"Plastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 victorious troops and hastened ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... . Or was there ever 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 ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... have convictions; but what are they? Has he merely a brilliant gift for description, helped out and sophisticated by a subtle taste? Or has he a queer entangled sense of the significance of form. Is he a plastic artist or an extraordinarily gifted statuary? Even if this work be an imitation, how admirable a one is it! That Mr. Epstein should combine with the taste and intelligence to perceive the beauty of Mexican sculpture the skill and science to ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... than the 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 play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... attention has 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, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... by Osmond's 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, who had made such a pretty ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... of the lunar 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, ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... 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 it could ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... sought so eagerly shaped themselves ever more and more clearly into realities that lived again. There rose up soon before my mind a whole world of figures, which revealed themselves as so strangely plastic and primitive, that, when I saw them clearly before me and heard their voices in my heart, I could not account for the almost tangible familiarity and assurance of their demeanour. The effect they produced upon the inner ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... 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 ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... artist in Norway was forced abroad for the necessary technical training: as a rule, students went to Dresden, because J. C. Dahl was there; but many settled in Duesseldorf, where the teaching attracted them. In any case, the adoption of a plastic profession meant a long and serious expenditure of money, together with a very doubtful prospect of ultimate remuneration. Fearnley, who had seemed the very genius of Norwegian art, had just (1842) died, having scarcely begun to sell his pictures, at the age of forty. It is not surprising that ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... led to see from the life-story of such insects, that the course of the story is not rigidly fixed; the creature in its various stages is plastic, open to influence from its surroundings, capable of marked change in the course of generations. And so the seasonal changes in the history of the individual from egg to imago point us to changes in the age-long history of ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... Farm Community in 1843, in that brilliant 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 Channing to the Church, Bronson Alcott to the education ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... amazing skill. Others have surpassed him in the richness of the musical substance out of which their tone-pictures are woven, in symmetry of form, in finish of detail; but no one has ever equaled him in that absolute mastery over instruments, by which a hundred become as plastic and flexible as one, and are made to embody every phase of the composer's thought with that warmth of color and precision of form long believed to be necessarily confined to ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... 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 ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... bear such traces, and tell such tales, who shall say that the plastic aether was destitute of the story of ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... 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 ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... 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 ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... 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 place and worshipped, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... as the result 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 fixity ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... to present reflections and observations concerning Nature, we must at the same time indicate that these remarks will chiefly have reference, first, to plastic art; then, to art in general; finally, to the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... my own confession knew Kagig, I who had sent Kagig a message, I who five minutes ago was on the verge of being hanged in the greasy noose that still swung above the ladder through the hole in the roof—I who therefore ought to be thoroughly plastic-minded and ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... scattered distances apart, and are in unusually 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 ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... 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, ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... certain limits and that the real basis on which to judge material of this description is, from the boiler man's standpoint, the quality of plasticity under a given load. This tendency of a brick to become plastic occurs at a temperature much below the melting point and to a degree that may cause the brick to become deformed under the stress to which it is subjected. The allowable plastic or softening temperature will naturally be relative and dependent upon the ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... the edge of this large, middlewestern city. Off to the back of the school were the towers of the town, great monolithic skyscrapers of pre-stressed concrete and plastic. To the front of the school the plains stretched out to meet ...
— There Will Be School Tomorrow • V. E. Thiessen
... 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 race. The sensuous and voluptuous libertine ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... 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 ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Delaney and his wife, once Lady Rose Chantrey, the favorite daughter of Lord Lackington. They were not a happy couple. She was a woman of great intelligence, but endowed with one of those natures—sensitive, plastic, eager to search out and to challenge life—which bring their possessors some great joys, hardly to be balanced against a final sum of pain. Her husband, absorbed in his military life, silent, narrowly able, and ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an 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 without independent ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... hand, or, on the other, 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 better and ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... cleverness is the triumph of a purely plastic art," Blondet went on. "You will not know what she said, but you will be fascinated. She will toss her head, or gently shrug her white shoulders; she will gild an insignificant speech with a charming pout and smile; or throw a Voltairean epigram into an 'Indeed!' an 'Ah!' a 'What then!' A ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... gatherings of Sense" is a phrase which may seem to imply some peculiar plastic power such as is claimed exclusively for artists: a power not of simple recollection, but of recollection and recombination. Yet this power belongs also to philosophers. To combine the half of a woman with the half of a fish,—to ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... used by the boys were plastic tubes curved at both ends. At one end was a mouthpiece; at the other was a cage that held a rubber ball. A dive or rough wave action floated the ball upward, closing the tube and preventing water entry. Rick and Scotty adjusted the rubber ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... the variegation of colors, their relations to the air, the sunshine, the dew, the rain; the habits of plants, some erect, some creeping, some climbing, the seasons of flowering, fruitage, and seed, are impressed with ease upon the plastic mind ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... are colourless and lifeless—sort of plastic stuff—until we get hold of them. We twist them to the best shapes we can. Nothing happens to us that isn't exactly like ourselves. Even what people call accidents. Even a man's diseases. I've seen that in the Wards. People die as they live, and ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... language spoken correctly and so the use of the proper words and forms becomes a second nature to them. A child can learn what is right as easy as what is wrong and whatever impressions are made on the mind when it is plastic will remain there. Even a parrot can be taught the proper use of language. Repeat to a parrot.—"Two and two make four" and it never will say "two ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... High rode the sun in heaven next day before The stricken mother found along the shore The object of her unremitting quest. The cooling wave whereon she lay at rest Had stilled the tumult of Winona's breast Along that shapely ruin's plastic grace, And in the parting of her braided hair, The hopeless mother's glances searching there The Thunder-Bird's mysterious mark ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... of 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, though ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... has passed since I wrote those lines. When they were written the hole which Jim Carpenter had burned with his battery of infra-red lamps through the heaviside layer, that hollow sphere of invisible semi-plastic organic matter which encloses the world as a nutshell does a kernel, was gradually filling in as he had predicted it would: every one thought that in another ten years the world would be safely enclosed again in its protective layer as it had been since the dawn of time. There ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... 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
... this natural predisposition of all characters, at once so genial and so serious as his, was finally stamped in him by his first schoolmaster. It is true that he was only two years at Ballitore, but two years at that plastic time often build up habits in the mind that all the rest of a life ...
— Burke • John Morley
... pleasures. Take, for example, the horse on which some quiet old country gentleman is accustomed to travel; how soberly and evenly he jogs along, picking his way over the ground. But let him fall into the hands of a lively youngster, and how soon he picks up a frisky spirit! Were horses less plastic, more the creatures of custom than they are, it would always be necessary, before buying one, to inquire into the ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... smiled again, this time in self-derision. A robot couldn't feel important, or anything else. A robot was nothing but steel and plastic and magnetized tape and photo-micro-positronic circuits, whereas a man—His Imperial Majesty Paul XXII, for instance—was nothing but tissues and cells and colloids and electro-neuronic circuits. There was a difference; ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... an 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 the question, What is that real First Cause, the Urgott ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... object-teaching, a grasping of ideas by forms seen in the mind, not a presenting of abstract ideas as in literature. Printing was not known. There were few manuscripts, and the majority of people could not read. Ideas came to them for centuries through form and color, until at last the Italian mind took on a plastic and pictorial character. It saw things in symbolic figures, and when the Renaissance came and art took the lead as one of its strongest expressions, painting was but the color-thought and form-language of ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... is; that the black fellow bolted the whole code at 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sovereign power into the midst of material things and there works according to His own purpose. Is not this the signature of divinity, that without means the mere forth-putting of the will is all that is wanted to mould matter as plastic to His command? It is not even, 'He spake and it was done,' but silently He willed, and 'the conscious water knew its Lord, and blushed.' This is the glory of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... not quite her fault. Life, for her, had been so hard and so busy that he ought not to grudge her the consolation she had been able to dig up out of the accumulated debris of the ancestral trick of sermonizing. In a more gracious, plastic existence, she would have taken it out in Browning and the Russians; yet she was not necessarily more narrow because her literary artists were pre-Messianic. Neither was it the fault of those same artists that they were quoted in and out of season, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the look and 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
... appeared disturbed by them, troubled, despite the evident attention which he gave to the work of the artist, or rather to the artist herself, to the triumphant grace of this girl whom her beauty seemed to have predestined to the study of the plastic arts. ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... 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 Edward Markland ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... 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 view, and literary affiliations, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... knowable—there were in 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 some ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... Ganganelli 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 ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... us, into a beautiful world that knows no care but lies forever bathed in the sunshine of cloudless happiness,—a world in which every loveliness of which fancy has dreamed has taken life and form. It is because of this that we make pilgrimages to the masterpieces of the plastic arts, that we give heed to the speech of Schiller, listen to the music of Mozart. When wearied by the stress of life we gladly hie to Mozart that he may tell us stories of that land of beauty, and convince us that there are other and better occupations ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... carbonic acid and water) in the atmosphere of the cooling earth, for these three wonderful elements have a unique ensemble of properties—ready to enter into reactions and relations, making great diversity and complexity possible, favouring the formation of the plastic and permeable materials that build up living creatures. We must not pursue the idea, but it is clear that the stones and mortar of the inanimate world are such that they built a friendly home ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... Zimmern; "it was always so; when a people has once fallen into evil ways the old generation can never be wholly redeemed, but youth can always be saved—youth is plastic." ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... 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 ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... she raised her eyes, her head still lowered. He was working, darkly absorbed as usual in the plastic mass under ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... Celsus describes plastic operations for the repair of the nose, lips and ears, though these operations are generally supposed ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... 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 ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... see, it is ze expansion of coloured forms in space, combined with the co-penetration of plastic masses which forms what ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... 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 little better, but as I progressed ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... 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
... 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 Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... never mastered in 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 attractive ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... Though I gave repeated expression to the benumbed messages of my tortured nerves, the doctor refused to return my clothes. For a semblance of warmth I was forced to depend upon ordinary undergarments and an extraordinary imagination. The heavy felt druggets were about as plastic as blotting paper and I derived little comfort from them until I hit upon the idea of rending them into strips. These strips I would weave into a crude Rip Van Winkle kind of suit; and so intricate was the warp and woof that on several occasions an attendant had to cut me out of these sartorial ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... inevitable that inflammation should determine this outcome since it induces spasmodic contraction of the muscular walls of the tube, lessening the bore or closing the portion of the canal invaded. Plastic infiltration takes place in the walls of the gut, thickening and binding them together; or, if the inflammation be of a simple catarrhal or atrophic nature, the plastic infiltration will more or less ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... was a ten minutes' trip by aircar from the conveyer head; when they boarded the stubby-winged strato-rocket, Vall saw that two of the passenger-seats had square metal cabinets bolted in place behind them and blue plastic helmets on swinging ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... he asked the lanky man bent over the littered desk in the rough plastic bubble that ...
— Second Sight • Basil Eugene Wells
... to examine the sign. Sure enough, it was the track of a man's knee; and the plastic mud exhibited on its surface a print of fretted lines, which must have been made ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... so doing have rendered great service to mankind, enriching literature and, what is more important, stimulating the urge and passion for improvement and the faith of men in their power to climb to the farthest heights of their dreams. But the material of life is hard and lacks the plastic quality of inspired imagination. Though there is probably no single evil which exists for which a solution has not been devised in the wonderful laboratory of visioning, the perversity of the subtle and mysterious thing called life is such that many great and grave evils continue to challenge, ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... figures, though rudely modelled 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 ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... and not 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 ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... That threatened a real difficulty in the near future, and she was much perturbed by being called on to decide instantly on a definite course of action. Too strong a line might have worse consequences than a laissez faire attitude. As matters stood, the girl was eminently plastic, her naturally gentle disposition inducing respect for the opinions and wishes of an older and more experienced woman, yet there was a fearlessness, a frank candor of thought, in Cynthia's character that awed and perplexed Mrs. Devar, in whom the unending ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... indecently vast fortune out of his first-discovery rights to the things, because she was really very fond of the Commissioner when he wasn't being irritating. But in some obscure way she found the plasmoids themselves and the idea of unlimited plastic life which they embodied rather appalling. However, she was in a minority there. Practically everybody else seemed to feel that plasmoids were the biggest improvement since the creation ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... 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; ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... deny or exalt the nutritive properties of bran, agriculturists, taking practical observation as proof, attribute to that portion of the grain a physiological action which has nothing in common with plastic alimentation, and prove that animals weakened by a too long usage of dry fodder, are restored to health by the use of bran, which only seems to act by its presence, since the greater portion of it, as already demonstrated by Mr. Poggiale, is passed through ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... men who are reared in Wall Street, who from their youth are familiarized with its processes, and who are well set in the plastic age to consider human life as an auspicious opportunity for getting possession of something that does not belong to them, are fatally blunted in their sensibilities; the ethical quality in them is battered out—or at least battered; they come to regard ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... clay, thoroughly mixed and plastic, is placed on a board on the earth before the kneeling or crouched potter. She pokes a hole in the top of this mass with thumbs and fingers, and quickly enlarges it. As soon as the opening is large enough to admit one hand it is dug out and enlarged by scraping with the ends of the fingers, ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... was thine to mould and fashion Life's plastic newness into grace; To make the boyish heart heroic, And light with thought ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... treasures—they are untouched by the notion of accumulating them, as they might knowledge or money, and they frankly act upon those they have. The personal example promptly rouses to emulation. In a neighborhood where political standards are plastic and undeveloped, and where there has been little previous experience in self-government, the office-holder himself sets the standard, and the ideas that cluster around him exercise a specific and permanent influence upon the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... then made Harry apply the mass of clay to the nozzle of the bellows, and fix it tightly round them, so that when the instrument was applied to the hole the clay could be pushed close up, and every cranny closed by the plastic mass, so that nothing but the deadly vapour would ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... of 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... into 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 is proportionate to the intensity ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... definition naturally brings up the picture of certain constant and stable surroundings enclosing an environed object which is to be changed at their demand. No such state of things exists. There is no fixed environment. It is always fixable. Every environment is plastic and derives its character, at least partially, from the environed object. Each stone sends out its little gravitative and chemical influence upon surrounding stones, and they are different through being in its neighborhood. ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... three major shipping routes of the Federation of the Hub crossed within a few hours' flight of one another, the Seventh Star Hotel had floated in space, a great golden sphere, gleaming softly in the void through its translucent shells of battle plastic. The Star had been designed to be much more than a convenient transfer station for travelers and freight; for some years after it was opened to the public, it retained a high rating among the more exotic pleasure resorts ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... secretary of the Academy, Arago, with much of prejudice, much of egotism, has talents most plastic, an energy of character, an indomitable will, a force and perspicuity of expression, which alone give to the sittings of the French Academy a peculiar and surpassing interest, but which, in the English Society, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... article of food among the Marquese islanders is manufactured from the produce of the bread-fruit tree. It somewhat resembles in its plastic nature our bookbinders' paste, is of a yellow colour, and somewhat tart ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... 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 ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... "Little cups of plastic. They slip under the eyelids and touch the white part of the eye. Familiar enough. But ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... 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
... furnish the best sort of good reading in an attractive style, suited at once to the needs of the girl's mind, and her natural enjoyment of the story, while it will stand the most critical censorship of parents and caretakers of the plastic minds of ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... of another Socrates my tender years; your rule, applied with skillful disguise, straightens each perverse habit; nature is molded by reason, and struggles to be subdued, and assumes under your hands its plastic lineaments. Ay, well I mind how I would wear away long summer suns with you, and pluck with you the bloom of night's first hours. One work we had, one certain time for rest, and at one modest table unbent ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... for the most part plastic as clay. The sisters were the potters. No ruling sovereign possesses a tithe of the absolute authority that was theirs. They literally held the powers of life and death. Unquestioned and god-like they moved serenely to and fro about the island farm, in their ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear 380 His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there All new successions to the forms they wear; Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight To its own likeness, as each mass may bear; 385 And bursting ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 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 is very easy to manage. She has a beautiful disposition. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... what 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 each, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... lectures that sapped his vitality. What really got right in amongst him was the torture of seeing Adeline's adoration of Raymond Parsloe Devine. The man seemed to have made the deepest possible impression upon her plastic emotions. When he spoke, she leaned forward with parted lips and looked at him. When he was not speaking—which was seldom—she leaned back and looked at him. And when he happened to take the next seat to her, she leaned sideways and looked at him. One glance at Mr. ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... goods (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, soap, cigarettes, flour), agricultural products ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... at him. No, 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 for a man than for his admiration ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... There was a dead silence until it came to my friend and myself, to each of whom it gave a most rappingly emphatic "Yes." Accordingly, we rose and left the field to those whose greater gullibility rendered them more plastic objects for working upon. Never in my life did I witness greater humbug; and yet so intense was the anxiety of the Boston public to witness the miracle, that during all the day and half the night the spirit was being invoked ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... 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 I haid that yeir"—the ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... 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
... is intended to answer the question, What brought the moon into that position, close to the surface of the earth? We will only say that there is the gravest reason to believe that the moon was, at some very early period, fractured off from the earth when the earth was in a soft or plastic condition. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... these were the preludes, we can understand how there might well be something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way of thought and in the style of the young men who read them during the plastic period of their minds and characters. Allow for all these influences, allow for whatever impressions his German residence and his familiarity with German literature had produced; accept the fact that the story is to the last degree disjointed, improbable, impossible; lay it aside as a complete ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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 the possession of an enormous area of virgin ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... the plastic age, my ancestor was observed to betray strong feelings of compassion at the sight of charity-children, nor was he ever known to pass a child, especially a boy that was still in petticoats, who was crying with hunger in the streets, without ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the case. From it he took a letter-knife, a pencil sharpener, a glass globe paperweight, a box of thumb tacks, a stapler, some clips, a plastic ashtray, and some things Thacher could not identify. He placed the objects in a row in front of him on the table top. Then he ...
— The Crystal Crypt • Philip Kindred Dick
... 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 the redeemed ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... tombs badly carved angels balance themselves dolefully. Let me make a nation's dolls: I care not who makes its pictures. Was it of these dolls a late President of the Royal Academy was thinking, when he said that the German genius did not find its best expression in plastic art? The Academy will not be permanently improved until we improve ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... saponification should be thorough and complete; if this is not ensured, rancidity is liable to occur and a satisfactory toilet soap cannot be produced. The soap must not be short in texture or brittle and liable to split, but of a firm and somewhat plastic consistency. ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... 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 ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... 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 ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... the marvels of his life. He has been in England already (1743-17—?); he is a great unknown. Nobody can accuse him of anything dishonest or dishonourable. 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 once swallowed a whole ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... searched for the Athena. There might be something—a post, perhaps—that signified the goddess of wisdom to the plastic mind of poor Mr. Levinsky. But ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... 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 master hand, she would roll it thin and cut out the ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 Wiser and more discreet; for when brute force And evil will ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... these two islands could stand for the capes on this—" He pulled a second map, this on transparent plastic, to fit over the first. The capes marked on the much larger body of land did slip over the modern islands with a surprising fit. The once large island, shattered and broken, could have produced the groups of atolls and ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... Without doubt his address at this meeting, in opposition to 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 that occupies the position of absolute and perfect liberty, with some measure of Christian ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... shape to represent the form of the body. In a later (probably Fifth Dynasty) mummy, found in 1892 by Professor Flinders Petrie at Medum, the superficial bandages had been impregnated with a resinous paste, which while still plastic was moulded into the form of the body, special care being bestowed upon the modelling of the face[26] and the organs of reproduction, so as to leave no room for doubt as to the identity and the sex. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... the innocence of childhood. Scandal was merely breathed—not even so hinted as to arouse curiosity. Foul speech I never heard from them nor a trace of profanity. What I did hear was a liberal education in the humanities—as time passes I rate more and more highly the sense of values it fixed in a plastic mind. I think it must have been because our Mammys saw all things from the elemental angle, they were critics so illuminating ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... outside the wide-open gap in the Shed's wall. Something went shrieking by the doorway. It looked like the magnified top half of a loaf of baker's bread, painted gray and equipped with an air-scoop in front and a plastic bubble for a pilot. It howled like a lost baby dragon, its flat underside tilted up and up until it was almost vertical. It had no wings, but a blue-white flame spurted out of its rear, wobbling from side to side for reasons best known to itself. It was a pushpot, which could not possibly ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... This brief plastic moment is the inventor's opportunity, when the metal will take on any shape for use or beauty. Similarly the fields offer a strategic time to the husbandman. In February the soil refuses the plow, the sun refuses heat, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... immediately present, and acting on their minds, without the interposition of Matter, or unthinking second causes.—Then in METAPHYSICS: what difficulties concerning entity in abstract, substantial forms, hylarchic principles, plastic natures, substance and accident, principle of individuation, possibility of Matter's thinking, origin of ideas, the manner how two independent substances so widely different as SPIRIT AND MATTER, should mutually operate on each other? what difficulties, I say, ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... patient exposition of the theme of 'Endymion' with a friendly interest that would certainly not be given to one with a lesser claim upon us; and in this spirit we can also find a welcome for the minute investigation of the pictorial and plastic material of Keats's imagination. Under auspices less benign we might have found the former mistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when Sir Sidney shows us over the garden every ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... sputters, turns to snow and then turns back to rain—and the sun disingenuously beams out again, only to be shut off like a rogue's lantern. And all the wretched while, if a boy sets foot out of doors, he must be harassed about his overcoat and rubbers; he is warned against tracking up the plastic lawn and sharply advised to stay inside the house. Saturday ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... fancy, he became aware that he was being made the fool of metaphor. That was not his way. To find out what lay at the bottom of this shifting personality, what elemental thoughts and feelings, if any, the real Audrey was composed of; to see for himself the play of circumstances on her plastic nature, and know what reaction it was capable of—in a word, to experimentalise in cold blood on the living nerve and brain tissue, was his plan of ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... plastic front of the Elite Cafe. Once through the double portals, she pulled the respirator from her face. The air inside was dirty and smelly but it was breathable. People were eating noisily, boisterously, ...
— Foundling on Venus • John de Courcy
... is no delight without high quality. If we had only preserved to us such masterpieces as the Capitoline Venus, the Dying Gaul, the Laocoon, the Dancing Faun, the so-called Narcissus, and the Resting Mercury, we should realise something of the exquisite skill in plastic art which had been attained in antiquity and has never been attained since. But we might perhaps imagine that these were altogether exceptional pieces and the choicest gems possessed by the world of the time. Yet the preservation of these is but an accident, and ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... an open patio in front of an artificial waterfall. The Sultan was pacing back and forth, wearing dusty khaki puttees, brown plastic boots, a yellow polo shirt. He carried a twig which he used as a riding crop, slapping his boots as he walked. He turned his head as Murphy appeared, pointed his twig at a ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... mind. It must 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 result of sufficient consideration, or as the settled ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... to and fro in a crowd, crumpling their clothes and ruffling their tempers, and call it a set of quadrilles. They have ample space for the sweeping movements and complicated figures of all the orthodox ball dances, and are generally gifted with sufficient plastic grace to carry them out in style. They carefully cultivate dances calling for a kind of grace which is almost beyond the reach of art. The mazurka is one of the finest of these, and it is quite a favorite ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... blithe as bonnie." So it may be, that if you are alarmed at the humility of the occupation of the one—even with your remembrance that Sir Isaac Newton experimented upon soap-bubbles—as being so intractable in the plastic-work of romance, you may be appeased by the qualities of the other; for has it not been our delight to sing for a thousand years, yea, in a thousand songs, too, the praises of young damsels, whether ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... 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 ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... expressed. It is 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 ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... 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 her ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... not the prime struggle of life to keep the mind plastic? To see and feel and hear things newly? To accept nothing as settled; to defend the eternal right of the questioner? To reject every conclusion of yesterday before the surer observations of to-day?—is not that ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... silent, dull house, where nothing else courted the sunbeam. 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
... the trophies of praise. But Palmer, with a striking originality and a subtle perception of spiritual influences, sees in the effect of Christianity on the 'untutored mind' of the Indian, a theme to inspire his plastic clay. So from this idea he evolves the 'Indian Girl,' standing in an attitude of perfect repose, holding in her right hand a crucifix, on which her eyes are bent pensively in a sweet, absorbing reverie, which shuts out the consciousness of the external world. In the other hand, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for the folly of the over-production—and its consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood—of yesterday. To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our surplus children of to-day. The child-laborer of one or two decades ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... of a ruder England. The lanes and the gateways in the fields, as they say, are 'slubby' enough in November, and those who try to go through get 'slubbed' up to their knees. This expresses a soft, plastic, and adhesive condition of the mud which comes on after it has been 'raining hop-poles' for a week. The labourer has little else to do but to chop up disused hop-poles into long fagots with a hand-bill—in other counties a bill-hook. All his class bitterly resent the lowering of wages which ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... regarded at the South would soon die out. New social and industrial relations and interests, new activities, new ambitions, would speedily efface all painful recollections of our desperate struggle. The late slaveholders, having ceased to be such, would no longer be controlled by the impulses nor plastic to the influences which impelled them to rush upon the thick bosses of the Union. They would find in the rapid peopling of their section by immigration from the North and from Europe, and the consequent increase in current value of the lands, timber, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... as he had done, in an immense lassitude and disgust of all things, born neither of satiety nor of disappointment, the full measure of one's reward? Perhaps success in the difficult art of life depended, almost as much as in the plastic arts, upon conviction, upon the personal enthusiasm which one brought to bear upon its conduct, and was never really compatible with that attitude of half-disdainful toleration which he had ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... commission in Berlin for the introduction of electric telegraphs instead of semaphores. He advocated the use of gutta-percha, then a new material, for the insulation of underground wires, and in 1847 designed a screw-press for coating the wires with the gum rendered plastic by heat. The following year he laid the first great underground telegraph line from Berlin to Frankfort-on-the-Main, and soon afterwards left the army to engage with Mr. Halske in the management of a telegraph factory which they had conjointly established in 1847. ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... retarding the earth, must also push the 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
... forgive me for again trespassing in his brain. But the difficulty is small. Life on a new planet, Maskull, is necessarily energetic and lawless, and not sedate and imitative. Nature is still fluid—not yet rigid—and matter is plastic. The will forks and sports incessantly, and thus no two creatures ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... together: that no one branch of the perfect art form could live apart from its fellows, that is, in its integral parts. He contended (and enforced in Bayreuth) that all the arts were akin: that the brains which created music, drama, colour effects, plastic sculptural effects—anything and everything that belonged to artistic expression—were, or should be, welded into one supreme artistic expression. He believed this implicitly, and like other persons who believe well ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... instances, all the influences of a pious home have been counteracted by the atmosphere of a school which, if not godless, has been without that fragrance of spiritual devoutness and consecration which is indispensable to the true training of impressible children during the plastic years when character ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson |
