"Imitative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the purely psychological stage, includes three cases. The spectator sympathizes (1) with the feelings of the agent; (2) with the gratitude or anger of the person affected by the action; (3) the person observed sympathizes in return with the imitative and judging feelings ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of the time were too insincere, too intent upon pleasing shallow-brained and frivolous courtiers, to produce much that was worth while. Great numbers of plays were written, it is true, but they were hopelessly dull imitations of classic models. Imitative and uninspired likewise were statues and paintings and poems. One merit they possessed. If a French painter lacked force and originality, he could at least portray with elegance and charm a group of fine ladies angling in an artificial pool. Elegance, indeed, redeemed the eighteenth century from ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... two mottoes which apply during this period, one to the child and the other to the parent: Example and Imitation. No creature under heaven is more imitative than a little child, and its conduct in after years will depend largely upon the example set by its parents during its early life. It is no use to tell the child "not to mind," it has no mind wherewith to discriminate, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. The parent storms; the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in a circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to the worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... clever blending of dash and sentimentality, in just the right proportion to create the impression of a powerful brush subdued to mildness by the charms of the sitter. Stanwell had thrown it off in a burst of imitative frenzy, beginning for the mere joy of the satire, but gradually fascinated by the problem of producing the requisite mingling of attributes. He was surprised now to see how well he had caught the note, and ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... perhaps made of the grain of the sacred last sheaf from the previous harvest, and therefore sacramental in character, were also used in different ways in folk-survivals. They were rolled down a slope—a magical imitative act, symbolising and aiding the course of the sun. The cake had also a divinatory character. If it broke on reaching the foot of the slope this indicated the approaching death of its owner. In another custom in Perthshire, part of a cake was thrown over the shoulder with the words, "This ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... Imitation is due to suggestibility. Even suicide is rendered epidemic by suggestion and imitation.[37] In a crisis, like a shipwreck, when no one knows what to do, one, by acting, may lead them all through imitative suggestibility. People who are very suggestible can be led into states of mind which preclude criticism or reflection. Any one who acquires skill in the primary processes of association, analogy, reiteration, and continuity, can play tricks on others by stimulating ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... interminable—no, not interminable—his hundred-paged Introduction. He abominates Pope's Homer, and groans to think how it has corrupted the English ear by its long domination in our schools. He takes up, with leathern lungs, the howl of the Lakers, and his imitative bray is louder than the original, "in linked sweetness long drawn out." Such sonorous strictures are innocent; but his false charge of licentiousness against Pope is most reprehensible—and it is insincere. For he has the sense to see Chaucer's broadest satire ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... by Mr. Parsons was not of these half dozen; but the plain, hard-headed builder who had erected it for the original owner was shrewd and imitative, and had avoided ambitious deviations from the type he wished to copy—the red sandstone, swell front variety, which ten years before would have seemed to the moral sense of Benham unduly cheerful. Mr. Parsons was so fortunate as to be able to buy it just after ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... them all. To be sure, she could only be judged by Queningford standards; and, as the railway nearest to Queningford is a terminus that leaves the small gray town stranded on the borders of the unknown, Queningford standards are not progressive. Neither are they imitative; for imitation implies a certain nearness, and between the young ladies of Queningford and the daughters of the county there ...
— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair
... among them Kaltschmidt, contend that there was but one primitive language, which was purely onomatopoeic, that is, imitative of natural sounds. This has been stigmatized as the "bow-wow" theory, but its advocates might derive an argument from the epithet itself, as not only our children, but the natives of Papua, call the dog a "bow-wow." They have, however, gone too far in attempting to trace back ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... the theatre requires four intervals in the play, but few, if any, of our authour's compositions can be properly distributed in that manner. An act is so much of the drama as passes without intervention of time or change of place. A pause makes a new act. In every real, and therefore in every imitative action, the intervals may be more or fewer, the restriction of five acts being accidental and arbitrary. This Shakespeare knew, and this he practised; his plays were written, and at first printed in ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... face of the crucifix, and, though I was no friend to images, and despised that imitative and grimacing art of which it was a rude example, some sense of what the thing implied was carried home to my intelligence. The face looked down upon me with a painful and deadly contraction; but the rays of a glory encircled it, and reminded me that the sacrifice ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unnecessary to deal in full with that hero's adventures. [1112] In a word, the Cyclic poems are 'written round' the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey". 3) The general structure of these epics is clearly imitative. As M.M. Croiset remark, the abusive Thersites in the "Aethiopis" is clearly copied from the Thersites of the "Iliad"; in the same poem Antilochus, slain by Memnon and avenged by Achilles, is obviously modelled on Patroclus. 4) The geographical knowledge ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... triliteral root in Hebrew were to agree with a triliteral word in Sanskrit, we should feel certain, at once, that they are not the same, or that their similarity is purely accidental. Pronouns, numerals, and a few imitative rather than predicative names for father and mother, etc., may have been preserved from the earliest stage by the Aryan and Semitic speakers; but if scholars go beyond, and compare such words as Hebrew barak, to bless, and Latin precari; Hebrew lab, heart, and the English liver; ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... this time, had been tentative and imitative, being mainly reflections from (and upon) what had most struck him in his reading. He had read considerably in some six languages, (Hebrew, Irish, German, Italian, French and English) and widely in at least four of them, besides ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... music, in which were blended the tones of childhood and age. Annie, with her sweet soprano, led, and gave time and key to them all, very much as by the force and loveliness of her character she influenced the daily harmony of their lives. The children, with their imitative faculty, seemed to gather from her lips how to follow with fair correctness, and they chirped through the tunes like two intelligent robins. Miss Eulie sang a sweet though rather faint alto that was like a low minor key in a happy life. Mr. Walton's melody was rather that of the heart, ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... Byron's genius on the imagination of Pushkin is well known. Shakespeare and other English dramatists had also their share in influencing his mind, which, at all events in its earlier developments, was of an essentially imitative type. As an example of his Shakespearian tastes, see his poem of "Angelo," founded upon ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... suicide tendency and check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from their troubles ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... observations and even spontaneous reflections. It has been held that all this implies real acts of intelligence. It is, in fact, often very difficult to decide exactly how far it is intelligence and how far memory, instinct, imitative genius, obedience or mechanical impulse, the effects of training, or ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... meaning it may be called his road; but his it cannot be by any such peculiarities as will found an incommunicable excellence. In literature proper, viz., the literature of power, this is otherwise. There may doubtless have been many imitative poets, wearing little or nothing of a natural individuality; but of no poet, that ever led his own class, can it have been possible that he should have been otherwise than strongly differenced by inimitable features and by traits not transferable. Consequently the [Greek: ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... with parasites—pot-bellied, hemorrhoidal apes. They come freely and simply, as to a restaurant or a depot; they sit, smoke, drink, convulsively pretend to be merry; they dance, executing abominable movements of the body imitative of the act of sexual love. At times attentively and long, at times with gross haste, they choose any woman they like and know beforehand that they will never meet refusal. Impatiently they pay their ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... correctness of judgment upon the works of the old masters, from merely associating with those who are conversant with the subject, living amongst the pictures themselves, or from hearing discussions upon their respective merits. In fact, man is an imitative animal, and can adapt himself very readily to the circumstances by which he is surrounded, as well as acquire from others the results of their deeper research and greater experience. Living in an atmosphere where good taste prevails, it is not wonderful that ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... building was evolved by the simple exercise of man's reason, with the result that the work of this period is the instinctive natural growth of man's mind. The buildings, on the other hand, which were designed in the imitative styles, and produced on a totally different principle, present us with an entirely different result, and one which frequently degrades architecture from its high position of a quasi-natural production to that of a mere ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... him. Although he wore the dress-clothes rather awkwardly, there was something in his manner which reminded her vaguely of a gentleman. It was not that he was exactly gentlemanly, but there was the reflection of good breeding in his bearing. Dark-skinned people, be it noted, have usually the imitative faculty. As the dinner and the wine warmed his heart, so by degrees he drew on his old self like a glove. He grew bolder and less guarded. His opinion of himself rose momentarily, and with it a certain gleam in his eyes increased as ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... which they had worn, that look of being tiptoe with revelation which is one of the most fascinating tricks of the visible world, and which even a harsh town full of chimneys can sometimes take on when seen in given moments and lights. And it was astonishing to see into what lifeless imitative verse his most original and passionate moments could ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... aboriginal crime has been attended with impunity, how much more does the imitative faculty cling to it. Ill-judged mercy falls, not like dew, but like a great heap of ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her to dress herself in a manner almost identical with that in which Mademoiselle Vseslavitch had appeared at Lucerne? Mentally, Paul roundly damned a score of times the imitative instinct of the sex. He could not forgive himself for having mistaken a person of the Comtesse's stamp for the lady ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... unvarying characteristic of every social fact whatsoever is that it is imitative. And this characteristic belongs exclusively to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... thing which the imitative arts add to nature is permanence, the lack of which is the saddest defect of many natural beauties. The forces which determine natural forms, therefore, determine also the forms of the imitative arts. But the non-imitative arts supply organisms different in kind from those which nature affords. ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... one remark. Milton's Latin verses are distinguished from most Neo-latin verse by being a vehicle of real emotion. His technical skill is said to have been surpassed by others; but that in which he stands alone is, that in these exercises of imitative art he is able to remain himself, and to give utterance to genuine passion. Artificial Arcadianism is as much the frame-work of the elegy on Diodati as it is of Lycidas. We have Daphnis and Bion, Tityrus and Amyntas for characters, Sicilian valleys for scenery, while Pan, Pales, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... fashion, the origin is a good deal of an accident. What the milliners of Paris, or the demi-monde of Paris, enjoin our English ladies, is (I suppose) a good deal chance; but as soon as it is decreed, those whom it suits and those whom it does not all wear it. The imitative propensity at once insures uniformity; and 'that horrid thing we wore last year' (as the phrase may go) is soon nowhere to be seen. Just so a literary fashion spreads, though I am far from saying with equal primitive unreasonableness—a literary taste always begins ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... requires the fusion of two types of life, commonly led in the world in well-nigh total separation, one a life of impulse expressed in affairs and social passions, the other a life of reflection expressed in religion, science, and the imitative arts. In the Life of Reason, if it were brought to perfection, intelligence would be at once the universal method of practice and its continual reward. All reflection would then be applicable in action and all action fruitful in happiness. Though this be an ideal, yet everyone gives it from time ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... quickly divines it by my face, and will disappear. Yesterday I noticed something queer about her, and soon discovered that she had been staining her lids with black kohol, like the hanums, so that, having found a box, she must have guessed its use from the pictures. Wonderfully clever!—imitative as a mirror. Two mornings ago I found an old mother-of-pearl kittur, and sitting under the arcade, touched the strings, playing a simple air; I could just see her behind one of the arch-pillars on the opposite side, and she was ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... own quiet homes to satisfy ourselves, that dramatic representations are natural to man. All children delight in mimicking action; many of their amusements consist in such performances, and are in every sense plays. It is curious, indeed, to observe at how early an age the young of the most imitative animal, man, begin to copy the actions of others; how soon the infant displays its intimate conviction of the great truth, that "all the world's a Stage." The baby does not imitate those acts only, that are useful ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... deep, deep well of feeling, In my mother's heart is stirred, And the tears come softly stealing At each imitative word! There's a struggle in my bosom, For I love my darling boy— He's the gladness of my spirit, He's the sunlight of my joy! Yet I think upon my country, And my spirit groweth bold— Oh! I wish my blue-eyed soldier Were but ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... to wonder at and even admire the mad splendour of the place. Her taste was as crude and flamboyant as herself, but it too had escaped vulgarity which at its worst is imitative of the best, a stupid second-handness, an aggressive insolent self-distrust. She was not ashamed of what she was. She was herself all through, and she trusted herself absolutely. She wanted colour and there was colour. She ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... The social projector, sublimely confident in himself, seems to expect to realize, on a most gigantic scale, the fable of Mesmerism; he will put the whole world in rapport with him, and it shall have no will but his, and none but such blind, imitative movements as he shall impress on it. And it is to a sort of coma that these projectors would, for the most part, reduce mankind—a state where there is some shadow of thought and passion, but no will, no self-direction, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... and were at once very perfect cats and monkeys and very natural men and women. I confess, however, that they failed to amuse me. I was doubtless not in a mood to enjoy them, for they seemed to me peculiarly cynical and vulgar. Their imitative felicity was revolting. As I looked askance at the complacent little artist, brandishing them between finger and thumb and caressing them with an amorous eye, he seemed to me himself little more than an exceptionally intelligent ape. I mustered an admiring grin, however, and ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... to be carefully educated they would be considerably in the minority in the world, but it is quite possible that will not be the reader's opinion. It is clearly a matter of an arbitrary line.) They are the stupid people, the incompetent people, the formal, imitative people, the people who, in any properly organised State, should, as a class, gravitate towards and below the minimum wage that qualifies for marriage. The laws of heredity are far too mysterious for such offspring ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... them to make sinful, paltry snuff-boxes that were mere pictures of the good old gold and silver? Was it my mischief? Or was it the mischief of the plotting swineherds who now find it to their interest to deal in base and imitative metals?" ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... may use a convenient German technical term, there is a traceable Tendenz in this direction, as is indicated in the Annotations on later pages. It is not to be supposed that even these apparently imitative incidents are (not to mince matters) mere pious frauds; they may well have come into existence in the folk-consciousness automatically, before they received their present literary form. But such a development could hardly have centred in an unworthy subject; there must have been ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... the winds and the storm. Admirers of Beethoven will recall numerous passages that would serve as illustrations. One particularly might be mentioned—the chorus in "Judah" (Haydn), "The Lord devoureth them all," which is admirably imitative of the reverberations of the cataract and the thundering of mighty waters. The sounds at sea, ominous of shipwreck, will also occur to the minds of some. At Land's End it is not uncommon for storms to be heralded by weird sounds; and in the northern seas ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... exceedingly poor compliment to the Southern whites, as it would naturally be supposed that constant contact with a superior race would have civilized the negro to a certain extent, especially as he is known to be wonderfully imitative. And such is the case; at least the writer of these lines, who has been born and bred in a slave State, thinks so. As a whole, they compare very favorably with the 'poor white trash,' and individually they are vastly superior ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... recruits. The real tragedy of Russia is that neither the party of reform nor the party of reaction shares, or even understands, the outlook and ideals of the people. Russian culture is still so comparatively recent that it has not yet passed out of the imitative stage; and, in spite of the work of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoieffsky, the books that are read and studied in Russia are for the most part translations from foreign authors. The result is that the political and social ideas of the intelligentsia ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... Major Cragiemuir, Ah Moy arrived at his place of business in Four-and-a-half Street, a mass of bruises, and with a heart full of hatred for his assailant. Perhaps, after all, the fellow had meant no harm. In his guileless, imitative way he had simply tried to do what he had often seen American young men do. Had he not frequently observed big Policeman Ryan kiss the red-haired widow who kept the lodging-house around on Missouri Avenue? Did not Muggsy Walker—across the street—salute his ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... black marble fireplace. The next time the banker's wife came to call she was able to offer her a cup of tea, with sliced lemon, quite as a matter of course, after the manner that Mrs. Kemp had handed it to her the week before. Milly was not crudely imitative: she was selectively imitative, and for the present she had chosen Mrs. ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... if you did but know how refreshing it is to see anything shabby, and dull, and ugly," Mrs. Grinstead answered with imitative inflections, which set Anna Vanderkist off into a fit of laughter, infecting both her uncle and aunt. The former ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... remember that in guiding the child to the formation of these habits, example and practice are far more important than precepts and rules. Example is more important because the child is very imitative; one rude act on the part of some older member of the household will counteract the benefit of many verbal lessons in politeness. Practice is important because it is through constant repetition ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... became her teacher, she had made for herself upward of sixty signs, all of which were imitative and were readily understood by those who knew her. The only signs which I think she may have invented were her signs for SMALL and LARGE. Whenever she wished for anything very much she would gesticulate in a very expressive manner. Failing to make ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... in grammar:" or—"of those persons who are skilled in grammar."—L. Murray cor. "This rule refers only to those nouns and pronouns which have the same bearing, or relation."—Id. "So that the things which are seen, were not made of things that do appear."—Bible cor. "Man is an imitative creature; he may utter again the sounds which he has heard."—Dr. Wilson cor. "But those men whose business is wholly domestic, have little or no use for any language but ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... corrupt examples and defective models, not only unrestrained and uncensured, but sanctioned with the applause of an uninstructed and misjudging multitude. Every plaudit which a vitious play, or a bad actor receives is a blow to the public morals, and the public taste. Man is an imitative animal, and insensibly conforms to the models and examples before him. Young men who excessively admire a favourite actor, will insensibly imitate him, without scanning the man's merits or defects; and without ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... his tone or manner; nothing, indeed, but a sincerity and anxiety usually rare with his temperament. It struck him also that his speech had but little of the odd California slang which was always a part of his imitative levity. He ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... complicated, slender strands of college gossip. But a woman of barely thirty, too old for friendships with young girls, too young to find her placid recreation in the stereotyped round of social functions, that seemed so perfectly imitative of the normal and yet so curiously unsuccessful at bottom—what ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... of McGaw's eldest son became visible to Mr. Crimmins, his face broke into creases so nearly imitative of a smile that his best friend would not have known him. He slapped the patched knees of his overalls gayly, bent over in a subdued chuckle, and disported himself in a merry and much satisfied way. His rum-and-watery eyes gleamed with delight, and even his chin-whisker took on a new vibration. ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious; conservatism stands on man's limitations, reform on his infinitude. The age of the quadruped is to go out; the age of the brain and the heart is to come in. We are too pettifogging and imitative in our legislative conceptions; the Legislature of this country should become more catholic and cosmopolitan than any other. Let us be brave and strong enough to trust in humanity; strong natures are inevitable patriots. The time, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... me remind you that a mere traditional religion, which is only orthodox because other people are so, and has not verified its beliefs by personal experience, is quite as deleterious as an imitative unbelief. Doubtless, I speak to some who plume themselves on 'never having been affected by these currents of popular opinion,' but whose unblemished and unquestioned orthodoxy has no more vitality in it than the other people's heterodoxy. The one man has ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Stevenson in his Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature, and many other curious searchers into the secrets of words, have attempted to explain the physiological basis of these varying "tone-qualities." Some of them are obviously imitative of sounds in nature; some are merely suggestive of these sounds through more or less remote analogies; some are frankly imitative of muscular effort or of muscular relaxation. High-pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquid consonants and harsh consonants, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... shall understand the imitative quality of early Elizabethan poetry if we read it in the light of these facts: that in the sixteenth century England was far behind other European nations in culture; that the Renaissance had influenced ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of law and order, in one whose fathers have stared at the sea day and night for a thousand years—the sea, full of its promises of unknown things, never quite the same, a slave to its own impulses. Man is an imitative animal.... ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... A horse is an imitative animal, and very susceptible to impressions,—both of a material and a mental character—and I must confess that these proceedings of the minister's were very well adapted to the object he had ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... calcareous grottoes have a more uniform tint. They are more beautiful, and richer in stalactites, in proportion as they are narrower, and the circulation of air is less free. By being spacious, and accessible to air, the cavern of Caripe is almost destitute of those incrustations, the imitative forms of which are in other countries objects of popular curiosity. I also sought in vain for subterranean plants, those cryptogamia of the family of the Usneaceae, which we sometimes find fixed on the stalactites, like ivy on walls, when we penetrate ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... the imitative and semi-dramatic character of the choral dance ("Laws," II, 655): "Choric movements are imitations of manners occurring in various actions, chances, characters—each particular is imitated, and those to whom the words, the song or the dances are suited, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... rafts, and are otherwise as commendably useful as those of Scotland; but no quaint ballad or simple song reminds us that men and women have loved, met, and parted on their banks, or that beneath each roof within their valleys the tragedy and comedy of life have been enacted. Our poetry is cold and imitative; it seems more the product of over-strained intellects than the spontaneous outgushing of hearts warm with love, and strongly sympathizing with human nature as it actually exists about us, with the joys and griefs of the men and women whom we meet daily. Unhappily, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... emotional consciousness of the actions going on about them, particularly of the life of their kind. In general these utterances are directed toward their kindred of their own species. In many cases, however, as among the imitative birds, the sounds which they utter indicate a curiously keen interest in the actions of their masters or other human affairs. The mocking-birds and some other species will, with great assiduity, endeavor to copy any sound which they happen to hear. I well remember watching a mocking-bird ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... especial manner the braying of an ass: when the fast fellows drive down to the Trafalgar at Greenwich, the Toy at Hampton Court, or the Swan at Henley upon Thames, the bugle-player mounts aloft, the rest of the fast fellows keeping a lookout for donkeys; when one is seen, a hideous imitative bray is set up by the man of music, and his quadrupedal brother, attracted by the congenial sound, rushes to the roadside—mutual recognition, with much merriment, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.—The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.—The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... century, the artistic interest of which has been lamentably deteriorated by renovation and scraping. The influence of the Byzantine cathedral that rose in the old Roman city by the Isle spread far, and numerous churches in Perigord bear witness to the imitative zeal which it inspired, especially in the application of domes to the vaulting of the nave. This arrangement is frequently to be found in connection with the pointed arch, and such is the case at Bourdeilles. The apse is beautiful, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... foreign, and the general want of encouragement to new inventions, however ingenious, have been greatly detrimental to the progress of the arts and manufactures. The people discover no want of genius to conceive, nor of dexterity to execute; and their imitative powers have always been acknowledged to be very great. Of the truth of this remark we had several instances at Yuen-min-yuen. The complicated glass lustres, consisting of several hundred pieces, were taken down, piece by piece, in the course of half an hour, by two Chinese, who had never ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... effort a certain imitative melody, but disapproved of the subject itself as low and unworthy of ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... What style is the best adapted to Senatorial reading? An imitative style and tone, being careful in the use of the ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... that the department of the fine arts which depended on outline surpassed that which derived its power from coloring and perspective. The sculptors far excelled the painters. The statue was the natural result of the imitative faculty surveying the nude human figure in every posture of activity or repose. Pictures came later, from more educated senses, and from minds which had first learned outward nature through the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... abroad, for he cheated us entirely to our satisfaction, and with such a grace as almost to make us fear he was robbing himself, and only exchanged his articles for our coin, out of respect for our country. These Chinese are truly said to be an imitative people. ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... the first act the impotent imitation of Marlowe is pitifully patent. Possibly there may also be an imitation of the still imitative style of Shakespeare, and the style may be more accurately definable as a copy of a copy—a study after the manner of Marlowe, not at second hand, but at third. In any case, being obviously too flat and feeble to show a touch of either godlike hand, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... is always the best revealer of its genuine life: the range of its spiritual as well as of its intellectual outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though it be shackled by rules of traditional ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... considerable time, and having considerably added to their capital, removed to a hotel of a higher grade in the city, where they now reside. It was not at all surprising that the clergyman and others had been deceived. The disguise, and Martin's imitative talent, might have misled persons on their guard, much more men unsuspicious of deception. The cast in the eyes, as well as a general resemblance of features, also of course ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... drifted into the camp to find Thorpe already out. With a curt nod the Indian seated himself by the fire, and, producing a square plug of tobacco and a knife, began leisurely to fill his pipe. Thorpe watched him in silence. Finally Injin Charley spoke in the red man's clear-cut, imitative English, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... historical recollections that hang about the Winter Palace. In the manner of children they will make a ghastly sport of them. Once, when they were in a specially jocular mood, Alexander, in company with his brother Constantine and some comrades in play, enacted—as youngsters in their apishly imitative mood will do—one of the most hideous scenes that concluded a previous reign. The throttling of the Emperor Paul was the subject! Alexander, standing for Paul, was assaulted and thrown down by his brother, who knelt upon his chest. With the aid of the sportive accomplices, a cord was passed ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... aeroplane its present place in aeronautics, there were three definite schools of experiment. The first of these was that which sought to imitate nature by means of the ornithopter or flapping-wing machines directly imitative of bird flight; the second school was that which believed in the helicopter or lifting screw; the third and eventually successful school is that which followed up the principle enunciated by Cayley, that of opposing a plane surface to the ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... you have collected your audience, just when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy. This notion of our having a simple pain in the reality, yet a delight in the representation, arises hence, that we do not sufficiently distinguish what we would by no means choose to do, from what we should ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... some with admiration and regret. It was devoted mainly to psalmody tunes of an elaborate sort, in which the first half-stanza would be sung in plain counterpoint, after which the voices would chase each other about in a lively imitative movement, coming out together triumphantly at the close. They abounded in forbidden progressions and empty chords, but were often characterized by fervor of feeling and by strong melodies. A few of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... architectural beauty for all nations, and the grace and elegance of their statuary have found students among every people. Much of this taste for the beautiful mingled with their poetry, which is kin sister to the imitative arts. In recent times the Italians have inherited the faculty of beauty, and introduced it into their fine cathedrals and capitols, as well as their statuary. The French also have displayed the highest ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... music retains its power to move. It is also highly probably that in the earlier objective phases of music, even the contemporary audiences were not moved in the sense that we should be moved to-day. The audiences were objective also and their enthusiasm may have been aroused by merely the imitative aspects of music as Avison called them. It is certainly a fact that content and form are more closely linked in music than in any other art. Suppose, however, we imagine the development of melody, counterpoint, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... any ulterior motive in his study of German. He simply found he had this imitative faculty; philology had always interested him, so even after he had gone into the motor trade, he used to amuse himself on business trips to ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... great original work to be undertaken in Ravenna as the capital of the empire in the West was the building and decoration of the churches of S. Vitale and S. Apollinare in Classe. All the Byzantine work that was done later in Ravenna is merely imitative, an expression of failing power under the crushing disaster of the Lombard invasion. When at last Aistulf in 751 made himself master of the impregnable city, it ceased, and suddenly, to be a capital, and though in 754 Pepin "restored" it to the papacy and established ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... followed letter-writing and easy composition. This completed the education of the vast majority of the boys not intended for the public service. The chief merit of the system was that it developed the memory and the imitative faculty. For secondary education somewhat better provision was made, practically the only method of attaining eminence in the state being through the schools (see Sec. Civil Service). At prefectural cities and provincial capitals colleges ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Imitative as a monkey she went on—with a child's perfect knowledge that it is all make-believe, yet with an entire credence in the power of make-believe: "Naughty child—WILL you be quiet? There! You've frown your counterpane off now. Wonder what next you'll do. I declare I'll slap you ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... eminently satisfactory to her own mind, Aun' Sheba taught her apt and eager pupil the secrets of her craft. Mara was up with the dawn on the following day, and achieved fair success. Other lessons followed, and it was not very long before the girl passed beyond the imitative stage and began to reason upon the principles involved in her ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... the subject of chewing. Whether the rock goat, the filthy animal to which we have before adverted, or the tobacco worm, first taught imitative man to masticate tobacco, we are ignorant. One thing, however, is most certain, that of all modes of using it, chewing seems most vulgar and ungentlemanlike, and it is worthy of particular remark, that in our country ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... memory of Ireland, its imaginations and thoughts for two thousand years. Must that be obliterated? Must national character be sterilized of all taint of its peculiar beauty? Must Ireland have no character of its own but be servilely imitative of its neighbor in all things and be nothing of itself? It is objected that the study of Irish history, Irish literature and the national culture generates hostility to the Empire. Is that a true psychological analysis? Is it not true in all human happenings that if ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... recent experiment has shown that the eye in fact moves by most irregular, angular leaps from point to point of the figure. The theory is therefore remodeled by substituting for the movement sensations of the eye, the tendencies corresponding to those early movements of touching imitative of the form, by which we learned to know a form for what it is, and the reproduction of feeling-tones belonging to the character of such movement. The movements of touching and feeling for a smooth continuous curved object are themselves pleasant. This complex of psychical factors makes ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... of "little John of Saintre and the Lady of the Beautiful Cousins"[86] has not struck all judges, even all English judges,[87] in the same way. Some have thought it mawkish, rhetorical, clumsily imitative of the manners of dead chivalry, and the like. Others, admitting it to be a late and "literary" presentation of the stately society it describes, rank it much higher as such. Its author was a bitter enough satirist if he wrote, as he most probably did, the famous Quinze Joyes de Mariage, one ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... beyond doubt; in a month's time all England was ringing with the fame of this noble new development of journalism; the proprietor saw his way to a solid fortune, and other men who had money to embark began to scheme imitative publications. It was clear that the quarter-educated would soon be abundantly provided ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... permit", and so on for two or three pages of rather vulgar and heartless merriment at the young lord's expense. [Footnote: Edinburgh Review, xi. 285. It is uncommonly hard to find any trace of poetic power, even of the imitative kind, in the Hours of Idleness. It is significant that the best pieces are those in the heroic couplet; an indication—to be confirmed by English Bards—of Byron's leaning towards the past.] The answer to the sneer, as all the world knows, was English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... always been recognized as the imitative animal par excellence. And there is hardly a book on psychology, however old, which has not devoted at least one paragraph to this fact. It is strange, however, that the full scope and pregnancy of the imitative impulse in man has had to wait till the last ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... imitative, hence the value of example over precept. The children of courteous parents will imbibe courtesy as naturally and unconsciously as the growing plant absorbs oxygen from the air and sunlight that bathes ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... The lengthy description in which Elihu is introduced, and the mention of his genealogy, are very unlike the other introductions. The literary art of the section is, speaking generally, inferior to that of the rest of the book. It is imitative rather than creative. Elihu takes about twenty verses to announce the simple fact that he is going to speak, though there might be a dramatic propriety in this, as he is represented as a young man. ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... that divine imagination of hers, his own appeared as something imitative and secondhand, and his art essentially degraded. He was nothing better than a ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... fashionable and educational authorities had hitched their wagon to the literary star, Miss Edgeworth, and the followers of her system; while the religiously inclined pinned their faith also upon tracts written by Miss Hannah More. In this still imitative land the booksellers simply reprinted the more successful of these juvenile publications. The changes, therefore, in the character of the juvenile literature of amusement of the early nineteenth century in America were due to the adoption of the works of these two Englishwomen, and to the ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... anchorage amongst the reefs, was 20 deg. 53' 15"; longitude by time keeper, 151 deg. 5' east. In the afternoon, I went upon the reef with a party of the gentlemen; and the water being very clear round the edges, a new creation, as it was to us, but imitative of the old, was there presented to our view. We had wheat sheaves, mushrooms, stags horns, cabbage leaves, and a variety of other forms, glowing under water with vivid tints of every shade betwixt green, purple, brown, and white; equalling in ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... scholars have discovered that the short lines in which Thorpe's translation is couched are imitative of the Old English measure. Iam unable to agree with them. Probably any short-line translation would ipso facto assume a choppiness not dissimilar to the Old English, and probably plenty of lines ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... in her. What was more, he could not have thought as she did if he had tried. She had that sort of mind which accepts no stereotyped reflection or idea; she worked things out for herself. Her words were her own, and not another's. She was not imitative, nor yet was she bizarre; she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of North Queensland jungles which have marked individualistic characters is that known as the koel cuckoo, which the blacks of some localities have named "calloo-calloo"—a mimetic term imitative of the most frequent notes of the bird. The male is lustrous black, the female mottled brown, and during most parts of the year both are extremely shy, though noisy enough in accustomed and quiet haunts. The principal note of the male is ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Admiralty, says in the Preface, "Every word has now been revised from the lips of a native. In the Midsummer vacation in 1852 Kallihirua passed some days with me, and we went partly over the Vocabulary. I found him intelligent, speaking English very fairly, docile and imitative, his great pleasure appearing to be a pencil and paper, with which he drew animals and ships. At the Christmas holidays, we revised more ...
— Kalli, the Esquimaux Christian - A Memoir • Thomas Boyles Murray
... with conviction, whereupon the mother, the father and Monsieur Rouquin filled the room with joyous exclamations and the baby, imitative little beggar that he ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... work is the end of the heroic age, both in politics and in literature. After the loss of Icelandic freedom there is no more left of Germania, and the Sturlunga Saga which tells the story of the last days of freedom is the last word of the Teutonic heroic age. It is not a decrepit or imitative or secondary thing; it is a masterpiece; and with this true history, this adaptation of an heroic style to contemporary realities, the sequence of German heroic tradition comes ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... There may be, of course, purely descriptive representation, which is a faithful record of the facts of appearance as the painter sees them, without any feeling toward them; here he works as a scientist, not as an artist. Merely imitative painting falls short of artistic significance, for it embodies no meaning beyond the external fact. It is the expressiveness of the object that the true artist cares to represent; it is its expressiveness, its value for the emotions, ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... admitted to himself that, in very truth, his object in smoking was to appear, as he imagined, more like a man, forgetful or ignorant of the fact that men, (even smokers), regard beardless consumers of tobacco as poor imitative monkeys. He soon came to see the habit in its true light, and gave it up, luckily, before he became its slave. He would have been more than mortal, however, had he given in at once. Continuing, therefore, to puff with obstinate vigour, ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... their influence on the spectator is, nevertheless, very similar to that of the leaders. We are here concerned only with what the pictorial offering contains. We must therefore also disregard the accompanying music or the imitative noises which belong to the technique of the full-fledged photoplay nowadays. They do not a little to push the attention hither and thither. Yet they are accessory, while the primary power must lie in the ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... anything but a poor copy. Even when the Brussels influence was most direct the flowers and sprays were placed inartistically, while the scroll copies of the early Flemish schools can only be termed the imitative ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... after the Battle of Bull Run, we were thrown on the defensive, and the fortifications of our capital were called for in a hurry. There were no models, in this country, from which to copy,—and few, if any, in Europe. Luckily, however, the art of fortification is not imitative; it is based on scientific principles; and we found in General Barnard and his assistants the science to comprehend the problem before them, and the experience and skill to grasp ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... perusal of such German works as were current in those days. Under the influence of these he, at the age of fifteen, wrote two short prose romances of slender merit. The sentiments and language were exaggerated, the composition imitative and poor. He wrote also a poem on the subject of Ahasuerus—being led to it by a German fragment he picked up, dirty and torn, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. This fell afterwards into other hands, and was considerably altered before ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... inner nature of the enterprise. The "model town," as was the case with imitative towns, proved to be a cunning device with two barbs. It militated to hold the workers to their jobs in a state of quasi serfdom, and it gave the company additional avenues of exploiting its workers ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... her period of separation, the foetus is given to her, and she lets it slide down between her shirt and her body so as to fall on the ground like an infant.[122] Here the imitation of childbirth is a piece of homoeopathic or imitative magic designed to facilitate ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer |
