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More "Maidenhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would be undisturbed even by the bloodiest war; and, best of all, those thousands upon thousands of our Northern girls, whose proper mates will perish in camp-hospitals or on Southern battle-fields, would avoid their doom of forlorn old-maidenhood. But, no doubt, the plan will be pooh-poohed down by the War Department; though it could scarcely be more disastrous than the one on which we began the war, when a young army was struck with paralysis through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and after it had been settled that he should attend to the matter for her he took up the illustrated volume of Longfellow—for, as the sisters had learned, his culture soared beyond the newspapers—and read aloud, with a fine confusion of consonants, the poem on "Maidenhood." Evelina lowered her lids while he read. It was a very beautiful evening, and Ann Eliza thought afterward how different life might have been with a companion who read poetry ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... method, no understanding of how to ingratiate themselves in youthful favour, save when they find virtue in the toils. If, unfortunately, the fly has got caught in the net, the spider can come forth and talk business upon its own terms. So when maidenhood has wandered into the moil of the city, when it is brought within the circle of the "rounder" and the roue, even though it be at the outermost rim, they can come forth and use ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... thing it would have been! Whoever heard of a girl on this side of the Maros being married without her farewell to maidenhood. I am paying for the supper and for everything because I want my bride's farewell to be finer and grander than anything that has ever been seen for many kilometres round. I have stinted nothing—begrudged nothing. I have given an ox, two pigs and a calf to be slaughtered for the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... with fatal serpents, and fastened with Gorgonian cold, turning men to stone; physically, the lightning and hail of chastisement by storm. Then in her fortitude she wears the crested and unstooping hemlet;** and lastly, in her temperance, she is the queen of maidenhood—stainless as ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... enthusiasm for Goethe first manifested itself as an elemental force. From another passage we learn that this was three years before her first meeting with the poet in 1807, "in the heyday between childhood and maidenhood." The "Child" of the first letters of the Correspondence was, accordingly, just nineteen. German authorities have accepted 1788 as Bettina's birth-year, but English publications, including the Encyclopaedia ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... more than a respectable landed estate in Connemara. For these reasons the amateur will do well to have new books of price bound "uncut." It is always easy to have the leaves pared away; but not even the fabled fountain at Argos, in which Hera yearly renewed her maidenhood, could restore margins once clipped away. So much for books which are chiefly precious for the quantity and quality of the material on which they are printed. Even this rather foolish weakness of the amateur ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... pilot should be her own conscience, hedged about with the learning, the good breeding, the fine character that she herself, under proper guidance, must cultivate through the impressionable years of childhood and maidenhood. If she so wills it, beauty and grace and true worth are all hers. And let her greet and go forth in the freshness of each golden day, as indeed, she must greet life, itself, ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... agent for the ruin of those she loves. I cannot remember the time when I did not love the only man for whom I ever entertained any affection. He was the playmate of my earliest years,—the betrothed of my young maidenhood,—and just before my poor father died, he joined our hands and left his blessing on my choice. Poverty was the only barrier to our union, but I took a situation as teacher, and hoarded my small gains in the hope of aiding my lover, who went abroad with a ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... or not she was unusually good to look at had hardly ever before occurred to her. She flushed slightly, pleased and wondering, with a new seed of gentle vanity planted in her simple nature, a child on the threshold of the womanly inheritance of maidenhood. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... promised me. I took his name then, as we do in the Cold Country. They still call me Tara! Years I have waited, true to my promise—with even my name of maidenhood relinquished. His name—Tara! And now he tosses me aside—because you, only an Earth woman, have ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... maplewood, and there, on white sheets spread over a mattress of fine sheep's wool, and protected from the cold by bright blue coverlets's, lay a graceful, lovely girl asleep; this was Rhodopis' granddaughter, Sappho. The rounded form and delicate figure seemed to denote one already in opening maidenhood, but the peaceful, blissful smile could only belong to a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... am about to tell thee is unknown to the very gods. Listen to me, O mighty-armed one, as it befell in former days. How all the Kshatriyas, cleansed by weapons should attain to regions of bliss, was the question. For this, a child was conceived by Kunti in her maidenhood, capable of provoking a general war. Endued with great energy, that child came to have the status of a Suta. He subsequently acquired the science of weapons from the preceptor (Drona), that foremost descendant of Angirasa's race. Thinking of the might ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... how Her fate I have fixed? Far from your side Shall the faithless sister be sundered; Her horse no more In your midst through the breezes shall haste her; Her flower of maidenhood Will falter and fade; A husband will win Her womanly heart, She meekly will bend To the mastering man The hearth she'll heed, as she spins, And to laughers is left for ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... between the expression of her lineaments and that of the countenances around her was not a little surprising, and was productive of hypotheses without measure as to how she came there. She was, in fact, emphatically a modern type of maidenhood, and she looked ultra-modern by reason of her environment: a presumably sophisticated being among the simple ones—not wickedly so, but one who knew life fairly well for her age. Her hair, of good English brown, neither light nor dark, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... sent upon me from heaven, and the utter marring of my person, whence it suddenly came upon me, a wretched creature! For nightly visions thronging to my maiden chamber, would entice me with smooth words: "O damsel, greatly fortunate, why dost thou live long time in maidenhood, when it is in thy power to achieve a match the very noblest? for Jupiter is fired by thy charms with the shaft of passion, and longs with thee to share in love. But do not, my child, spurn away from thee the couch of Jupiter; but go forth to Lerna's fertile mead, to the folds and ox-stalls ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... relations of the various ranks to one another. Great Britain is essentially the home of the chaperon. We pride ourselves, as a nation, upon the extreme care with which we protect our young gentlewomen from contaminating influences. But the fastidious attention which we bestow upon our national maidenhood is as nothing in comparison with the protective commotion with which we surround that shrinking sensitive plant, Mr. ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... young and innocent girl married to this remorseless gambler, scarred with the gun and the knife, was a profanation of maidenhood—and yet, as he fell now and then into a dream, he took on a kind of savage beauty which might allure and destroy a woman. Whatever else he was, he was neither commonplace nor mean. The visitors to whom he ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... mind, being now a loving and reasonable woman. It was just a year since she had saved the life of Robin; and patience, and loneliness, and opposition, had enlarged and ennobled her true and simple heart. No lord in the land need have looked for a purer or sweeter example of maidenhood than this daughter of a Yorkshire farmer was, in her simple dress, and with the dignity of love. The glen was beginning to bestrew itself with want of light, instead of shadows; and bushy places thickened with the imperceptible growth of night. Mary went on, with ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... entertained them all. Then began King Malcolm to yearn after the child's sister, Margaret, to wife; but he and all his men long refused; and she also herself was averse, and said that she would neither have him nor any one else, if the Supreme Power would grant, that she in her maidenhood might please the mighty Lord with a carnal heart, in this short life, in pure continence. The king, however, earnestly urged her brother, until he answered Yea. And indeed he durst not otherwise; for they were come into his kingdom. So that then it was fulfilled, as God had long ere foreshowed; ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... My liege, it chances The Archon Lamachus is old and spent. He has an only child, a daughter, Gycia, The treasure of his age, who now blooms forth In early maidenhood. The girl is fair As is a morn in springtide; and her father A king in all but name, such reverence His citizens accord him. Were it not well The Prince Asander should contract himself In marriage to this girl, and take the strength Of Cherson for her dowry, and the power Of ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... the cool whiteness of her face was untinged by any flush of young maidenhood. At seventeen she was a slender sprite of a girl, to reach whose unearthly aloofness the warm human hands of her companions strained unavailing. Each winter she descended to the valley and to school and church, a silent, remote ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... welfare is not wholly attributable to an uncle's and guardian's solicitude in behalf of an orphaned niece. A much closer bond, the bond between husband and wife, united them, for when Esther had grown to maidenhood, Mordecai had espoused her. (79) Naturally, Esther would have been ready to defend her conjugal honor with her life. She would gladly have suffered death at the hands of the king's bailiffs rather than yield herself to ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... OR JUSTICE.—As has been already said, Artegal, or Justice, makes conquest of Britomartis or Elizabeth. It is no earthly love that follows, but the declaration of the queen that in her continued maidenhood justice to her people shall be her only spouse. Such, whatever the honest historian may think, was the poet's conceit of what would best please his ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... men void of understanding," to their common degradation. This human wastage is worse upon the race than war; and all the more pathetic because it consists of girls scarcely past the threshold of their maidenhood. When we consider further the indescribably horrible cruelty of the "white-slave trade," which the insatiable lust of men has brought into being, we may begin to realize to what the absence of restraint upon this appetite ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... at the open casement, illumined, with its clear radiance, the chamber which had been, during the years of her maidenhood, Mora de Norelle's ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... and with every people, the arcana of life and death, the mysteries of birth, childhood, puberty, adolescence, maidenhood, womanhood, manhood, motherhood, fatherhood, have called forth the profoundest thought and speculation. From the contemplation of these strange phenomena sprang the esoteric doctrines of Egypt and the East, with their horrible accompaniments of vice and ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... enormously. He had had a hopeless feeling, of late, that life was too complex an affair for him to grapple with. Now, as by a flash, order was restored in his chaotic universe. He stood gazing in rapture at Miss Jones's blushing face, which seemed angelic in its purity and its dignified maidenhood. That there dwelt a sweet young soul behind those blameless features he felt ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... and darkens in a vessel over the fire. It remained, persisted. Time but steadied the focus as the wise oculist, seeking for his patient the perfect image, drops lenses in the frame through which the vision chart is viewed. In a little the perfect image is found. There was that Rosalie, come to maidenhood, come to the dizzy edge of leaving school, with the perfect image of her persistent obsession; with the belief no longer that men were magicians having the world for their washpot and women for their footstool, but unquestionably that they "had a better time" than women and that ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... come once more, But bringing young ones of our brood— One boy (Salopian), and four Girls, blooming into maidenhood. ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... reconnoitring took place, that he appeared sad and much depressed. The truth was that, by a strange freak of destiny, it had come to pass that the stronghold he was set to reduce was the home of his own sister, whom he had tenderly loved during her maidenhood, and whom he loved now, in spite of the estrangement which had resulted from hostilities with her husband's family. He believed, too, that, notwithstanding this cruel division, she still was sincerely ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... scene, but she was not to be found amongst the governesses. No one in Polchester had learnt yet to cycle in rational costume, it was several years before the publication of "The Heavenly Twins," and Mr. Trollope's Lilys and Lucys were still considered the ideal of England's maidenhood. Mrs. Cole, therefore, had to choose between idiotic young women and crabbed old maids, and she finally chose an old maid. I don't think that Miss Jones was the very best choice that she could have made, but time was short. Jeremy, aided by Hamlet, was growing terribly ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... one early example of the wizard-legend where the magician is saved from his pact with Satan not so much by the counter-charms of the Church as by the purity and steadfastness of Christian maidenhood, and for this reason I think the poet Shelley is right in regarding this legend as 'the true germ of Goethe's Faust.' It is the story of Cyprian and Justina, who were among the many victims of the persecution of the Christians by Diocletian, about 300 A.D. Cyprian ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... unconscious lethargy of her maidenhood's untroubled dreams the soul of Vera had awakened at length to the realization of the strong, passionate woman's ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... parents-in-law. If the negotiations go off smoothly, the marriage contract is written, presents are exchanged between the engaged couple, through their respective parents, and all that is left the girl of her maidenhood is a period of busy preparation for ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... And all the light upon her silver face Flowed from the spiritual lily that she held. Lo! these her emblems drew mine eyes—away: For see, how perfect-pure! As light a flush As hardly tints the blossom of the quince Would mar their charm of stainless maidenhood.' ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... in a meditation. "Poor Kate! poor Kate! We were bairns together, M. Montaiglon, innocent bairns, and happy, twenty years syne, and I will not say but what in her maidenhood there was some warmth between us, so that I know her well. She was compelled by her relatives to marriage with our parchment friend yonder, and there you have the start of what has been hell on earth for her. The man has not the soul of a louse, and as for her, she's the finest gold! You would see ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... much ado to conceal her chagrin; she had started out with bright hopes of securing a brilliant match, and now, though not yet twenty, began to be haunted with the terrible, boding fear of old maidenhood. ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... child's way of caring For only the present enjoyment shall pass; When she'll learn to take thought of the dress that she's wearing, And grow rather fond of consulting the glass? Well, never mind; nothing really can change her; Fair childhood will grow to as fair maidenhood; Her unselfish, sweet nature is safe from all danger; I know she will always be charming ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... seemed that these colors were an image of the soul that was disclosed to him. He would have been at a loss for words to describe the extraordinary sense of purity that Corydon gave to him; it was not simply her maidenhood—it was something far more rare than that. Here was an utterly perfect human soul; a soul without speck or blemish—without a base idea, with no trace of a vanity, unaware what a pretense might be. The joy and wonder of life welled spontaneously in her, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... born of murmuring sound" may enhance the charms of maidenhood, is it too much to expect that sunburn, fervently desired, may not only permanently darken the complexion, but affect the mien of the race? And thus in years to come the white Australian may be of the past—transformed physically by the supremacy of soil ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... stars, Welshwomen's hats, and rosaries pendent from the gas brackets. As for Florinda's story, her name had been bestowed upon her by a painter who had wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhood was still unplucked. Be that as it may, she was without a surname, and for parents had only the photograph of a tombstone beneath which, she said, her father lay buried. Sometimes she would dwell upon the size of it, and rumour had it that Florinda's father had died from the growth of ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... As for Smellie, trembling with weakness and depressed in spirits as he was after his recent sharp attack of fever, he completely broke down, and, laying his head upon my shoulder, sobbed like a child. Poor Daphne! it seemed hard that she should thus, in the first bright flush and glory of her maidenhood, be struck down, and the light of her life extinguished by the ruthless hand of a murderer; and yet, perhaps, after all, it was better so, better that she should enjoy the bliss of laying down her life for the sake of the man she loved, rather ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... and other disease. The first thing the child learns is that it is its duty to be pretty—to look its best. It is taught to value dress and show as the great necessities of existence, and is trained in the most extravagant habits. As the girl advances towards maidenhood, she is forced forward, and made to look as much like a woman as possible. Her education is cared for after a fashion, but amounts to very little. She learns to play a little on some musical instrument, to sing a little, to paint a little—in short she acquires ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... those eyes as he had first seen them in the pale light that had preceded the dawn. Then they had been full of curiosity, like a young animal's. Now surely they were changed. Once they had asked a question. They delivered a summons to-night. What was in them to-night? The mystery of young maidenhood, southern, sunlit, on the threshold of experience, waking to curious knowledge, to a definite consciousness of the meaning of its dreams, of the truth ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... man, who have not destroyed your innocency, you alone are invited, to proclaim anew before the Sun and the Earth, before your companions and in the sight of the Great Mystery, the chastity and purity of your maidenhood. Come ye, all who ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... months gone, when he had waited her coming in those very rooms. Not yet six months, and he seemed to have lived years since then! He recalled her as she appeared before him that night in all the grace and witchery of lovely maidenhood just opening into womanhood. How beautiful, how joyous she had been! without a thought ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... did not expect to find it there. For an instant, however, he saw with new eyes that primary eloquence of woman life, the unspent splendour of youth, the warm joy of the material being, the mystery of maidenhood in all its efflorescence. It was the emergence of his own youth again, as why should it not be, since he had never married and had never dallied! But in a moment ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Gerard might be hesitating in uncertain humility before the delicate maidenhood that invested her like a fine atmosphere forbidding approach. She was not even dimly aware that her averted face controlled to soft impassivity, the intent gaze on her work which veiled her eyes beneath their ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... away, like echo of old age Sighing and dying in the heart that fails. Ah! the cruel beauty ... how it creeps Into my home, into my waiting heart! Who am I that I wait to-night?... Alas, Where is the old content of maidenhood, The calmness and the laughter and the song, The patient hands unshaken as the needle Plied to the gentle rhythm that my lips Murmured, untroubled girlhood at ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... this terrible fact is the other, that woman must marry in India anyhow. No disgrace and misfortune can befall a woman, according to Hindu ideas, equal to that of spending her whole life in maidenhood. This, of course, is connected with the idea that she has no social status or religious destiny apart from man. Hence it is that a host of loving parents, who are unable to find a suitable match for their daughters, rather than leave them unmarried, stupidly join them ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Morgan, though not at all a sentimental person, had hoarded up her ideal so much after the ordinary date, that it came all the harder upon her when everything thus merged into the light of common day. She walked very fast up Grange Lane, which was another habit of her maidenhood not quite in accord with the habit of sauntering acquired during the same period by the Fellow of All-Souls. When Mrs Morgan was opposite Mr Wodehouse's, she looked across with some interest, thinking of Lucy; and it shocked her greatly ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... lawn, open at the rounded throat, she saw with woman's unerring eye the unspoken approval if not open admiration in his face. Not yet nineteen, she had lived a busy, earnest, thoughtful life. The Cranstons had known her from early maidenhood. She was a child in the Southern garrison in the days of the great epidemic, when the young captain owed his life to the doctor's skill and assiduous care. It was this that led to the deep friendship between the two men, and to Cranston's ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... has Amalia to do with Luis' marriage?" asked Jovita, to whose maidenhood simplicity seemed befitting in spite of ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... heart— The prim coquette, the drinking stuff, The drinker, then, the farms and cattle; And on the miser, rude and rough, The robes and lace did Aesop settle; For thus, he said, 'an early date Would see the sisters alienate Their several shares of the estate. No motive now in maidenhood to tarry, They all would seek, post haste, to marry; And, having each a splendid bait, Each soon would find a well-bred mate; And, leaving thus their father's goods intact, Would to their mother pay ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... but with evidence of unbending character behind it, in some way conjured something out of the past, and he saw her again, the greying locks restored to their youthful glory and the careworn cheek abloom with the colour of young maidenhood as they had been in the gathering shadows that night when they swore to build their own home, and live their own lives, and love each other, always, only, for ever and ever...And yet, to let her defiance go unchecked, to have his authority challenged ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... life; how, oft she stood, Sweet in her guileless maidenhood, By dying bed, in hovel lone, Whose sorrow she had ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... clasping the hand of the daughter of one of his scullions, is grotesque and humiliating. At the time the thought never presented itself to me at all, and had it done so it would have troubled me no whit. She was my first glimpse of fresh young maidenhood, and I was filled with pleasant interest and desirous of more acquaintance with this phenomenon. Beyond that I ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... from the arrival of at "Powhatan," the country seat of the Mayo family, just below Richmond, of a fair guest—Miss Louisa Patterson, of Philadelphia. This lady was no longer young, according to the severe standards of that time of early marriages and correspondingly early "old-maidenhood," but so much the better, as she was therefore of suitable age for the elderly though spruce and prosperous widower. She was, withal, a decidedly personable woman with the elegant manners and conversation of the inner ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... how she spent the entire evenings sitting alone by the window in the dark—assuredly not on Olya's account, but because she was dying; all her life she had been dying, as the town was dying where Kozlov was read; as he, Agrenev, was dying; as the maidenhood of Olya had died. How powerful is the onward rush of life! What tragedy lay in those evenings by the window ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... lie spoken that converted all her frank, proud maidenhood to a memory. In its place there was now something false and sullied. While Dubova was dressing herself, Sina glanced furtively at her from time to time. Her friend seemed to her bright and pure, and she herself as repulsive as a crushed reptile. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... since the body's maidenhood Alone were neither rare nor good Unless with it I gave to you A spirit still untrammeled, too, Take my dreams and take my mind That were masterless as wind; And "Master!" I shall say to you Since ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... much-disputed question of her masculine attire, she said she would wear woman's dress only when she heard Mass, and woman's clothing at her execution, if it came to that. The judges were perfectly well aware of her proved maidenhood, and of the real reason for her dress, but they persisted—without result—in trying to trap her into dangerous replies. She was far too direct and simple to be caught, just because she saw no "heresy" in an act of ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... cease to resist (O Maid!) such bridegroom opposing, Right it is not to resist whereto consigned thee a father, Father and mother of thee unto whom obedience is owing. Not is that maidenhood all thine own, but partly thy parents! Owneth thy sire one third, one third is right of thy mother, Only the third is thine: stint thee to strive with the others, Who to the stranger son have yielded their dues with a dower! 65 Hymen O Hymenaeus: ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... fearlessly as some undaunted child She met his eyes that searched her own for truth, She who had scorned the tempest dark and wild, Feared not the chidings of his hasty youth. And undismayed she moved to where he stood, With blushing, beauteous charms of maidenhood, And there with rapt eyes looking up to him, She told him of those visions never dim; Of that wild spirit born amid the storm Whose restless strength had swayed her fragile form. Before his own she laid her very soul, That he might there its ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... her close intercourse with the Garthowen family from babyhood. Did she feel anything more? She thought she did. From childhood she had been promised to Will; the idea of marrying him when they were both grown to manhood and maidenhood had been familiar to her ever since she could remember. It caused no excitement in her mind, no tumult in her heart. It was in the nature of things—it was Will's wish—it was her fate! She did ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... the stream of time flow by And leave each year a richer good, And matron loveliness outvie The nameless charm of maidenhood. ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... examining witnesses from Domremy, and the Queen of Sicily and other great ladies to whom Joan was intrusted, the clergy found nothing in her but "goodness, humility, frank maidenhood, piety, honesty and simplicity." As for her wearing a man's dress, the Archbishop of Embrim said to the king, "It is more becoming to do these things in man's clothes, since they have to be done ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the tale of crime, long and intricate; but I will briefly follow its argument. Her husband was Sychaeus, wealthiest in lands of the Phoenicians, and loved of her with ill-fated passion; to whom with virgin rites her father had given her maidenhood in wedlock. But the kingdom of Tyre was in her brother Pygmalion's hands, a monster of guilt unparalleled. Between these madness came; the unnatural brother, blind with lust of gold, and reckless of his sister's love, lays Sychaeus low before the altars with ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... in the superstition of her old-maidenhood concerning love, really thought it cold-blooded and shocking; but she said, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... less frequent, her dress lighter; her conversation, toned by the ideas of pride and self-love reflected from the society she moved in, was profane and irreligious; and soon the roses of Christian virtue that bloom in the cheek of innocent maidenhood became sick and withered in the heated, feverish air of perverse influences that tainted ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... her youth and maidenhood had gone by in silent and fanciful dreamings, whilst one of the greatest conflicts the world had ever known was raging between men of the same kith and the same blood. The education of women—even of those of rank and wealth—was avowedly upon ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... and drawing back to escape the disturbing eloquence of his eyes, she discovered the presence of his encircling arm. The discovery brought her to her feet—flushed, palpitating, aquiver with anger at this first shadow of insult to her maidenhood. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... a legend that the love of God So quickened under Mary's heart it wrought Her very maidenhood to holier stuff.... However that may be, the birth befell Upon a night when all the Syrian stars Swayed tremulous before one lordlier orb That rose in gradual splendor, Paused, Flooding the firmament with mystic light, And dropped upon the breathing hills A sudden music Like a distillation ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... really true of chastity? she would ask herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied to maidenhood alone. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... stared at her with the story of relentless years; at the corners of her lips the artistic fingers of Time had chiselled lines, delicate, it is true, but clearly defined—a line that did not dent the cheeks of early maidenhood, a line that had found no place near her own lips ten years ago; and above her eyes—she had not discerned that, at first—there was a lack of fullness, you could not name it hollowness; that was new, at least new to her, others with ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... the poets and romancists for nothing. Perhaps Broussard would say more to her—at that thought a lovely light came into Anita's innocent eyes. Perhaps he had forgotten everything. Then Anita's eyes were troubled. The pride of maidenhood was born, as it should be, with love, and Anita no longer ran to the window to see Broussard, but when he was present he filled the room; when he spoke she heard ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... is that no value was, or is, attached to maidenhood in all Polynesia, the young woman being left to her own whims without blame or care. Only deep and sincere attachment holds her at last to the man she has chosen, and she then follows his wishes in matters of fidelity, though still to a large ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... and their kings' daughters are now become sons of the Master and handmaidens of the Anointed. And one nobly born lady among them, a beautiful woman whom I baptized myself, came soon after to tell me that she was divinely admonished to live in maidenhood, drawing nearer to Him. Six days later she entered the grade that all the handmaidens of the Anointed desire, though their fathers and mothers would hinder them, reproaching and afflicting them; nevertheless, they grow in number, so that I know not how many they are, besides widows and continent ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... the night, And sleep under a bush; and she could eke Wrestle by very force and very might With any young man, were he ne'er so wight;* *active, nimble There mighte nothing in her armes stond. She kept her maidenhood from every wight, To no man deigned she for ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... thing in the least emotional way. In the whole of the two centuries prior to that date there were five first-born girls out of a total of seven generations of the family. Each of these girls grew up to maidenhood and each became engaged, and each one died during the period of engagement, two by suicide, one by falling from a window, one from a 'broken heart' (presumably heart failure, owing to sudden shock through fright). The fifth girl was killed one evening in the ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... sunshine years yet, little one, and think not of the bonds and cares of marriage. How could these little hands lift the heavy kettles, wash the blankets, and do the thousand tasks of a household? You are mistaken, child. It is not love you feel, but the changing fancies of maidenhood. Play in the sun with Loup and wait for the real prince. He will come some day with great beauty and you will give no more thought to me. He must be young, little one, a youth of twenty; not one like me, nearer the mark of another decade. It ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... from her very cradle Lovely and witty and good; And at last, in the course of years, had blossomed Into full sweet maidenhood. ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... is my prayer.... They come into a house: they are all strife And hate to any child of the dead wife.... Better a serpent than a stepmother! A boy is safe. He has his father there To guard him. But a little girl! (Taking the LITTLE GIRL to her) What good And gentle care will guide thy maidenhood? What woman wilt thou find at father's side? One evil word from her, just when the tide Of youth is full, would wreck thy hope of love. And no more mother near, to stand above Thy marriage-bed, nor ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... that she wilfully deceived thee, that she abused thy belief and denied to thy question and profaned maidenhood to stealth,—all this might have galled thee; but to these wrongs old men are subjected,—they give mirth to our farces; maid and lover are privileged impostors. But to have counted the sands in thine hour-glass, to have sat by thy side, marvelling when the worms should have ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... personified. Parthenia is sister of Agnei'a (3 syl.), or wifely chastity, the spouse of Encra't[^e]s, or temperance. Her attendant is Er'ythre, or modesty. (Greek, parth[)e]nia, "maidenhood.")—Phineas Fletcher, The ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... daughter's wedding was sent with the others, and the remaining days of Rachel's maidenhood slipped away in a whirl of preparation and excitement in which her mother reveled, but which was ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the kindly voice of age, who can hold cheerful converse with one whom years have deprived of charms. Show me the man of generous impulses, who is always ready to help the poor and needy; who treats unprotected maidenhood as he would the heiress surrounded by the protection of rank, riches and family; who never forgets for an instant the delicacy, the respect, that is due a woman in any condition or class. Show me such a man and you show me a gentleman—nay, more, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... she was in spite of the long years of trouble and disappointment! True, the first blush of maidenhood was gone, for she was only four years younger than I, but she was beautiful beyond description. Little of stature, yet perfectly moulded, her great, grey eyes still possessed their old charm, while her brown hair made a fitting crown for so beauteous ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... common lands and it urges these principles upon the public, praying that the time may speedily come when no human being shall be condemned without due process of law; and when the unspeakable outrages which have so often provoked such lawlessness shall be banished from the world, and childhood, maidenhood and womanhood shall no more be the victims of ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... very pretty. Excitement seems to put the match to the flickering taper of beauty, hidden behind the self-control of healthy maidenhood. Her cheeks were aflame and her eyes sparkled so like Jack's when he was sure ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... had come in their place; knowledge was hers, but faith had rotted. Time was when the sight of a drunken man filled her with terror; now the one beside her scarcely awakened disgust. Bad women had seemed unreal—phantoms of another world. Now she brushed shoulders with them daily, and her own maidenhood was soiled by the contact. She was a girl only in name; in reality she was a woman of the streets, or so she viewed herself in ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... blown of death's dark horn The marriage moonlight withers, that the morn For two made one may find three made by death One ruin at the blasting of its breath: Clothed with heart's flame renewed And strange new maidenhood, Faith lightens on the lips that bloomed for hire Pure as the lightning of love's first-born fire: Wide-eyed and patient ever, till the curse Find where to fall and pierce, 110 Keen expiation whets with edge more dread A father's wrong to smite a ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was past thirty-five, and had no regrets. She was a close student of the Bible, and brought one text from it into her own life. "When I was a child I played as a child, but now that I am old I have put aside childish things." She often quoted this in defence of her industrious maidenhood. ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... Among the other pictures are full-length portraits of the Queen and Prince Albert in their youth, taken soon after their marriage— like the natural good end to the various pictures of her Majesty in her fair English childhood and maidenhood, with the blonde hair clustering about the open innocent forehead, the fearless blue eyes, the frank mouth. The child, long a widow in her turn, a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, must look with strange mingled feelings on these shadows of ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... these busy days Ume-ko moved as one but little interested. Kano and Uchida noticed nothing unusual. To them she was merely the conventional nonenity of maidenhood that Japanese etiquette demanded. It never entered their heads that she would not have agreed with equal readiness to any ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... receipts which fell to the minor members was small—but it was full of variety and sometimes of excitement. If the work did not entirely drive away the remembrance of Lancelot Vane it enabled her to look upon the romance of her early maidenhood with equanimity. Her love affair had become a regret tinged ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... Kore. M. Martin ('Hist. France,' i. 63) thinks there is here a confusion between the Greek Kore (Proserpine) and Koridwen, the White Fairy, the Celtic Goddess of the Moon and also (as amongst the Greeks) of maidenhood. But ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... no longer honorably keep them in the dark—to make up your mind that you will come to the woman you love in the glory of your unfallen manhood, as you expect her to come to you in the beauty of her spotless maidenhood." ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... doing anything but adding to their difficulties, and preventing them from getting married. When the girls had been left in poverty he only thought of their trying for the nice quiet situations that every one recommended, but which seemed so hard to obtain, and then sinking into obscure old maidenhood in the bosom of a respectable family. When Jane mentioned the matronship, Mr. MacFarlane strongly advised her to apply for it, for the salary was more than she could look for in a situation, and she would probably be more independent. But as for him employing a girl as a law-writer, ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... bloom, by sun and wind unwooed, Seems to expand and blossom 'mid the snows, A lily sceptreless, a scentless rose, For dainty listlessness of maidenhood. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Radcliffes were all Papists; there was Popery in the blood, and it came out like the gout, missing a couple of generations. Then again there was the scar, and Miss Radcliffe would never be married. One of the neighbours who suggested the scar and maidenhood as a sufficient reason for apostasy was a retired mill-owner, who was a Wesleyan Methodist when he was in business in Manchester, but had become ostentatiously Anglican when he retired into the country. The village ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... more of the great world than the rude, chaotic civilization she saw from the cabin windows or met in the persons of her father's lodgers. Shut up for days in this quaint tenement, she had seen it change from the enchanted playground of her childish fancy to the theater of her active maidenhood, but without losing her ideal romance in it. She had translated its history in her own way, read its quaint nautical hieroglyphics after her own fashion, and possessed herself of its secrets. She had in fancy made voyages in it to foreign lands, had heard the accents of a softer tongue ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... now become sons of the Master and handmaidens of the Anointed. And one nobly born lady among them, a beautiful woman whom I baptized myself, came soon after to tell me that she was divinely admonished to live in maidenhood, drawing nearer to Him. Six days later she entered the grade that all the handmaidens of the Anointed desire, though their fathers and mothers would hinder them, reproaching and afflicting them; nevertheless, they grow in number, so that I know ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... of his soul, and in her exaltation waited now almost impatiently for death that should unite her with him. Taking joy in the thought that she should go to him a maid, she ceased at last to resent the maidenhood that had been ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... the girl, throwing herself at his feet, "pity my maidenhood, do not prostitute this body under so ugly a name." The superintendent of maids replies, "Let the maid here present be dressed up with every care, let a name-ticket be written for her, and the fellow who deflowers Tarsia ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... in spite of the long years of trouble and disappointment! True, the first blush of maidenhood was gone, for she was only four years younger than I, but she was beautiful beyond description. Little of stature, yet perfectly moulded, her great, grey eyes still possessed their old charm, while her brown hair made a fitting crown for so beauteous a ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... as an emblem of hard things, as, to take a modern example, in Mr. Swinburne's "armed and iron maidenhood "— said of Atalanta. Hearts are "iron," strength is "iron," flesh is not "iron," an "iron" noise goes up to the heaven of bronze. It may not follow, Cauer thinks, from these phrases that iron was used in any way. Men are supposed ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... maidenhood, she took refuge in her chamber, as she had done once before. He heard her lock the door hastily, with a double turn of the key. He remained alone, and he asked himself suddenly, seized by infinite discouragement and sadness, if he had done right in speaking, if the truth would germinate in ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... plainly felt very happy and important. She had always wished to be married; she was not in the least strong-minded and her old-maidenhood had always been a sore point with her. I think she looked upon it as somewhat of a disgrace. And yet she was a born old maid; looking at her, and taking all her primness and little set ways into consideration, it was quite impossible to picture her as ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... sitting alone by the window in the dark—assuredly not on Olya's account, but because she was dying; all her life she had been dying, as the town was dying where Kozlov was read; as he, Agrenev, was dying; as the maidenhood of Olya had died. How powerful is the onward rush of life! What tragedy lay in those evenings by the window ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth—even that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping, like garments put off long ago—were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... how, oft she stood, Sweet in her guileless maidenhood, By dying bed, in hovel lone, Whose sorrow she had ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... She had had her little romance, and it had been incontinently nipped in the bud by imperious mamma, and she had dutifully yielded, with the pain sharp in her heart all the same. But he was poor, and Mildred was weak, and so Lady Kingsland's only daughter glided uncomplainingly into old-maidenhood. ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... he promised me. I took his name then, as we do in the Cold Country. They still call me Tara! Years I have waited, true to my promise—with even my name of maidenhood relinquished. His name—Tara! And now he tosses me aside—because you, only an Earth woman, have ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... notwithstanding the fact that he was quite a young man still, and quickly kindled to enthusiasm by dance and song. That the quiet Elizabeth, who had long ago appraised life at a moderate value, and who knew in spite of her maidenhood that marriage was as a rule no dancing matter, should have had zest for this revelry surprised him still more. However, young people could not be quite old people, he concluded, ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... children's clothes. The men have adopted Chinese dress, but the women, in most cases, retain their tribal costume with its large turban-like head-dress, its plaited skirt and intricately embroidered coat. All this is made by hand, and the choicest years of maidenhood are occupied in preparing the ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... never yielded to the pleading of man, who have not destroyed your innocency, you alone are invited, to proclaim anew before the Sun and the Earth, before your companions and in the sight of the Great Mystery, the chastity and purity of your maidenhood. Come ye, all who have ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... gauze within the range of pale pink, pale crocus, pale green, silver and azure. Then came chromatic scales of colour; combinations meant to vulgarise the rainbow; sinfonies and fugues; the twittering of birds and the great peace of dewy nature; maidenhood in her awakening innocence; "The Dawn in June." The ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... and he was filled with wonder at the sanctity of her maidenhood. Thenceforth meditating upon the Annunciation he should always clothe Pauline in a robe of white samite and set her in his mind's eye for that other maid of Jewry, even as painters found holy maids in Florence or Perugia ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... Juan asked Don Quixote what news he had of the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, was she married, had she been brought to bed, or was she with child, or did she in maidenhood, still preserving her modesty and delicacy, cherish the remembrance of the tender ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... slightly under his gaze, the faint, troubled flush of maidenhood which apprehends an evil of which it may not know the conditions; and he saw by swift intuition that this sincere spirit was ashamed of its own ignorance. His mind darted a guess that he had before him, in fact, an inexperience of life underlying intimate acquaintance with grief ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Janet scrupled not to embroider a bit, so much is permissible to the "unco guid" when so very much is at stake. And Angela went on brushing out her beautiful hair without a sign of emotion. To the scandal of Scotch maidenhood she seemed unimpressed by the depravity of the pair. To the surprise of Aunt Janet she heard her without interruption to the uttermost word, and then—wished to know if Aunt Janet thought the major would let her ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... tells her, "is a country that hath yet her maidenhood. The face of the earth hath not been torn, the graves have not been opened for gold. It hath never been entered by any army of strength, and never conquered by any Christian prince. Men shall find here more rich ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... unintentional and unconscious agent for the ruin of those she loves. I cannot remember the time when I did not love the only man for whom I ever entertained any affection. He was the playmate of my earliest years,—the betrothed of my young maidenhood,—and just before my poor father died, he joined our hands and left his blessing on my choice. Poverty was the only barrier to our union, but I took a situation as teacher, and hoarded my small gains ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... wear them in their hair, upon their bosoms, and carry them in their hand, the gentlemen will carry button-hole bouquets, and many even stick them upon their hats. They are fashionable with all ages and all classes. From blooming maidenhood to gray-headed age, all will adorn themselves with flowers. The English seem to cultivate the most flowers, while the French and the Italians, and (lately?) the Germans, wear most upon their persons. In England, every available spot of spare soil about the yard, is planted with ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... blush flooded Jehane, whose breath also became a trouble. By a quick movement she drew her veil about her, lest he should see her unquiet breast. So the mother of Proserpine might have been startled into new maidenhood when, in her wanderings, some herd had claimed her in love. Her husband watched her keenly, not unkindly. Jehane's trouble increased; he left her alone to fight it. So at last she did; then touched his hand, looking deeply into his face. He, loving ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... ecstasy and flinging herself madly into the whirl of pleasure it held out, was not so much her conscience and the ideals which she had formed more or less vaguely from the novels and poems she had read, as the instinct of her maidenhood, which made her shrink from the thought of marriage with a man whom she did not love. So strong was this feeling in her that at first she felt that she could not even bear to be introduced to him with such an idea ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... sound" may enhance the charms of maidenhood, is it too much to expect that sunburn, fervently desired, may not only permanently darken the complexion, but affect the mien of the race? And thus in years to come the white Australian may be of the past—transformed ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... her for the other thing? Why was there his blood battling with her? If only he could have been always gentle, tender with her, breathing with her the atmosphere of reverie and religious dreams, he would give his right hand. It was not fair to hurt her. There seemed an eternal maidenhood about her; and when he thought of her mother, he saw the great brown eyes of a maiden who was nearly scared and shocked out of her virgin maidenhood, but not quite, in spite of her seven children. They had been ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... illumines many periods of the past which history leaves in darkness, and tradition tells how this colony found among friendly Indians a refuge from the dangers of Roanoak Island, and how this infant grew into fair maidenhood, and was changed by the sorcery of a rejected lover into a white doe, which roamed the lonely island and bore a charmed life, and how finally true love triumphed over magic and restored her to human form,—only to result in the death of the maiden ...
— The White Doe - The Fate of Virginia Dare • Sallie Southall Cotten
... husband's presence she had nothing to say, and Milton, the theorist, discovered that what he had mistaken for the natural reticence and bashfulness of maidenhood was mere inanity and lack of ideas. But the loneliness of the poor country girl, shut up in a student's den, is a deal more touching than the scholar's wail about "the silent and insensate" wife. The girl was being deprived of the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... tale goes, once tended sheep along the marsh-meadow of Peneus among men of old time; for dear to her were maidenhood and a couch unstained. But, as she guarded her flock by the river, Apollo carried her off far from Haemonia and placed her among the nymphs of the land, who dwelt in Libya near the Myrtosian height. And here to Phoebus she bore Aristaeus whom the Haemonians, rich in corn-land, ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... tracing triumphal inscriptions, or even for making mention of the exploits of our brave soldiers, for which reason all was fear and suspicion in the episcopal city, which, although poor, did not lack treasures in chickens, fruits, money, and maidenhood, all of which ran great risk from the moment when the before-mentioned sons of Mars entered it. In addition to this, the native town of Polentinos, as a city remote from the movement and stir brought with them by traffic, the newspapers, railroads, and other agents which it is ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the bishop. He probably knows, having once been six years old himself, that all boys of that age are horrid little beasts. He also knows—he distinctly says so in the pastoral quoted by Lalage—that the charm of maidenhood is a delicate thing, comparable to the bloom on a peach or the gloss on a butterfly's wings. Even Miss Battersby, who must know more about girls than any bishop, felt that Lalage had lost something not to be regained when she became intimate enough with Tom Kitterick to rub glycerine ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... her face, through the tint of brown, lay the blush and flush of maidenhood, the indescribable sacred something that makes a maiden holy to every man of a manly and chivalrous nature; that makes a man utterly unselfish and perfectly content to love and be silent, to worship at a distance, as turning ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... feet and made thee hideous. Yet, even then, men with the eagle power of vision said to thee in a glance, 'Thou shalt perish ingloriously, because thou hast fallen away, because thou hast broken the vows of thy maidenhood. The angel with peace written on her forehead, who should have shed light and joy along her path, has been a Messalina, delighting in the circus, in debauchery, and abuse of power. The days of thy virginity cannot return; henceforward thou shalt be subject to a master. Thy hour has come; the ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... to stay longer; and, if after this they still seemed bent on going, she would do all in her power to speed them on their journey. With so many traits betokening strength of mind and character, she had but one weakness; and this was her excessive dread of thunder, caused in early maidenhood by seeing a young lady struck dead at ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... evidence of unbending character behind it, in some way conjured something out of the past, and he saw her again, the greying locks restored to their youthful glory and the careworn cheek abloom with the colour of young maidenhood as they had been in the gathering shadows that night when they swore to build their own home, and live their own lives, and love each other, always, only, for ever and ever...And yet, to let her defiance ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... this pilot should be her own conscience, hedged about with the learning, the good breeding, the fine character that she herself, under proper guidance, must cultivate through the impressionable years of childhood and maidenhood. If she so wills it, beauty and grace and true worth are all hers. And let her greet and go forth in the freshness of each golden day, as indeed, she must greet life, itself, ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... she experienced the same feeling which she used to have when caressing her little sister Evelyn. It was a sort of rapture of tenderness and protection. It was the maternal instinct glorified and rendered spiritual by maidenhood, and its timid desires. Jessy Ramsey's eyes looked up into Maria's like blue violets, and Maria noticed with a sudden throb that they were like George Ramsey's. Jessy, coming as she did from a degenerate, unbeautiful branch of the family-tree, had yet some of the true Ramsey ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... reason to believe that on her discarding her man's dress these ruffians attempted to violate the prisoner: so, sooner than suffer this, although she knew that to return to her former dress would be equivalent to meeting certain death, she did not hesitate to save her maidenhood at ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... the tale of crime, And long, but briefly be the sum supplied. Sychaeus was her lord, in happier time The richest of Phoenicians far and wide In land, and worshipped by his hapless bride. Her, in the bloom of maidenhood, her sire Had given him, and with virgin rites allied. But soon her brother filled the throne of Tyre, Pygmalion, swoln with sin; 'twixt whom ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... persisted in dressing alone, and what occasioned the absorption which led to her ignoring all appeals at her door at a time when a woman is supposed to be more than usually gracious? But one answer suggested itself. Her heart was not in her marriage, and that last hour of her maidenhood had been an hour of anguish and struggle. Perhaps she not only failed to love Francis Jeffrey, but loved some other man. This seemed improbable, but things as strange as this have happened in our complex society and no reckoning can be made with a woman's fancy. If this ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... gloomy philosophy and my mother's lecture were calculated to revive the fears which used to disturb us at Blois. The nearer marriage approached, the more did I need to summon all my strength, my resolution, and my affection to face this terrible passage from maidenhood to womanhood. All our conversations came back to my mind, I re-read your letters and discerned in them ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... swagger of one who would beard the Saints for a wager, this Aladdin was just such a galliard as Angelica had often fondled in her dreams. He lept straight into the closet of her heart, and "Deus!" she cried, "maugre my maidenhood, I will follow those pretty heels round ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... Joins with the wind and fills the empty skies And dies away, like echo of old age Sighing and dying in the heart that fails. Ah! the cruel beauty ... how it creeps Into my home, into my waiting heart! Who am I that I wait to-night?... Alas, Where is the old content of maidenhood, The calmness and the laughter and the song, The patient hands unshaken as the needle Plied to the gentle rhythm that my lips Murmured, untroubled girlhood ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... I so long have tried to tell; The humor coarse, the persons common,—well, From Nature only do I love to paint, Whether she send a satyr or a saint; To me Sincerity's the one thing good, Soiled though she be and lost to maidenhood. Quompegan is a town some ten miles south From Jethro, at Nagumscot river-mouth, A seaport town, and makes its title good With lumber and dried fish and eastern wood. 430 Here Deacon Bitters dwelt and kept the Store, The richest man for many a mile of shore; In little less than everything dealt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... profound and undisturbed slumber. Carefully managing my advance, as if I were afraid of waking her up, I begin by gently gratifying her senses, and I ascertain the delightful fact that, like her sister, she is still in possession of her maidenhood. As soon as a natural movement proves to me that love accepts the offering, I take my measures to consummate the sacrifice. At that moment, giving way suddenly to the violence of her feelings, and tired of her assumed dissimulation, she warmly locks me in her arms at the very instant ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... also certain to be of a general universal type with the broad hips, wide waist, muscular limbs, and the melting sweetness of lips and eyes that only abundant health and a rich animalism of nature bring to maidenhood. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... letter, his common sense took flight. Instead of a supplicant, he became an invader, and stormed the citadel with such hot-headed passion and fervor that Ruth fled in affright to the innermost chamber of her maidenhood, and there, barred and ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... and protected from the cold by bright blue coverlets's, lay a graceful, lovely girl asleep; this was Rhodopis' granddaughter, Sappho. The rounded form and delicate figure seemed to denote one already in opening maidenhood, but the peaceful, blissful smile could only belong to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... which Harry had signed the recruiting roll, he had taken her home up the long, sloping hill, through moonlight as soft, as inspiring, as glorifying as that which had melted even the frosty Goddess of Maidenhood, so that she stooped from her heavenly unapproachableness, and kissed the ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... beauty, swayed about Like seaweed moved by the deep winds of water: For it is all the news of love to me. Through paths pine-fragrant, where the shaded ground Is strewn with fruits of scarlet husk, I come, As if through maidenhood's uncertainty, Its darkness coloured with strange untried thoughts; Hither I come, here to the flowery peak Of this white cliff, high up in golden air, Where glowing earth and sea and divine light Are in mine eyes like ardour, and like love Are in my soul: love's glowing gentleness, The sunny ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... devoted himself to the arts, in which he made such progress that he had already become the favourite pupil of his celebrated namesake Lopez, the best painter of modern Spain. Such was Maria Diaz, who, according to a custom formerly universal in Spain, and still very prevalent, retained the name of her maidenhood though married. Such was Maria ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... girl is shaved—cheeks, ears, brows, chin, even nose! What is here to shave? Only that peachy floss which is the velvet of the finest human skin, but which Japanese taste removes. There is, however, another use for the razor. All maidens bear the signs of their maidenhood in the form of a little round spot, about an inch in diameter, shaven clean upon the very top of the head. This is only partially concealed by a band of hair brought back from the forehead across it, and fastened to the back hair. The ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... have more patience if she reflected that the sunset is often finer than the sunrise, commonly finer than noon, especially after a stormy day. The secret of a beautiful old age is as well worth seeking as that of a charming young maidenhood. For it is one of the compensations for the rest of us, in the decay of this mortal life, that women, whose mission it is to allure in youth and to tinge the beginning of the world with romance, also make the end of the world more serenely satisfactory ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... pervaded her being, as she watched the woman moving about the room, to know of her former life-the life of her maidenhood,—and learn if others beside herself had ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... brought him to own,—I—[Do laugh!] by my very great apprehensions of the effects of such a doctrine, that though marriage be a bad thing it is quite necessary, at present, for the defence of the weaker vessels and modest maidenhood. Ay and I applauded him for his honest candour! I was glad I had misunderstood him! Thanked him for all his profound information! In short made him exactly what I wished, my tool! And a high-tempered tool he is, by the aid of which I will ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... of the goodly angels whose stout legs, flowing curls, and impossible draperies sprawled among the pictures in the big Bible, and who excited her wonder as much by their garments as their turkey-wings and brandishing arms. So she betook herself to pets, and growing up to the old-maidenhood of thirty-five before her father fell asleep, was by that time the centre of a little world of her own,—hens, chickens, squirrels, cats, dogs, lambs, and sundry transient guests of stranger kind; so that, when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... this history, as the famous chronicler of Abbotsford has recorded them, can doubt for a moment what was the result of the marriage between Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe and Lady Rowena. Those who have marked her conduct during her maidenhood, her distinguished politeness, her spotless modesty of demeanor, her unalterable coolness under all circumstances, and her lofty and gentlewomanlike bearing, must be sure that her married conduct would equal her spinster ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... over her mind, she bent down her head upon her lute, pressed her round, dimpled cheek against its smooth frame, and drawing her fingers mechanically over its strings, abandoned herself unreservedly to the reveries of maidenhood and youth. ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... you cast a glance, a smile; You are not as one of these, Yours is beauty without guile. Round your maiden brows and hair Maidenhood and Childhood met Crown and kiss you, sweet and ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... dennes seek, And runnen in the mountains all the night, And sleep under a bush; and she could eke Wrestle by very force and very might With any young man, were he ne'er so wight;* *active, nimble There mighte nothing in her armes stond. She kept her maidenhood from every wight, To no man deigned she for ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... idly against the mast, others swinging slowly, from their fast anchors. And queen of all this peaceful scene-appeared the metropolis of Australia, with its white houses, lofty spires, and thronged wharves-thus she appeared-sitting in the prime of youth, laying aside her maidenhood ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... sun full clear doth pass, Without a break, through shining glass, Thy Maidenhood unblemished was For bearing of the Lord: Now, sweetest Comfort of our race, To sinners ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... had a hopeless feeling, of late, that life was too complex an affair for him to grapple with. Now, as by a flash, order was restored in his chaotic universe. He stood gazing in rapture at Miss Jones's blushing face, which seemed angelic in its purity and its dignified maidenhood. That there dwelt a sweet young soul behind those blameless ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... engaged in these and other golden dreams of maidenhood as she walked in the Saski Gardens this March morning. The faces of those who passed her were tranquil enough. The news of yesterday's doings in St. Petersburg had not reached Warsaw, or, at all events, had not been given to the public yet. Even ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... alive with yet sweeter sounds. On the breast of the fell that lies over against Cat Bells a procession of children walked, and sung, and chattered, and laughed. It was St. Peter's Day, and they were rush-bearing: little ones of all ages, from the comely girl of fourteen, just ripening into maidenhood, who walked last, to the sweet boy of four in the pinafore braided with epaulets, who strode along gallantly in front. Most of the little hands carried rushes, but some were filled with ferns, and mosses, and flowers. They had ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... But that was in her earlier maidenhood, With such a fervent flame of human love, Which being rudely blunted glanced and shot Only to holy things; to prayer and praise She gave herself, to ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... gentleman from Branford, of whom Moppet had been so suspicious, was the lucky individual upon whom she intended to bestow her hand. Verily, with all these wedding-bells sounding, Betty began to feel that she was likely to be left alone, but who only laughed gayly when twitted with her fancy for maidenhood, and danced as merrily at Sally's wedding as if her heart had lain light in her bosom instead of aching bitterly for one whom she began to fear she should never ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... entitled "The Songs of Seven," which picture seven stages in a woman's life. For the first of the series, "Seven Times One," see page 44 of the Fourth Reader. Read it in connection with this. "Seven Times Two" shows the girl standing at the entrance to maidenhood, books closed and lessons said, longing for the years to go faster to bring to her the happiness she imagines ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... the wonderful art which could afford a little to humanity on so trying an occasion. For she was as it were beginning her career anew; literally to her was this a new world; and she felt for a moment as if in her first blushing maidenhood of song. This second time the hesitation of the voice in that commencement was not felt. The note began soft and timid and scarce audible, as the prayer of Norma might have done; but how it gradually swelled ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... statuary, arbors and foliage in endless variety, that rendered it a miniature paradise. In these grounds, darting in and out among the avenues, playing hide-and-seek behind the statuary, or otherwise amusing themselves, I met eight lovely children, ranging from infancy to young maidenhood. The glowing cheeks and eyes, and supple limbs spoke of perfect health and happiness. When they saw their mother coming, they ran to meet her, the oldest carrying the two-year old baby. The stately woman greeted each with a loving kiss. She showed ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... This lively interest displayed by Mordecai in Esther's physical and spiritual welfare is not wholly attributable to an uncle's and guardian's solicitude in behalf of an orphaned niece. A much closer bond, the bond between husband and wife, united them, for when Esther had grown to maidenhood, Mordecai had espoused her. (79) Naturally, Esther would have been ready to defend her conjugal honor with her life. She would gladly have suffered death at the hands of the king's bailiffs rather than yield herself to a man not her husband. Luckily, there was no need for this sacrifice, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... fate hath brought thee? Dost thou roam The scented hills at morn, to gather flowers; To gaze into the fountain's glassy mirror, Or list the sweet birds sigh on every bough, Thou art a woodnymph, speaks thy fair attire. Sweet fancy of a sweeter maidenhood, That thou dost walk at dawn a woodnymph wild. Here will I seal upon thy foam-white brow My flame again, which burns like yonder orb. Odora! speak to me! thy voice is sweet, As sounds of rescue to a ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... and innocent girl married to this remorseless gambler, scarred with the gun and the knife, was a profanation of maidenhood—and yet, as he fell now and then into a dream, he took on a kind of savage beauty which might allure and destroy a woman. Whatever else he was, he was neither commonplace nor mean. The visitors to whom he was pointed out as "a ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... her redoubled, while Jim seemed dropped out of the race—and therefore my wife's relations with Miss Trescott were subjected to a severe strain. Naturally, being a matron, and of the age of thirty-odd years, she put on some airs with her younger friend, still in the chrysalis of maidenhood. Sometimes, in a sweet sort of a way, she almost domineered over her. On this Elkins-Cornish matter, however, Josie held her at arms' length, and refused to make her position plain; and Alice nursed that simulated resentment which one ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... night less than six months gone, when he had waited her coming in those very rooms. Not yet six months, and he seemed to have lived years since then! He recalled her as she appeared before him that night in all the grace and witchery of lovely maidenhood just opening into womanhood. How beautiful, how joyous she had been! without a ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... the calm, unconscious lethargy of her maidenhood's untroubled dreams the soul of Vera had awakened at length to the realization of the strong, passionate woman's heart that ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... Then began King Malcolm to yearn after the child's sister, Margaret, to wife; but he and all his men long refused; and she also herself was averse, and said that she would neither have him nor any one else, if the Supreme Power would grant, that she in her maidenhood might please the mighty Lord with a carnal heart, in this short life, in pure continence. The king, however, earnestly urged her brother, until he answered Yea. And indeed he durst not otherwise; for they were come into his kingdom. So that then ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... eyes—the pity, the indignation, the wonder that this exquisitely refined specimen of maidenhood should be bent to such base uses—shone in them and stopped her. The colour rose to her face and her eyes grew faintly troubled, then a proud ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... from Domremy, and the Queen of Sicily and other great ladies to whom Joan was entrusted, the clergy found nothing in her but 'goodness, humility, frank maidenhood, piety, honesty, and simplicity.' As for her wearing a man's dress, the Archbishop of Embrun said to the king, 'It is more becoming to do these things in man's gear, since they have ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... intellectual forehead and the proud and firmly cut mouth, was a trifle too calm and self-reliant for a young girl: but all the softness of expression that was wanted, all the gentle and gracious timidity that we associate with maidenhood, lay in the large, and dark, and lustrous eyes. When, by accident, she turned aside, and he saw the outline of that clear, olive-complexioned face, only broken by the outward curve of the long black ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... bloom that seemed a reflection from the thistle heads that nodded at her through the snake fence. It had taken sixteen years of pure-hearted, joyous living to lend those eyes, azure as the sky above, their brave, clear glance; sixteen years of unsullied maidenhood to endow her with that divine something of mystery which, with its shy reserve and fearless trust, awakens reverence and rebukes impurity as with the vision ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... him his power over unsophisticated maidenhood—a power which seemed sometimes to have a touch of the weird and wizardly in it. Personally he was not ill-favoured, though rather un- English, his complexion being a rich olive, his rank hair dark ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... Society. Sir John Shaftesbury, somewhat late in life, had married a wife many years his junior; a dazzling beauty, a dashing horsewoman, and moreover a lady who, having spent the years of her eligible maidenhood largely among politicians and racehorses, had acquired the knack and habit of living in the public eye. She adored her husband, as did everyone who knew him: but life at Shaftesbury Court had its longueurs ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... And in the woodland ways she grew, On either side a hand to hold, Nor the world's worst of evil knew, Nor rued its miseries manifold, Nor made discovery of its cold. What more, like one with morn content. Or of the morrow diffident, Unconscious, beautiful she stood, Calm, in young stainless maidenhood. Then, with the last steps childhood trod, Took up her ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... liege, it chances The Archon Lamachus is old and spent. He has an only child, a daughter, Gycia, The treasure of his age, who now blooms forth In early maidenhood. The girl is fair As is a morn in springtide; and her father A king in all but name, such reverence His citizens accord him. Were it not well The Prince Asander should contract himself In marriage to this girl, and take the strength Of Cherson for her dowry, ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... the disturbing eloquence of his eyes, she discovered the presence of his encircling arm. The discovery brought her to her feet—flushed, palpitating, aquiver with anger at this first shadow of insult to her maidenhood. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... longing for experience—had been filched from her before she was old enough to know its value. In time she would perhaps recover her self-esteem, but she would never know in its fullness that divine right of American maidenhood to rule its environment and ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... disendowed—that will be the end of it! Dame Hannah—you're a nice old person—you could marry if you liked. There's old Adam—Robin's faithful servant—he loves you with all the frenzy of a boy of fourteen. HAN. Nay—that may never be, for I am pledged! ALL. To whom? HAN. To an eternal maidenhood! Many years ago I was betrothed to a god-like youth who woo'd me under an assumed name. But on the very day upon which our wedding was to have been celebrated, I discovered that he was no other than Sir Roderic Murgatroyd, one of the bad Baronets of Ruddigore, and the uncle of the man ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... imperfectly dressed skins—nothing like the Astrachans of the nineteenth century—it would certainly have been very inconvenient to coddle ailing infantry through an attack of diphtheria, for example. So bountiful Nature, then in the first blush of maidenhood, doubtless brought the long-lived Patriarch through his nine hundred and sixty-nine years without once calling in the family medical adviser. It is recorded, however, that he was born and that he died, and ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... beside her. I instantly recognized the infant—a popular organism known as "Baby Buckly"—the prodigy of the Greyport Hotel, the pet of its enthusiastic womanhood. Fat and featureless, pink and pincushiony, it was borrowed by gushing maidenhood, exchanged by idiotic maternity, and had grown unctuous and tumefacient under the kisses and embraces of half the hotel. Even in its present repose it looked moist and shiny from ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... common veil,—when he saw this twofold loveliness, the sentiment, the conviction of that mysterious defence which exists in purity, thrilled like ice through his burning veins. In all his might of monarch and of man, he felt the awe of that unlooked-for protection,—maidenhood sheltering maidenhood, innocence guarding innocence. The double virtue appalled and baffled him; and that slight arm which encircled the neck he would have perilled his realm to clasp, shielded his victim more effectually than the bucklers of all the warriors that ever gathered ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with awe at the sacredness of the obligation thus imposed on him. She was his now, to have and to hold, to keep, to protect, and to defend—she who was once so glorious of her strength, of her savage isolation, her inviolate, pristine maidenhood. All words seemed futile ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... Browning. Coleridge, except in a few love-poems, scarcely touched them. Wordsworth did not get beyond the womanhood of the home affections, except in a few lovely and spiritual sketches of girlhood which are unique in our literature, in which maidenhood and the soul of nature so interchange their beauty that the girl seems born of the lonely loveliness of nature and lives with her ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... it may sound a ridiculous thing that a forlorn governess should be comforted for a lost love by the love of children; but it is true to nature. Women's lives have successive phases, each following the other in natural gradation—maidenhood, wifehood, motherhood: in not one of which, ordinarily, we regret the one before it, to which it is nevertheless impossible to go back. But Fortune's life had had none of these, excepting, perhaps, her one six ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... to maidenhood with, seemingly, the same features, the same voices, the same tastes, and with an unbounded love for and confidence in each other. As they always dressed alike nobody could be sure which was ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... were evolved from the face of the Mary of the Assumption, of the Susannah of Mieris, and of that Angel in the blue coif whose face has a light as of the sun,—to her who had dreamed her way into vague perceptions of her own sex's maidenhood and maternity by help of those great pictures which had been before her sight from infancy, there was some taint, some artifice, some want, some harshness in these jewelled women; she could not have reasoned about it, but she felt it, as she felt that the grand dahlias ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... fathomless eyes with a radiance as of heaven. And in this gay return of youth and happiness, an exquisite instinct had prompted her to put on a white gown, a plain girlish gown which symbolised her maidenhood, which told that she had remained through all a pure untarnished lily for the husband of her choice. And nothing of her form was to be seen, not a glimpse of bosom or shoulder. It was as if the impenetrable, redoubtable ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... them: she could give Philip the attention with which his stepmother's social duties might interfere. It was hardly likely that her aunt entertained any hope of marriage; indeed, Miss Laura had long since professed herself resigned to old maidenhood. ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... that that at all events is not the business of art: but when he comes to create in vacuo he is at once obsessed by some Platonic theory regarding the ethical aim of the poet. The victory, therefore, shall be with the powers of good, purity and vestal maidenhood shall triumph and undergo apotheosis at his hands, the world shall see how fair a monument of stainless womanhood he can erect in melodious verse. Well and good; for this is indeed an object to which no self-respecting person can take ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... for the modest lore of maidenhood, Bids me not sojourn with these armed men, O whither shall I fly, what secret wood Shall hide me from the tyrant? or what den, What rock, what vault, what cave can do me good? No, no, where death is sure, it resteth then To scorn his power and be it therefore seen, Armida lived, and ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... came to pass that Dic and Rita grew up together on the heart of the hearth; and what wonder that their own hearts were welded by the warmth and light of its cheery god. Thus the boy grew to manhood and the girl to maidenhood, then to young womanhood, at which time, of ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... Warding the mightier land Yielded their maidenhood To his imperious prow. The mainland within call Lay vast and virginal: In its blue porch he stood: ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... yearn back with last regret For the maiden meads of mignonette And the fairy-haunted wood, That you had not withheld from love, A little while, the freedom of Your happy maidenhood? ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... silver paper stars, Welshwomen's hats, and rosaries pendent from the gas brackets. As for Florinda's story, her name had been bestowed upon her by a painter who had wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhood was still unplucked. Be that as it may, she was without a surname, and for parents had only the photograph of a tombstone beneath which, she said, her father lay buried. Sometimes she would dwell upon the size ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the latter alternative seems more appalling than to a woman of thirty, whose eyes have grown strong in the gray, cold, sunless light of confirmed old-maidenhood; even as the vision of those who live in dim caverns requires not the lamps needed by new-comers fresh from the ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Peipa. The witch carried Rannapuura away to her horrible abode, which was in a rock beneath a lofty mountain ridge in Ingermanland. Here the poor child was compelled to pass ten years of her life. But notwithstanding her hard servitude to the witch, she grew up to maidenhood, and no maiden in the whole world was so fair as she. As the dawn shines ruddy on the borders of the horizon at daybreak and promises fine weather, so shone her gentle face in quiet restfulness, and her eyes proclaimed the ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... were offered to M'liss when her conversion became known, the master had preferred that of Mrs. Morpher, a womanly and kind-hearted specimen of Southwestern efflorescence, known in her maidenhood as the "Per-ra-rie Rose." By a steady system of struggle and self-sacrifice, she had at last subjugated her naturally careless disposition to principles of "order," which as a pious woman she considered, with Pope, as "Heaven's first law." But she ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... lay on the lounge, the young man never looked at her, but he saw nobody else. Brought up in a saddle on the range, he had never before met a girl like her. It was not only that she was beautiful and fragrant as apple-blossoms, a mystery of maidenhood whose presence awed his simple soul. It was not only that she seemed so delicately precious, a princess of the blood royal set apart by reason of her buoyant grace, the soft rustle of her skirts, the fine texture of the satiny skin. What took ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... there's an end of her! Her sole aim and end of being was to produce eggs, which in their turn become worms and repeat the same dull routine of business. Now—think me as brutal as you like—I say a woman is very like a female silkworm,—she comes out of her beautiful silken cocoon of maidenhood with wings which she doesn't know how to use—she merely flutters about waiting to be 'loved'—and when this dream she calls 'love' comes to her, she doesn't dream any longer—she wakes—to find her ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... her very cradle Lovely and witty and good; And at last, in the course of years, had blossomed Into full sweet maidenhood. ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... livelihood, and snaring the heedless and restless youth of the cities, the "young men void of understanding," to their common degradation. This human wastage is worse upon the race than war; and all the more pathetic because it consists of girls scarcely past the threshold of their maidenhood. When we consider further the indescribably horrible cruelty of the "white-slave trade," which the insatiable lust of men has brought into being, we may begin to realize to what the absence of restraint upon this appetite ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... when the share of the receipts which fell to the minor members was small—but it was full of variety and sometimes of excitement. If the work did not entirely drive away the remembrance of Lancelot Vane it enabled her to look upon the romance of her early maidenhood with equanimity. Her love affair had become a regret tinged with ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... after his last campaign on the turbaned Danube. The subject was again her beloved Siegfried slaying the Dragon on Drachenfels. Whenever Aunt Lisbeth indulged in any bitter virginity, and was overmatched by Margarita's frank maidenhood, she hung out this tapestry as a flag of truce. They were working it in bits, not having contrivances to do it in a piece. Margarita took Siegfried and Aunt Lisbeth the Dragon. They shared the crag between them. A roguish gleam of the Rhine toward Nonnenwerth ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... secondary sex characteristics of the mind, and doubtless many qualities of the thought and feeling of men and women owe their origin to the same source as brilliant plumage, antlers, combs and wattles. Thus the shy, retiring, reticent, self-effacing, languishing, adoring excesses of maidenhood and the peculiar psychological manifestations of the late forties must probably be understood from this point of view. So, also, must the bold, swaggering, assertive, compelling bearing of youth be interpreted. The shy or modish, dandified, lackadaisical cane-carrying youth ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... smoothly-braided hair; her dimpled, round, white shoulders left to their own adornment; and for jewels, only one opal on her ripening bosom;—as much of her dress as was shown was the simple white bodice of pure maidenhood. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... what seem to me the strange and repugnant elements of the religion of a people so refined, and so capable of high moral ideas, as the Greeks. Aphrodite is personified desire, but religion did not throw her mantle over desire alone; the cloistered life, the frank charm of maidenhood, were as dear to the Greek genius, and were consecrated by the examples of Athene, Artemis, and Hestia. She presides over the pure element of the fire of the hearth, just as in the household did the daughter of the king or chief. Hers are the first ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... not how Her fate I have fixed? Far from your side Shall the faithless sister be sundered; Her horse no more In your midst through the breezes shall haste her; Her flower of maidenhood Will falter and fade; A husband will win Her womanly heart, She meekly will bend To the mastering man The hearth she'll heed, as she spins, And to laughers is ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... his sorrows and perplexities he turned instinctively to Rachel, not to her. When Lucrece's intelligence was laid before Rachel, though perhaps she grieved less, she was even more shocked than her brother. That Blanche should think of quitting the happy and honourable estate of maidenhood, for the slavery of marriage, was in itself a misdemeanour of the first magnitude: but that she should have made her own choice, have received secret gifts, and held clandestine interviews—this was an awful instance of what human depravity ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... the lady and Merlin departed, and by the way Merlin showed her many wonders, and came into Cornwall. And always Merlin lay about the lady to have her maidenhood, and she was ever passing weary of him, and fain would have been delivered of him, for she was afeard of him because he was a devil's son, and she could not beskift him by no mean. And so on a time it happed that Merlin showed to her in a rock whereas was a great wonder, and wrought ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... but actually 'poor girls neglected.' His pages breathe their clean and innocent perfumes, and are beautiful with the chaste beauty of their colour, just as they carry with them something of the sweetness and simplicity of maidenhood itself. And from both he extracts the same pathetic little moral: both are lovely and both must die. And so, between his virgins that are for love indeed and those that sit silent and delicious in the 'flowery nunnery,' the old singer finds life so good a thing that ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... good, gentle, sensible, and amiable, and a real comfort to me." Without her sister, the Princess Royal's, remarkable intellectual power, Princess Alice had fine intelligence. She was also fair to see in her royal maidenhood. The two elder sons were away. The Prince of Wales was in Italy, Prince Alfred with his ship in the Levant. At home the volunteer movement, which has since acquired such large proportions, was being actively inaugurated. The war between Austria and France, and a dissolution of Parliament, made ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... Mary more human. She no longer dwelt upon the various points that in her maidenhood days she had thought would be conducive to happiness in matrimonial life; she was now, anyhow for the moment, in love with her husband, or at least persuaded herself that this was the case, and was at pains to inform ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... him so fondly, trusted him so wholly, clung to him so faithfully, that mine eyes had to be torn open before I would see the truth—that even now, after all these years, it is like thrusting a dagger into my soul to tell you verily who and what he is. Ay, child, I loved that man in mine early maidenhood, better than ever thou didst or wouldst have done. Dost thou think it was easy to stand up to the face that I had loved, and to play the avenging angel toward his perfidy? If thou dost, thou mayest know ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... beholding them all, the girl became frightened and her face was suffused with blushes of shame. And then she addressed Surya, saying, 'O lord of rays, go thou back to thy own region. On account of my maidenhood, this outrage of thine is fraught with woe to me! It is only one's father, mother, and other superiors, that are capable of giving away their daughter's body. Virtue I shall never sacrifice, seeing that in this world the keeping of their persons inviolate is deemed as the highest duty of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... whose simple piety is in perfect keeping with his office and his surroundings; and the home is brightened by the presence of two daughters,[89] the one of whom, Friederike, appears as a vision of rustic grace and modest maidenhood. In the midst of this circle moves the richly-gifted youth, laying under a spell father, daughters, and all who come within the magnetism of his presence. In no other situation, indeed, are the attractive ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
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