant and more retentive of the by-play of life, which is the only amusing part of it, than that of one of the chief actors can possibly be. Moreover, idlers are the natural confidants of the busy: they are consulted, made useful as go-betweens, entrusted with those little services ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... you one of those hundred and sixteen piece five-dollar-ninety-eight-marked-down-from-six sets of china. While I don't mean to say that the average wedding present carries a curse instead of a blessing, it could usually repeat a few cuss-words if it had a retentive memory. ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... and was never idle one instant when awake. When he had an hour for diversion, he not unfrequently employed it in looking over a book of logarithms, which he acknowledged, with some surprise, was at all seasons of his life a recreation to him. So retentive was his memory of numbers, that sums over which he had once glanced his eye were in his mind ever after. He recollected the respective produce of all taxes through every year of his administration, and could, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various |
