"Middle-age" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it." He supposed he was treating the matter humorously, but in this sort of banter between husband and wife there is always much more than the joking. March had seen some pretty feminine inconsistencies and trepidations which once charmed him in his wife hardening into traits of middle-age which were very like those of less interesting older women. The sight moved him with a kind of pathos, but he felt the result hindering ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... opens with the sorrowful scene, "Tristis est anima mea," Christ's sad words in the walk to Gethsemane,—an unutterably pathetic solo, with an accompaniment which is a marvel of expressive instrumentation. The next number is the old Middle-Age hymn, "Stabat Mater dolorosa," in which Liszt has combined voices and instruments in a manner, particularly in the "Inflammatus," almost overpowering. Solos, duets, quartets, choruses, orchestra, and organ are all handled ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... I had a curious twinge of conscience as I parted from Lady Osprey. Either a first intimation of middle-age or my inexperience in romantic affairs was to blame, but I felt a very distinct objection to the prospect of invading this good lady's premises from the garden door. I motored up to the pavilion, found Cothope reading in bed, told him for the first time of West Africa, spent an ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... from whom she received her work, was a man of middle-age, of rather stern and forbidding aspect; and as she approached his desk, he pointed to the clock ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... as with a steamer, the greater the number of revolutions its engine makes, the more imperative is the demand for fuel."[12] These statements justify and explain the instinctive demand for sleep. They also show why it is that infants require more sleep than children, and children than middle-age folk, and middle-age folk than old people. Infants must have sleep for repair and rapid growth; children, for repair and moderate growth; middle-age folk, for repair without growth; and old people, only for the minimum of repair. Girls, between ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... the vision of material poverty that she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper empoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... characters, and the signature of that most fashionable physician, Sir Harvey Diggs, I was led to believe that the lady of Moncontour was, or fancied herself, in a delicate state of health. By the side of the physic for the body was medicine for the soul—a number of pretty little books in middle-age bindings, in antique type many of theist, adorned with pictures of the German school, representing demure ecclesiastics, with their heads on one side, children in long starched nightgowns, virgins bearing lilies, and so forth, from which it was to be concluded that the owner of the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... living yet, though close on eighty, and two younger brothers, Archibald and Randall, both dead. Sir Charles was a bachelor, and for years his brothers lived with him in a sort of dependence. Towards middle-age they both married—I was told, by his orders—and near about at the same time. At any rate each married and each had a child—Archibald a daughter and Randall a son. Archibald's daughter—he died two years after her birth—was ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... she appeared to him not as herself alone, but as the embodied essence of all former loves of which he had dreamed—of all the enchanting dead women of whom the poets wrote. Then he thought of Arnold Kemper, with his exhausted emotions, his superficial cleverness, his engrossing middle-age, and especially of his approaching baldness. Was love, after all, he questioned, only a re-quickened memory in particular brain cells as modern scientists believed? Was physical heredity, in truth, the fulfilling of the ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... he must not suffer selfishness to triumph over love. Sooner or later we are all called upon to decide on the same issue—of us all, the same question is asked. To Lord Arthur it came early in life—before his nature had been spoiled by the calculating cynicism of middle-age, or his heart corroded by the shallow, fashionable egotism of our day, and he felt no hesitation about doing his duty. Fortunately also, for him, he was no mere dreamer, or idle dilettante. Had he been so, he would have hesitated, like Hamlet, and let irresolution mar his purpose. But ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... told me she was in the parlour and took me in to be introduced. I was bitterly disappointed. Somehow, I had expected to meet, not indeed a young girl palpitating with youthful bloom, but a woman of ripe maturity, dowered with the beauty of harmonious middle-age—the feminine counterpart of Uncle Dick. Instead, I found in Rose Lawrence a small, faded woman of forty-five, gowned in shabby black. She had evidently been very pretty once, but bloom and grace were gone. Her face had a sweet and gentle ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of his wit. As we have all been boys—except those that were girls—and not all of us very good boys, we can appreciate that passion for robbery which began with orchards and passed on to knockers. It is difficult to sober middle-age to imagine what entertainment there can be in that breach of the eighth commandment, which is generally regarded as innocent. As Sheridan swindled in fun, so Hook, as a young man, robbed in fun, as hundreds of medical students and others ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... was who looked but glum; In middle-age, a father he, And this his first experience too: "They shot at my heart when my hands were up— This fighting's crazy work, I see" But noon is high; what next do? The woods are mute, and ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... luncheon with an air of relief. He was a man of little more than middle-age, powerfully built, inclined to be sombre, with features of a legal type, heavily jawed. "Always tactful, dear hostess," he murmured. "As a matter of fact, nothing but the circumstance that it was your ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Aristotle; Euclid, the first great geometer; Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, the astronomers; and, latest of ancient scientists, Ptolemy, whose works on astronomy and geography became the text-books of the middle-age schools. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... He was past middle-age. Small, thin man, with a smooth face; and the other was a big man ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... through the town, you find here and there bits of middle-age architecture, which have escaped ruin; here a door, there a window, of graceful design, built around with the rough masonwork for which Segni is noted in later days; but the greater number of the houses are constructed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and open-handed. He was so friendly, and thoughtful, and genial, that even his jokes had the air of graceful benedictions. He did not seem to grow old, and he was one of those who never appear to have been very young. He flourished in a perennial maturity, an immortal middle-age. ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... idea, but with the courage of youth, presuming, with the prudence of middle-age, that he would not really be called upon to perform so unimaginable a feat, he put two ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... sisters. But he did not. He was amazed to discover that frivolity appealed more powerfully to his secret soul. He was also amazed to discover that his gloom was leaving him. This vanishing of gloom gave him strange sensations, akin to the sensations of a man who, after having worn gaiters into middle-age, abandons them. ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... all the other Ibsenites were fond of insisting that a defect in the romantic drama was its tendency to end with wedding-bells. Against this they set the modern drama of middle-age, the drama which described marriage itself instead of its poetic preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw had been more patient with popular tradition, more prone to think that there might be some sense in its survival, he might have seen this particular problem much more clearly. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Hubbard wrapper and a stiff, clean blue-checked apron, she was not in the least a peasant. Her figure was tall and spare, her hair gray and drawn into an uncompromising knot, her face wrinkled and shrewd, her eyes soft, and full of the experience that middle-age brings to the native American woman who has lived all her life ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... "Middle-age is mercifully blind no doubt to its own horrors," he said. "You can respect and even admire old age, like other ruins, if it's picturesque, but ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... it seems to me the office staff was in some ways a curious collection and very different to the clerks of to-day. Many of them had not entered railway life until nearly middle-age and they had not assimilated as an office staff does now, when all join as youths and are brought up together. They were original, individual, not to say eccentric. Whilst our office included certain steady married clerks, who ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... antiquity of one's surroundings. Apart from a few tourist-haunted monuments, which the resident passes with scarcely a glance, the general run of buildings and streets, if not palpably modern, can at most lay claim to a respectable, or disreputable, middle-age. Now, an eminently respectable middle-age is precisely the characteristic of the central regions of Philadelphia and Baltimore; while in New York both reputable and disreputable middle-age are amply represented. One may almost say that these Eastern cities are fundamentally old-fashioned, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... back. He had no knack for business, no head for figures, no dimmest insight into the mysteries of commerce. He wanted to travel and write—those were his inmost longings. And as the years dragged on, and he neared middle-age without making any more money, or acquiring any firmer health, a sick despair possessed him. He tried writing, but he always came home from the office so tired that his brain could not work. For half the year he did not reach his dim ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... went away intent on classifying the soutar by finding out with what sect of the middle-age mystics to place him. At the same time something strange seemed to hover about the man, refusing to be handled in that way. Something which he called his own religious sense appeared to know something of what the soutar must mean, though ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... probably four of every five were women. The men had come, apparently, to see and hear Miss Anthony; and when she was done many of them left. It was such an audience as is not often seen. The ladies were generally elderly, the great majority beyond middle-age; they had braved the cold and wind to hear the leader whom they had known and loved for many years, but whom most of them had never seen. Their bright faces framed in silvery hair, with brighter eyes upturned to the speakers, must have been an inspiration to those ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... from the wide veranda and came down to meet them, a tall, smooth-faced man of young middle-age, evidently on most intimate terms with the Governor and the Major. While expressing his pleasure in being privileged to entertain Terry, he bent upon him the searching look of appraisal which is instinctive ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... on what I have said about eighteenth century and middle-age houses: I do not know if I have yet explained to you the sort of loyalty, of urbanity, that there is about the one to my mind; the spirit of a country orderly and prosperous, a flavour of the presence of magistrates and well-to-do merchants in bag-wigs, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of easy, indolent, happy middle-age. His tall hat, frock coat with a carnation in the lapel, the precise crease of his trousers, the spickness of his patent-leathers and his graceful confidence of manner, proclaimed his mind to be free from all but the pleasant ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... to round off these rhymes, A Matron who railed at the crimes Of designers of frocks Who in smart fashion "blocks" Left middle-age out of The Times. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... the theory of the middle-age university and the design of collegiate foundations in their origin. Time and circumstances have brought about a total change. The colleges no longer promote the researches of science, or direct professional study. Here and there ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Black Book, Red Book, and White Book—we see it in storm and calm, observe the vigilant and jealous honesty of the guilds, and become witnesses again to the bloody frays, cruel punishments, and even the petty disputes of the middle-age craftsmen, when Cheapside was one glittering row of goldsmiths' shops, and the very heart of the wealth of London. The records culled so carefully by Mr. Riley are brief but pregnant; they give us facts uncoloured by the historian, and highly suggestive glimpses of strange ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... expectation, that his new presentation of the subject would have little or no effect upon those who had already reached middle-age, has—out of Paris—not been fulfilled. There are, indeed, one or two who have thought it their duty to denounce the theory as morally dangerous, as well as scientifically baseless; a recent instance of the sort we may have to consider ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... him suspiciously. This cheerfulness was unusual in people he had worsted, and the unusual was always to be distrusted. But to the less vigilant, ordinary mind Mr. Walkingshaw merely presented the spectacle of a man of young middle-age with a heart some ten ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... no one knows how precious, perhaps, that portrait of his grandfather may be, if any one has but the sense to keep it till the time when the old man can be seen no more up the lawn, nor by the wood. That child is working in the Middle-Age spirit—the ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... we must protest against such a sketch as this; even of one of the least honourable of the Middle-age saints: ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... At present the two stories were occupied; the second by a malter and his brood of children, the third by a woman who was partially bedridden. The lower or ground floor of four rooms she reserved for herself. As a matter of fact the forward room, with its huge middle-age fireplace and the great square of beamed and plastered walls and stone flooring, was sizable for all domestic purposes. Gretchen's pallet stood in a small alcove and the old woman's bed by the ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... and scarcely anything could have seemed to him too bizarre to happen. He felt curiously impatient of the ordinary conventionalities of civilized life. Since this miraculous thing had come to pass—that he, Caspar Brooke, a respectable, sane, healthy-minded man of middle-age, could be accused of killing a miserable young scamp like Oliver Trent in a moment of passion—the world had certainly seemed somewhat crazy and out of joint. It was not worth while to stand very much on ceremony at such a conjuncture; and if Rosalind Romaine ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... could truthfully answer that he had not a single picture to show. In Brittany he had come across a painter whom nobody else had heard of, a queer fellow who had been a stockbroker and taken up painting at middle-age, and he was greatly influenced by his work. He was turning his back on the impressionists and working out for himself painfully an individual way not only of painting but of seeing. Philip felt in him something ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... are hardly sins, So frank they are and free. 'T is but when Middle-age begins We ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... It sits, in comfortable middle-age, on the ruins of its glory. But it is not buried beneath them. It used to lead America in Literature, Thought, Art, everything. The years have passed. It is remarkable how nearly now Boston is to New York what Munich is to Berlin. ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... astonishing that the warrior king allowed this speech to last as long as it did. He hated nothing so fiercely, now that he was in middle-age, as any long mention of the "handsome god.[FN81]" Having vainly endeavoured to stop by angry mutterings the course of the Baital's eloquence, he stepped out so vigorously and so rudely shook that inveterate talker, that the latter once or twice nearly bit off the tip of his tongue. Then the Vampire ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... or municipal building, is of the quaintest and most picturesque Middle-Age architecture. It has a massive portico and steps, before it, heavily balustraded, and adorned with life-sized rusty iron knights in complete armor. The clock-face on the front of the building is very large and of curious pattern. Ordinarily, a gilded ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... playing fields becomes the dunce of the office. Other men go on playing till middle-age robs them of their physical powers. At the end the whole thing is revealed as vanity. Play tennis or golf once a day and you may be famous; play it three times a day and you will be in danger of being thought a professional—without ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... mediaeval Art of Love; and if the amorous metaphysics are sometimes cold, conventional, or laboured, we have gracious allegories, pieces of brilliant description, vivid personifications, and something of ingenious analysis of human passion. Nevertheless the work of this Middle-Age disciple of Ovid and of Chretien de Troyes owes more than half its celebrity to the continuation, conceived in an entirely opposite spirit, by his ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... speaks, a substantial woman, a little over middle-age, in old dark clothes and a black straw hat, enters from the corridor. She goes to a cupboard, brings out from it an apron and a Bissell broom. Her movements are slow and imperturbable, as if she had much time before her. Her face is broad and dark, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the village, where the open Atlantic is sighted, and stopped to glance at the latest official poster on the wall. That explained to me, while the west wind blew, what the penalties are for young men who are in the wrong because they are young, not having attained the middle-age which brings with it immunity for the holding of heroic notions. Yet how if those young men are not bellicose like their wise seniors? Why should they get the evil which their elders, who will it, take so much ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... a finished work, it is well done. The most harassed man of middle-age will turn over the pages with delight and have dreams of half-forgotten ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... health. In his youth, after having shown sufficient spirit to lose an eye during a sporting absence of three nights and days, Violet was not again permitted enough freedom of action to repeat this disloyalty; though, now, in his advanced middle-age, he had been fed to such a state that he seldom cared to move, other than by a slow, sneering wavement of the tail when friendly words were addressed to him; and consequently, as he seemed beyond all capacity or desire to run away, or to run at all, Mrs. Balche allowed ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... sorrows just described you have still the power of preserving yourself. You have as yet acquired no factitious tastes; you still retain the power of enjoying the simple pleasures of innocent childhood. It now depends upon your manner of spending the intervening years, whether, in the trying period of middle-age, simple and natural pleasures will still awaken emotions of joyousness and thankfulness ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... next time I meet him at Corwen I'll crack his head for saying so. Mal-practices—he had better look at his own, for he is a pig-jobber too. Written a book has he? then I suppose he has been left a legacy, and gone to school after middle-age, for when I last saw him, which is four years ago, he could neither ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... now, or even delayed, by a swamp that had no bottom. He had grappled with hard rock and sliding snow, had overcome professional rivals, and had made his influence felt by politicians; and, though he had left middle-age behind, he still retained his full vigor of body and freedom of speech. When he had explained what he thought of Cassidy he turned ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... his housekeeper towards their table. The housekeeper was getting on towards middle-age; she was a very voluptuous looking woman, taller than Klingemann, and, when she walked, always appeared to be asleep. Klingemann bowed towards them with exaggerated politeness. The gentlemen scarcely ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... would keep company or have any thing to do with such an old blade, as, after the wear and harrowing of so many years should yet continue of as clear a head and sound a judgment as he had at any time been in his middle-age; and therefore it is great kindness of me that old men grow fools, since it is hereby only that they are freed from such vexations as would torment them if they were more wise: they can drink briskly, bear up stoutly, and lightly pass over such infirmities, as a far stronger constitution ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... the state of matrimony, and had made more than one tentative essay in that direction. She had walked out with three or four sprigs of the Ailesworth bourgeoisie in her time, and the shadow of middle-age had crept upon her before she realised that however pliant her disposition, her lack of physical charm put her at the mercy of the first bright-eyed rival. At thirty-five Ellen had decided, with ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... the gypsies, for they turned out all together, hunted them down, and, having secured the sorceress, burned her alive at the stake. And thus in a single crime and its punishment we have curiously combined a world-old Oriental offense, an European Middle-Age penalty for witchcraft, and the fierce torture of the ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... of the thousands like him, as Horvendile reflected, had been within this hour sedately dining with his wife,—neither of them eating with the zest and vigor of their first youth, perhaps, but sharing amicably the more moderate refreshment which middle-age requires,—without being at any particular pains to conceal the fact from anybody. Here was then, after all, the strong and sure salvation of Philistia, in this quiet, unassuming common-sense, which ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... hydropathic cures. Being there only for a single day, I did not think it best to submit in all points to the cold water treatment; neither did SEATSFIELD, for I noticed that he mixed two table-spoonfuls of gin with every gill of cold water. SEATSFIELD is a man of about middle-age, with a penetrating eye, and rather a good form, though not unusually muscular. His face bears a remarkable resemblance to the pictures of NUMA POMPILIUS; the benign smile of each is the same. His chin is round and full, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... described the key-note of Zinzendorf's life. "It was love to Christ," said Albertini, "that glowed in the heart of the child; the same love that burned in the young man; the same love that thrilled his middle-age; the same love that inspired his every endeavour." In action faulty, in motive pure; in judgment erring, in ideals divine; in policy wayward, in purpose unselfish and true; such was Zinzendorf, the Renewer of the ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... as came near enough to me in speculative liberty of opinion to justify my speaking, that the present churches were in course of dissolution, and would have to be followed by a reconstruction of Christian essential verity into other than these middle-age scholastic forms. Believing in Christ's divinity, which is the life of Christianity, I believed this. Otherwise, if the end were here—if we were to be covered over and tucked in with the Thirty-nine Articles ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... possible, then, is to recall some of those anecdotes which, while justifying them in a measure, yet at the same time illustrate Lord Byron's way of acting. I will select one. When Lord Byron was at Pisa a friend of Shelley's, whom he sometimes saw, had formed a close intimacy with Lady B——, a woman of middle-age but of high birth. The tie between them was evidently the result of vanity on Mr. M——'s side, and, as she was the mother of a large family, it was doubly imperative on her to be respectable. But that did not prevent Mr. M—— from boasting of his ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... had lost consciousness of external sights and sounds. He could not have told any one when it was that the two worlds had parted company. For many many years he had been conscious of both existences, but during his youth and middle-age they had seemed to mingle and go along together. He had believed in both equally and had been a citizen of both. Then gradually, as time passed, he had seemed to have less and less hold upon the actual physical world. He saw it suddenly with darkened vision; his wife ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the great banking house of Asabri Brothers in Rome, had been a great sportsman in his youth. But by middle-age he had grown a little tired, you may say; so that whereas formerly he had depended upon his own exertions for pleasure and exhilaration, he looked now with favor upon automobiles, motor-boats, ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... head, and her eyes were full of an unconscious realism, as though she were looking in the face one of life's sordid facts, and making the best of it. In youth her cheeks had been of cream and roses, but they were mottled now by middle-age, and again that hard, ugly directness came into her eyes as she dabbed a powder-puff across her forehead. Putting the puff down, she stood quite still before the glass, arranging a smile over her high, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... drearier than ever. Then Addie married. She was nearly if not quite forty years old, and neither her brother nor sister-in-law expected such an event. She was sallow, thin, and rather querulous in temperament. Very likely Addie felt that marriage could not make her lot worse, and as middle-age threatened, she accepted the defeat of her ambitions and in the spirit of better-late-than-never struck out for herself in the race for personal happiness, throwing over the burden of ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... a Middle-Age Interlude, is described by the author as "a glimpse from the burning of Jacques du Bourg-Molay [last Grand-Master of the Templars], A.D. 1314, as distorted by the refraction from Flemish brain to brain during the course of a couple ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... by the sermon nor comfortable with herself. For the parson, instead of recognizing, through all defects of the actual, the pattern after which God had made man, would fain have him remade after the pattern of the middle-age monk—a being far superior, no doubt, to the most of his contemporaries, but as far from the beauty of the perfect man as the mule is from that of the horse; and she was annoyed with herself that she ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... spoke my imagination was already turning over the leaves of a history of that stately monument, around which clusters so much of Middle-Age story, and looking at copies of forms and faces which to remember is a dream of rainbows and angels. There should be that quaint Madonna who points her thumb over her shoulder at St. Francis while she asks her Son to bless him, and the three saints and the Madonna of the north ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... when she went into the house, seeming, for the first time, the woman of middle-age that she was. Quietly, purposefully, she drew out a chair, and, standing upon it, took down from the rafters the plant which Little Coyote's woman, the Mandan, had given her. It had hung there a long time, and ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... in his hands). Madame, though I have wandered about the world, I have saved some pennies in my time. A few trifling coins—enough for middle-age. Since I have had the great honour of knowing you—(He breaks of as the voice of the SINGER to full song is heard approaching.) Oh, God bless that poor young fool! Madame, I ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... I should," he assured her. "Believe me, there isn't such an obstinate person in the world as the man of early middle-age who suddenly discovers the woman he ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her youth vanish, her freshness disappear, her hopes die, and now she felt her flaming middle-age slipping away from her. No wonder that with her admirably dressed, abundant hair, thickly sprinkled with white threads and adding to her elegant aspect the piquant distinction of a powdered coiffure—no wonder, I say, that she clung desperately to her last infatuation for that graceless young ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... voyage of conception, what delicious diligent indolence! A doze upon a sofa does not hinder it, and a nap upon Clover engenders ethereal finger-pointings—the prattle of a child gives it wings, and the converse of middle-age a strength to beat them—a strain of music conducts to "an odd angle of the Isle," and when the leaves whisper it puts a girdle round the earth.—Nor will this sparing touch of noble Books be any irreverence to their Writers—for ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... a nice-looking Turk of middle-age, extremely neat in his apparel and methodical in his surroundings. He might have been an Englishman but for the crimson fez upon his brow and a chaplet of red beads, with which he toyed perpetually. He gazed into my eyes with kind ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... produced this Practical Life which Shakspeare was to sing. For Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the primary vital fact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of Parliament could abolish it, before Shakspeare, the noblest product of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance nevertheless. Nature at her own time, with Catholicism or what ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... hung out his washing, for the smell of the wet linen seemed to take us both straight home as nothing else could do. I have often wondered whether that good man and his wife are still living, though I think it hardly likely, for they were of a hale middle-age at the time. Jim would come with us too, sometimes, and would sit with us smoking in the big Flemish kitchen, but he was a different Jim now to the old one. He had always had a hard touch in him, but ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... held between Thorndyke, his two daughters, and Elizabeth Wareing—a woman approaching middle-age, whom, under the specious pretence that Mrs. Thorndyke's increasing ailments rendered the services of an experienced matron indispensable, he had lately installed at the farm. It was quite evident to both the mother and daughter that a much greater degree ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... was connected in some measure with the two people to whom my attention was so suddenly drawn. They were, in that somewhat heterogeneous crowd, sufficiently noticeable. The man, although he assumed the jauntiness of youth, was past middle-age, and his mottled cheeks, his thin, watery eyes, and thick red neck were the unmistakeable hall-marks of years of self-indulgence. He was well dressed and groomed, and his demeanour towards his companion ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a swift rustle of petticoats at their heels, and Mr. Caryll stood aside, bowing, to give passage to a tall lady who swept by with no more regard for him than had he been one of the house's lackeys. She was, he observed, of middle-age, lean and aquiline-featured, with an exaggerated chin, that ended squarely as boot. Her sallow cheeks were raddled to a hectic color, a monstrous head-dress—like that of some horse in a lord mayor's show—coiffed her, and her dress was a mixture of extravagance and incongruity, ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... Miss Varleys, Lady Lucy's young nieces, saw that Diana was making a conquest; and it seemed to her, moreover, that Mr. Ferrier's scrutiny of his companion was somewhat more attentive and more close than was quite explained by the mere casual encounter of a man of middle-age with a young and charming girl. Was he—like herself—aware that matters of moment might be here at ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... beauties' once? We were queens of men while our youth lasted, and diarists still prattle charmingly concerning us. But nothing was expected of us save to be beautiful and to condescend to be made much of, and that is our tragedy. For very few things, my dear, are more pitiable than the middle-age of the pitiful butterfly woman, whose mind cannot—cannot, because of its very nature—reach to anything higher! Middle-age strips her of everything—the admiration, the flattery, the shallow merriment—all the little things that ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... any necromancy at work upon his daughter. He smoked his pipe, made notes in his field-book, directing an occasional remark toward his apprentice, enjoying in his tranquil, middle-age way the beauty and ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... so is Nero, now an honored old dog frisky only in his memories. But old as he is in teeth and muscle, he is hardly past middle-age in the wag of his still bushy tail, and is as young as ever in happy devotion to his master. Liddy, too, is down stairs, promoted, but busy as in the days gone by; and the voice of that very bell tinkled but an ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... in splendid health; I have seen her swimming, galloping, playing tennis madly. The usual swarm of devoted youth and smitten middle-age is in attendance. She wears neither black nor colours; only white; nor does she go to any sort of functions. At times, to me, she resembles a scarcely grown girl just freed from school and ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... people whom Marise was working over lately. He couldn't understand a note of them, nor keep his mind on them, nor even try to remember their names. He had been able to get just as far as Debussy and no further, he thought whimsically, before his brain-channels hardened in incipient middle-age. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... his boyhood struggling against an education, his youth struggling against matrimony and his middle-age struggling against embonpoint; but sooner or later he succumbs to all ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... is drawn into late middle-age there are few things more affecting and in a measure more surprising than the recollection of the ardent hero-worship of one's youth. Whether, if my dear old chief were back again and I could survey him in the light of a riper experience than I had during his lifetime, ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... these was a man younger by some two years than the first-comer, but so like him that none might misdoubt that he was his brother; the next was an old man with a long white beard, but hale and upright; and lastly came a man of middle-age, who led the young woman by the hand. He was taller than the first of the young men, though the other who entered with him outwent him in height; a stark carle he was, broad across the shoulders, thin in the flank, long-armed and big-handed; very noble and well-fashioned ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... surroundings with a quick descriptive gesture. "Observe the lights and shadows. The ghostly wavings of those pale curtains. Smell the potpourri and spices. Think of the ancestor worship. Listen to the protesting wind and rain. See the mysterious treasure you hold in your hand. And then ask me what middle-age and the clerical profession have to do with all this! Why, nothing, just precisely nothing, nothing in the whole world. That's the point of my argument. They'd ruin the sentiment, blight the romance, hopelessly ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... night topside, but an even pleasanter night below, at least in our part of the ship below. A few of us were gathered in the flag office, where Dalton, the flag yeoman, sometimes allowed us to call when his admiral was ashore. Getting on toward middle-age was Dalton, with a head of gray-flecked hair and an old-time school-master's face. A ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... man has reached middle-age he generally feels with tenfold force the truth of those "sayings of the wise" which he learned in his early years, and has cause to regret, as well as wonder, that he had not all along followed their wholesome teaching. For it is to the young, who are about ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... thought, compassionately; yet, blended with the compassion, was the half-unconscious triumph of strong middle-age at sight of the failure of a senior. "That's the first knock. He'll want to mind himself from this out—the next one ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... because they have lost all faith in the living God—the ever-working, ever-teaching, ever-inspiring, ever-governing God whom our Lord Jesus Christ revealed to men; in whom the Apostles, and the Fathers, and the great middle-age Schoolmen, and the Reformers believed, and therefore learned more and more, and taught men more and more concerning God and the dealings of God, ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... done it very well. Not only had he accounted honourably for his repulse, but he had cleared Elise. And he had cleared himself from the ghastly imputation of middle-age. Repulse or no repulse, he was proud of his ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... back on his oars; the German leans forward. The Englishman's phrase is "Stick it," which means to hold what you have; the German's phrase is "Onward." It was national youth against national middle-age. A vessel with pressure of increase from within was about to expand or burst. A vessel which is large and comfortable for its contents was resisting pressure from without. The French were saying, What if ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... there was a sonorous hail from the house; a hail in keeping with the generous bulk of its owner, who had come through the door. He was well past middle-age, with a thatch of gray hair half covering his high forehead. In one hand he held the book that he had been reading, and in the other a ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others have gone to a harbour of rest to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle-age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition, than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories; these meet with more pity and ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... continental cities. It can be discerned at a great distance; and, taken in connection with the extensive ruins of O'Connor's Castle, in the suburbs, and the beautiful abbey upon the other side of the town, seems to partake of the character of the middle-age architecture. The fatal drop was, perhaps, the highest in Ireland. It consisted of a small doorway in the front of the third storey, with a simple iron beam and pulley above, and the lapboard merely a horizontal door hinged to the wall beneath, and raised or let fall by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... example would have been fatal to the peace, perhaps even to the existence, of society. If such frenzies were, unhappily, to burst out among mankind at present, civilized nations might transport their energumeni to distant possessions; but the middle-age magistrates had no facilities of that kind: they should deal with the terrible plague by the only means at their disposal; and these were, either to let the madness wear itself out, or to repress it by the rope and faggot. If they had adopted the former course, the epidemic would probably have passed ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... in analytical consideration of the extra-mural decorations of St. Mark's. The world buzzed along after its own fashion, not disturbing him, and his absorptions permitted only a faint consciousness of the despair of his relatives regarding his mind. Arrived at middle-age, and a little more, he found himself alone in the world (though, for that matter, he had always been alone and never of the world), and there was plenty of money for him with various bankers who appeared to know about looking after it. Returning to the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... critically watched them as they got out of the taxi. Alderman Edwin Clayhanger, undeniably stout, with grey hair and beard, was passing from middle-age into the shadow of the sixties. He dressed well, but the flat crown of his felt hat, and the artificial, exaggerated squareness of the broad shoulders, gave him a provincial appearance. His gesture as he paid the driver was absolutely characteristic—a mixture of the dignified and the boyish, the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... not so much to the long-lived men who existed in those times, as seven months are to us ephemerals of the nineteenth century! Jacob could very well afford to wait that time; for he was not over what we call 'middle-age' when he married; and was, most likely, in the flower of his youth on his ninetieth birthday!—He did not die you know, until he had reached the ripe age of 'an hundred and forty and seven years.'—Besides, he had Laban's promise to keep him up to his ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... mistake of supposing that it sagged in any untidy way at the edges, or anything dull like that. Could you call a place dull which was first heard of historically in connection with a reward for killing wolves? There's a dear old town not far from the ferry. In its sedate middle-age it was a great whaling place, and is still crammed full of sea captains' descendants who are, in their turn, crammed full of fascinating stories of old days of great adventure, just as their serene-looking, aged houses are crammed full of shells and coral ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... socially. His natural dignity and detachment of mind were alike too strong for that; but he had arrived at the conclusion that you must have learned the rudiments of the art of amusement in early youth if you are to practise it with satisfaction to yourself in middle-age. And he very certainly had not learned the rudiments—not, anyhow, according to the English fashion. He had been aware, during these social excursions, that he was a good deal stared at and even commented on. At first he supposed ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... do not say such a thing! She is so hot-headed, so fond of you. Yes, I saw it from the beginning, and your talk about the insurmountable wall of middle-age did not deceive me. I only hope that will not be a tragic wall for her, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Amherst and rested on the faces pressing about her. There were many women's faces among them—the faces of fagged middle-age, and of sallow sedentary girlhood. For the first time Mrs. Westmore seemed to feel the bond of blood between herself and these dim creatures of the underworld: as Amherst watched her the lovely miracle was wrought. Her pallour gave way to a quick ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... vaults, hewn out of the solid rock, and intricate as the wards of the old keys of Calais surrendered to Edward III.; even so do these King-Commodores house themselves in their water-rimmed, cannon-sentried frigates, oaken dug, deck under deck, as cell under cell. And as the old Middle-Age warders of Warwick, every night at curfew, patrolled the battlements, and dove down into the vaults to see that all lights were extinguished, even so do the master-at-arms and ship's corporals of a frigate perambulate all the decks of a ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... known in all the vast region served by the Transcontinental Railway System. The owner of the name had finished his ice, and was sitting back to clip the end from a very long and very black cigar. He was a man past middle-age, large-framed and heavy, with the square, resolute face of a born master of circumstances. Like the younger generation, he was clean shaven; hence there was no mask for the deeply graven lines of determination about the mouth and along the angle of the strong, leonine jaw. In the region ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... a man past middle-age, riding a horse and leading another, to whose packsaddle was fastened a box, went slowly along that old trail in Southern Idaho, now almost obliterated by many-footed Progress. He was scanning the hills and consulting a piece of age-yellowed paper, broken at all its ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... her mother's gaze the girl's young features looked sadly out of place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as no unsuitable medium for wrinkled middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from Tess's dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from their seats, hastily finish their ale, and descend the stairs behind her, Mrs Rolliver's caution following ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... undoubtedly; especially when Davies prints O Brithi, O Brithoi! in Hebrew characters, as being 'vestiges of sacred hymns in the Phoenician language.' But then comes Mr. Nash, and says that the poem is a middle-age composition, with nothing Helio-daemonic about it; that it is meant to ridicule the monks; and that O Brithi, O Brithoi! is a mere piece of unintelligible jargon in mockery of the chants used by the monks at prayers; and he gives this counter-translation ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... came back to him. Come what might, he would not yield, he would not surrender himself into the hands of the foe without a struggle. He replaced the cover on the dish, and rang the bell for his landlady. She came in a moment later, comfortable and smiling, the very picture of respectable middle-age. As Fenwick glanced at her, he at once acquitted her of any connection with his ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... preliminary lecture, he had put the "Greville Memoirs" in her hands by way of improving her mind; and she had been struck by a passage in which Greville describes Lord Melbourne's training of the young Queen Victoria, whose Prime Minister he was. The man of middle-age, accomplished, cynical and witty, suddenly confronted with a responsibility which challenged both his heart and his conscience—and that a responsibility towards an attractive young girl whom he could neither court nor command, towards whom his ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his vague reply. He was not the man to give away the jokers of Farewell. Old lady, indeed! Miss Blythe to the contrary notwithstanding this girl was not within sight of middle-age. "Yeah," he went on, "they shore fooled me. Told me I'd taken ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White |
