"Precocious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the evolution and endowments of the future races with only the help of our present limited senses. The exceptions to this quasi-universal rule have been hitherto found only in some rare cases of constitutional, abnormally precocious individual evolutions; or, in such, where by early training and special methods, reaching the stage of the fifth rounders, some men in addition to the natural gift of the latter have fully developed (by certain occult methods) their sixth, and in still rarer cases their seventh, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... be used on the individuals themselves in building up their bodies, strengthening their minds, and preparing them to reproduce their species in maturer years. There is a serious day of reckoning for early indulgence; for precocious persons (unless their constitutions are as powerful as their desires) who give way to their passions at their first exactions, barter their youth for their enjoyment, and are old and weary of the world at an age when people of ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... paste to fifty gallons of the made-up lime-sulphur. If done properly this will get the scab of the apple, blossom blight or the brown rot in the plum, and is the most important spray for plum pocket. The arsenate of lead in the mixture will control the young of leaf eating insects and precocious plum curculios. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... quite as pretty as her elders, and had more of a southern look. Perhaps she was proportionably precocious, for she returned Gillian's greeting without embarrassment, and was quite ready to enter into conversation and show her gratification at compliments upon ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... children will show immediate improvement when they go to school. The boy who is passionate and disobedient, and whose parents cannot control him, is best at school. Boys who, from being much with grown-up people, have become too precocious and have acquired the habits and tastes of their elders, will dislike school at first, but it will do them good. Their fault shows that they are quick to learn and sensitive to the influences of others, and they will soon adapt themselves ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... reached out his hand and took the lavender piece. He did not eat it, however, for, chancing to remember that it might spoil his dinner, he put it in his vest pocket. Mrs. Bostwick, still intently listening to her precocious daughter, without thinking what she did, took the remaining piece, which was the white one, ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... greatest of his later achievements. Almost any other youth who had as much of the sense of language as was there exhibited, would have been led astray by the standards of the hour, would have mounted the spread-eagle and flapped its wings in rhetorical clamor. But Lincoln was not precocious. In art, as in everything else, he progressed slowly; the literary part of him worked its way into the matter-of-fact part of him with the gradualness of the daylight through a shadowy wood. It was not constant in its development. For ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... of their precocious worldliness to recognise, to feel a little afraid of their new companion's intellectual power. Those obviously meditative souls, which seem "not to sleep o' nights," seldom fail to put others on their guard. Who can tell what they may be judging, planning in silence, so near to one? Looking back ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... that time and toil should be thus wasted. The negro child, like the Hindu, is much sharper, because more precocious, than the European; at six years he will become a good penman; in fact, he promises more than he can perform. Reaching the age of puberty, his capacity for progress suddenly disappears, the physical reason being well known, and the 'cute lad becomes a dummer ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... he practise on the soft sands, laughing as he falls, and rising to try again. And thus, does he quickly, wonderfully develop, unfolding in the little circle of his caressers—in his mother's lap, in Shakib's arms, on Khalid's back, on Mrs. Gotfry's knee—the irresistible charm of his precocious spirit. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Cambridge, who were among the most fascinating devotees of ancient Jewish wisdom. Henry More was particularly attractive, "the most interesting and the most unreadable of the whole band." When he was a young boy, his uncle had to threaten a flogging to cure him of precocious "forwardness in philosophizing concerning the mysteries of necessity and freewill." In 1631 he entered Christ's College, Cambridge, "about the time when John Milton was leaving it," and he may almost be said to have spent the rest of his life ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... m-chromosomes. Some time before the first mitosis, the spireme splits and the pairs of granules embedded in linin are wonderfully distinct, both in iron-haematoxylin and safranin-gentian preparations (fig. 245). The m-chromosomes have here formed a precocious tetrad (m). Figure 246 is a similar stage from a safranin-gentian preparation. Figures 247 and 248 show the condensation of chromatin granules to form tetrads of various sizes, still embedded in the linin spireme. As these tetrads ...
— Studies in Spermatogenesis - Part II • Nettie Maria Stevens
... under the age of sixteen, unless very precocious, live, eat, work, play, sleep, and worship, accompanied only by their caretakers. Once upon the Sabbath do they worship with the adults. Their meetings are not so long, neither do they retire but fifteen minutes ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... crouched in a pebbly, sunny arroyo, peering across the bleak prairie, a lone watcher. Ascending, Carl saw that it was Eugene Field Linderbeck, a Plato freshman. That amused him. He grinningly planned a conversation. Every one said that "Genie Linderbeck was queer." A precocious boy of fifteen, yet the head of his class in scholarship; reported to be interested in Greek books quite outside of the course, fond of drinking tea, and devoid of merit in the three manly arts—athletics, flirting, and breaking rules by smoking. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... want, for my little dream to be realised, is that among these precocious wielders of the pencil there should arise here a Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope, who, finding quite early in life that he can draw as easily as other men can spell, that he can express ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... son. Like all children, he was imitative, so had commenced very early to make a collection of insects, and this was sufficient to give him a precocious taste for natural history; but in his character he was earnest and reflective, and very eager for knowledge. Sumichrast took pleasure in the boy's intelligence, and often amused himself by arguing with him. From the flashes of childish humor which he would display on such occasions, my friend sometimes ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... to children, but the carrying of their freaks and fancies into effect is peculiar only to those who are precocious and daring in character. Such was Edith, and no sooner had she conceived the idea of attempting to find the Esquimau camp than she proceeded to put it in execution. Frank was in so depressed a condition that she thought it better not to disturb or annoy him by arousing him so as to get him to ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... the same design, to make a rose no rose. Leaf after leaf fell under Mr. Stackpole's touch, as if it had been a black frost. The American government was a rickety experiment go to pieces presently; American institutions an alternative between fallacy and absurdity, the fruit of raw minds and precocious theories; American liberty a contradiction; American character a compound of quackery and pretension; American society (except at Mrs. Evelyn's) an anomaly; American destiny the same with that of a cactus, or a volcano a period of rest followed by a period of excitement; not, however, like ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... crudely, but examiningly. It was not enough, then, to love a man if you were going to have something else to do in life besides love him. The idea was new. It puzzled her. It was something outside the novelettes she had read, and outside her own precocious thoughts. Love was love—all knew that. She loved Toby; she had given herself to him; they were practically married; and now it appeared that something was wrong somewhere. Toby did not want her to be Sally: he wanted ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... called at the side door of the brick house on the evening before his departure, and when Rebecca answered his knock, stammered solemnly, "Can I k-keep comp'ny with you when you g-g-row up?" "Certainly NOT," replied Rebecca, closing the door somewhat too speedily upon her precocious swain. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Father of Pittsburgh, for he came thither in November, 1753, and established the location of the now imperial city by choosing it as the best place for a fort. Washington was then twenty-one years old. He had by that time written his precocious one hundred and ten maxims of civility and good behavior; had declined to be a midshipman in the British navy; had made his only sea-voyage to Barbados; had surveyed the estates of Lord Fairfax, going for months into the forest without fear of savage Indians or wild beasts; ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... the springs of the boy's religion. It is easy to call all this a hot-house process; it is easy to dub the child a precocious prig. But at bottom his religion was healthy and sound. It was not morbid; it was joyful. It was not based on dreamy imagination; it was based on the historic person of Christ. It was not the result of mystic exaltation; it was the result of a study of the Gospels. It was ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... why Little Moccasin was always so full of mischief, and always inventing tricks to play upon the other boys. He was a precocious and observing youngster, full of quaint and original ideas—never at a ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... With precocious insight he quickly learnt that money is made not by those who go out upon the waters, but by those who stay on land and send them hither and thither. He soon gave up the seafaring life and entered a shipbroker's office. ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... in height 81.39 inches and the fourteen self-fertilised plants 64.07, or as 100 to 79. One self-fertilised plant in Pot 3 exceeded, and one in Pot 4 equalled in height, its opponent. The self-fertilised plants showed no sign of inheriting the precocious growth of their parents; this having been due, as it would appear, to the abnormal state of the seeds from the unhealthiness of their parents. The fourteen self-fertilised plants yielded only forty spontaneously self-fertilised capsules, to which must be added seven, the product of ten flowers artificially ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... sentiment. The winds and clouds come to minister to the solitary ego. Have there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the genteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind its back? This might well not have occurred as yet; but America is so precocious, it has been trained by the genteel tradition to be so wise for its years, that some indications of a truly native philosophy and poetry are already to be found. I might mention the humorists, of whom you here in California have had your share. The humorists, however, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... father lived in Rome with his son, and argues from this that he was a man of large means. But Cicero gives no authority for this. It is more probable that he lived at the house of one Aculeo, who had married his mother's sister, and had sons with whom Cicero was educated. Stories are told of his precocious talents and performances such as we are accustomed to hear of many remarkable men—not unfrequently from their own mouths. It is said of him that he was intimate with the two great advocates of the time, Lucius Crassus and Marcus Antonius the orator, the grandfather of Cicero's future ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... by Annie, who, we may here seize the opportunity of saying, was, in addition to being a sensitive creature, one of those precocious little philosophers thinly spread in the female world, and made what they are often by delicate health, which reduces them to a habit of thinking much before their time. Not that she wanted the vivacity of her age, but that it was tempered by periods of serious musing, when ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... development; from being stupid and dull, the expression of the face brightens and becomes intelligent; the child talks quite as well as other children of its age, and sometimes becomes really intellectually precocious. Here we see the development of the brain as a direct result of the improved physical condition. In certain cases of insanity, on the contrary, we find that the wasting away of the body results from the disease of the brain, ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... would not have found those dwarfs and humpbacks whom Bernal Diaz saw waiting at his table when he dined.* (* Bernal Diaz Hist. Verd. de la Nueva Espana 1630.) The custom of marrying very young, according to the testimony of the monks, is no way detrimental to population. This precocious nubility depends on the race, and not on the influence of a climate excessively warm. It is found on the north-west coast of America, among the Esquimaux, and in Asia, among the Kamtschatdales, and the Koriaks, where girls of ten years old are often mothers. It may appear ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... plenty of now venerable relatives begging to be allowed to play nurse, my aunties among them. Many of my childhood pranks and words they told me in their old age. One of them that the aunties remembered struck me as rather precocious. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... should say nothing, and the speech of the one and the silence of the other clearly foreshadowed the kingdom for one or both. But the boy's words seemed heartless and not altogether knightly to Warde, who was himself before all things a man of heart; and the first impression made on him by the precocious lad was more or less a wrong one, since Henry afterwards turned out a just and kind man, though often stern and unforgetful of offence. And Gilbert was very far from guessing that the young prince was suddenly attracted to him in the strongest possible way, and that in the first meeting ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... could hold her tongue; so she squatted down by us, and talked, perhaps all the faster because she had the conversation all to herself. Her daughter was a young lady, whom by appearance in England, you would call somewhere in her teens; but, hereaway they are so precocious that one is constantly deceived in guessing their age. She would have been pretty if she had been clean; and was abundantly and expensively ornamented. Sometimes we hear it figuratively said of a domestic coquette, that she carries all her property on her ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... all in the coarse sense, but she struck me as having formed a system of ethics and views of life, both good-humoured and sarcastic, and had carried into her rustic sequestration the melancholy and precocious lore of her ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... not uncalled for here, even while we are speaking of a child not more than ten years old. Before Byron had attained that age, he describes himself as having felt the passion. Dante is said as early as nine years old to have fallen in love with Beatrice; Alfieri, who was himself precocious in the passion, considered such early sensibility to be an unerring sign of a soul formed for the fine arts; and Canova used to say that he was in love when but five years old. But these instances, however, prove nothing. Calf-love, as it is called in the country, is common; and ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... serious reason in the world for crying. She loved Luis dearly, and his general coldness saddened and surprised her. By degrees she had come to understand with precocious instinct, that the count loved her more than the others did, but he had to hide his feelings. So she, following his example, also adopted an indifferent manner with him when in public. But when they were alone, she reciprocated his expressions of affection with equal enthusiasm, ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... of Mr. Ekings the 'poarthecary?" said that young Michael Ragstroar, thrusting himself forward and others backward; because, you see, he was such a cheeky, precocious young vagabond. "Mean to say I can't buy twopenn'orth of diaculum plaster off of Mr. Ekings the 'poarthecary? Mean to say my aunt that orkupies a 'ouse in Chiswick clost to high-water mark don't send me to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... from Palermo, with whom he lived for several years until the summer of 1828, when he was under the necessity of separating from her in consequence of the extreme violence of her temper; and in this little boy all his affections are concentrated. He is a very precocious child, and already indicates strong signs of musical talent. Being of a delicate frame of health, Paganini never can bear to trust him out of his sight. "If I were to lose him," says he, "I would be lost myself; it is quite impossible I can ever separate myself from him; when ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... the consequences of his errors. His youth was passed in the prisons of the state, where his passions, becoming envenomed by solitude, and his intellect rendered more acute by contact with the irons of his dungeon, his mind lost that modesty which rarely survives the infamy of precocious punishments. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... never suffer him to be considered superfluous or intrusive. There seemed to be no secrets which the Emperor held too high for the comprehension or discretion of his page. His perceptive and reflective faculties, naturally of remarkable keenness and depth, thus acquired a precocious and extraordinary development. He was brought up behind the curtain of that great stage where the world's dramas were daily enacted. The machinery and the masks which produced the grand delusions of history had no deceptions for him. Carefully to observe men's actions, and silently to ponder ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... surely. Frost kills the flowers that blossom out of season; And these precocious intellects portend A life of sorrow or an ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... still a child, and, neglected as she had been, she still had had no one to make her precocious in matters of this kind. She was quite willing to take Christina's view of the case, and not resent the exclusion of her brother; indeed, she was unwell enough to dread the loudness of his voice and rudeness of ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there is more than this. The precocious development of early talent and originality is the thing which strangely terrifies these examination-maniacs. They have a horror of the man who teaches himself. They have a horror of any one who ventures to think for himself and to enquire for himself at twenty-five years of ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... cuss." "What are you shooting at me for?" mildly inquired the lieutenant. "Because you had your hands on the dead-line," answered the boy. At this moment the sergeant of the guard came up, and taking the precocious ruffian by the collar, shook him with considerable energy, and demanded of him very fiercely, "What the devil are you shooting at that prisoner for, you little scoundrel?" The boy replied that the prisoner had his ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... in amazement. The boy referred to was a little fellow seven or eight years of age, by name Louis Joseph de Saint Veran. M. Ricot was his tutor, and was led to express himself after this fashion in consequence of some precocious criticisms of his pupil on the tactics employed by Caius Julius Caesar at a battle fought in Transalpine Gaul fifty odd years before the advent of the Christian era. It was evident to the critic's youthful mind that the ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... famous in society for their precocious, bitter irony, quivered as do those of children when ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... is precocious; but it is not with the erudite precocity of the German Heinecken, who at three years of age was intimately acquainted with history and geography ancient and modern, sacred and profane, besides being able to converse fluently in Latin, French, and German. We know, of course, that ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the importance of this subject, and will instantly commence a system of measures imperatively demanded by the sternest principles [colonization principles?] of sound policy." We would tell this precocious statesman that we are not to be intimidated into colonization "measures" by the angry effusions of his illiberal soul; that we had rather die in Maryland under the pressure of unrighteous and cruel laws than be driven, like cattle, to the pestilential clime of Liberia, ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... is the date of the awakening of intellectual life, and the rapidity of its progress, that height of stature might almost as well be taken for its measure as length of years. In every community there are some young minds of peculiar gifts and precocious development, as fit to cope with the masterpieces of literature at ten years of age, as the average person of twenty, and more appreciative of them. From this class come the minds which rule the world of mind, and confer the greatest benefits on the race. ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... done, for there is no proof of any unkindness on her part. That he loved her there can be but little doubt, but hardly to the verge of madness, as he wrote love sonnets to other ladies at the same time; the truth seems to be that he became mentally unbalanced as the result of the precocious development of his powers, which made a man of him while yet a boy and developed in him an intensity of feeling which made his candle of life burn fiercely, but for a short time only. His end was but the natural consequence of the beginning, and whether Leonora ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... bantling's dawning days?— Precocious shall he prove, and harass The world with inconvenient ways And lisped conundrums that embarrass? (Such as Impressionists delight To offer each aesthetic gaper, And faddists hyper-Ibsenite Rejoice to perpetrate ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... our party had been able to join us without our observing it. Their names were Parry and Leslie; the former a man of thirty, just getting into practice at the Bar, the latter still almost a boy in years, though a very precocious one, whom I had brought with me, ostensibly as a pupil, but really as a companion. He was an eager student of philosophy, and had something of that contempt of youth for any one older than twenty-five, which I can never find it in my heart to resent, though have long passed the age ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen or nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just as children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at eighteen months and some will hardly speak until three, and the thing has very ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... specific flavour, which render it noteworthy, are distinct and self-evolved. It is a premature, an unconscious effort made by a limited class to achieve per saltum what was slowly and laboriously wrought out by whole nations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Too precocious, too complete within too narrow limits, it was doomed to sterility. Not the least singular fact about it is that though the Carmina Vagorum continued to be appreciated, they were neither imitated nor developed to ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... of twelve he was sent to Cambridge, and put under Whitgift at Trinity. It is a question which recurs continually to readers about those times and their precocious boys, what boys were then? For whatever was the learning of the universities, these boys took their place with men and consorted with them, sharing such knowledge as men had, and performing exercises and hearing lectures according ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... you have got the new Juans, recollect that there are some very gross printer's blunders, particularly in the fifth Canto,—such as 'praise' for 'pair'—'precarious' for 'precocious'—'Adriatic' for 'Asiatic'—'case' for 'chase'—besides gifts of additional words and syllables, which make but a cacophonous rhythmus. Put the pen through the said, as I would mine through * *'s ears, if I were alongside him. As it is, I have ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... proportion of their time, during the most impressionable period of life, in what are liable to prove forcing-houses of sexual precocity and criminal tendencies. There is every reason for regarding the habit of "going to the pictures" without adequate restrictions as contributing seriously to precocious sexuality, and also to weakening the powers of inhibition and self-control in other directions—powers which are the distinctive attributes of the higher ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... sincere man, gentle and kindly, whose memory was "like a religion" to his sons and daughters. In that same year was born Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest of thirteen children. He was an extraordinarily precocious child, who could read at three years of age, and who, before he was five, had read the Bible and the Arabian Nights, and could remember an astonishing amount from both books. From three to six he attended a "dame" school; and from six ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... of his having been a very precocious child. Indeed, it is usually the eldest child whose necessary companionship with his elders wins him this reputation. The youngest remains a child among children longer than any other ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... prolongs With spangled speeches,—let alone the songs; Statesmen grow merry, lean attorneys laugh, And weak teetotals warm to half and half, And beardless Tullys, new to festive scenes, Cut their first crop of youth's precocious greens, And wits stand ready for impromptu claps, With loaded barrels and percussion caps, And Pathos, cantering through the minor keys, Waves all her onions to the trembling breeze; While the great Feasted views with silent glee His scattered limbs ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... fast. Because she was aping older and foolishly fashionable folk, she was becoming an exacting, precocious girl—not at all the innocent and joyous child she should have been at fourteen ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... The precocious little savage was known to every rider on the trail from St. Joe to Sacramento. Of course the Indians were always on the alert to steal the horses that belonged to the stations, but where Little Cayuse was living they never made a success of it, owing to his vigilance. ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... following her death in brooding and novel-reading. Grief, and to no small extent idleness, had shaken his whole nervous system and quickened his imagination. His tears had been like warm April showers falling on fruit trees, wakening them to a precocious burgeoning: but alas! only too often the blossoms are doomed to wither and perish in a frosty May night, before the fruit ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... drawn away from the speculative to the practical. The faculties which are necessary for the conduct of important business ripened in him at a time of life when they have scarcely begun to blossom in ordinary men. Since Octavius the world had seen no such instance of precocious statesmanship. Skilful diplomatists were surprised to hear the weighty observations which at seventeen the Prince made on public affairs, and still more surprised to see a lad, in situations in which he ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... why he, who had met nice girls and attractive women by the score, had come into the North woods to be stirred out of all reason by a slip of a girl with yellow hair and expressive gray eyes and a precocious ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... years old when she perceived with a discernment somewhat precocious that her sleeping companion was simple, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... mothers, they have none of the habits or character necessary to govern their household and to train their children properly. Hence arise that growing neglect or laxity of family discipline; that insubordination, that lawlessness, and precocious depravity of Young America; that almost total lack of filial reverence and obedience with the children of this generation. Exceptions there happily are; but the number of children that grow up without any proper training or discipline at home is fearfully large, and their evil ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... written, as I should imagine, some time since, in which you address her as 'Connie Davenant,' and have the impudence to admire the hat she wore the Sunday before! I shudder, sir, to think of such duplicity, such precocious and shameless depravity. It astounds me. It deprives me of all ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... Compared with this, our other colleges are all provincial; and unless the State of Massachusetts shall see fit to adopt us, and to foster our interest with something of the zeal and liberality which the State of Michigan bestows on her academic masterpiece, Harvard cannot hope to compete with this precocious child of the West. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... is a bad sign, as well from an intellectual as from a moral point of view, if he is precocious in understanding the ways of the world, and in adapting himself to its pursuits; if he at once knows how to deal with men, and enters upon life, as it were, fully prepared. It argues a vulgar nature. On ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... astronautics. From the age of ten I specialized in that subject, never for a moment regretting the choice. When I was still a child of twenty-four I took part in the Ninth Jupiter Expedition and after that there were many more. I had a precocious marriage at thirty and my boys, Robert and Neil, were born within a few years after Marla and I wed. It was fortunate that I fought for government permission that early; after the accident, despite my high rating, I would have been denied the ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... the character of this unhappy youth be contemplated, it is full of instruction. His talents were unusually precocious, and their variety was as astonishing as their extent. Besides the Poetical pieces in this volume, and his scholastic attainments, his ability was manifested in various other ways. His style was remarkable for its clearness and elegance, and his correspondence and prose ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... the first. The second, though less precocious, is yet more enjoyable. Besides, we know it is true, while the other—well, it is not ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... recent writer,(87) 'of all the street-boys in the world, those of New York are the most precocious. I have seen a shoe-black, about three feet high, walk up to the table or 'Bank,' as it is generally called, and stake his money (five cents) with the air of a young spendthrift to whom "money ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... and kissing, etc., in children who have the emotion in this first stage of its development, is not specifically sexual except in some cases which I am inclined to consider as precocious. Normally, there appears to be no erethism of the sexual organs during the process of love-making. But erethism, as we shall see in another chapter upon the analysis of the sex impulse, is not confined to the sexual organs, but is distributed throughout the entire body, especially through the vascular ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... chanced to turn toward the main entrance door of the East Room. I saw, pushing through, a certain page, a young boy of good family, who was employed by Mr. Calhoun as messenger. He knew me perfectly well, as he did almost every one else in Washington, and with precocious intelligence his gaze picked me out ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... the direction of educational and religious reform, its political and social speculations took a far wider range in the "Utopia" of Thomas More. Even in the household of Cardinal Morton, where he had spent his childhood, More's precocious ability had raised the highest hopes. "Whoever may live to see it," the grey-haired statesman used to say, "this boy now waiting at table will turn out a marvellous man." We have seen the spell which his wonderful learning and the sweetness of his temper threw ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... restless to be quite pleasant. Still, when he smiled, and he had smiled brightly when he first saw the bread, his countenance improved; and there was, besides, something about his open forehead which redeemed the covert expression of his eye. He was about seven years old, and precocious in quickness of a particular kind, as is very often the case ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... wish to see Mr. Bennett?" asked the precocious Milton politely on one hand while on the other he made ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... consonance with the laws of physiology, to discountenance marriage before twenty; and the nearer the girls arrive at the age of twenty-five before the consummation of this important rite, the greater the probability that, physically and morally, they will be protected against those risks which precocious marriages bring in ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... other animals I would pitilessly suppress proclivities to gawster. I would ask power from Parliament to whip, when mild persuasion failed, the precocious prig, "neither man nor boy," who struts about on Sundays, scoffing at religion, and polluting the air with bad tobacco and worse talk; and I would authorise the police to supervise, and to send home at their discretion, those small giggling girls who, having lost the shame which is a glory ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... ever get a man. Because I've had one, and am making something that resembles a trousseau, she thinks that I have a recipe for cornering the male market. Her dental arch is like the porte-cochere of the new Belmont Hotel, and last night a precocious four-year-old said, "Miss Mandy, why don't you tuck your teeth in?"—Miss Mandy would if she could but she can't. She is the sort who would stop her own funeral to sew up a hole ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... large chinquapin bush for top-working with the choice Merribrooke variety of the common chestnut. Every one of the grafts caught, and some of them have grown tremendously. This introduces an interesting question. May we graft the common American chestnut upon bush chinquapin stocks and secure precocious bearing? In that case we shall have trees like the dwarf apple and pear trees that are readily pruned ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... precocious gallantry evidently was not considered as gratuitous as his experimental metallurgy. But as his eyes followed his daughter's wholesome, Phyllis-like figure, a new idea took possession of him: needless to say, however, it was in the line of another ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... attentions with a finished coquetry that was far from childlike, a flush on her satin cheek, a dimple puckering the corner of her mouth, and silky lashes lowered over her satisfied eyes. She was inevitably precocious in many ways, but she was young enough still to fancy herself one of the irresistible beauties and belles of the world, and to flaunt a perfectly conscious arrogance in the eyes of all ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... before the windows apprise us of the character of the building. There are two divisions of inmates; the one in which the discipline is more rigid is called the retenue. Those placed here are generally between fourteen and twenty-one years of age, although occasionally a child of precocious depravity is met with, who has to be separated from those under less restriction even at ten years of age. The disciplinaire is the division of milder restraint. The twenty-five or twenty-six places in each of the ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... strain appeared, however, the mother would be overtaken by a fit of repentant watchfulness, and for days together Robert would find her the most fascinating playmate, story-teller, and romp, and forget all his precocious interest in history or vulgar fractions. In after years when Robert looked back upon his childhood, he was often reminded of the stories of Goethe's bringing-up. He could recall exactly the same scenes as Goethe describes,—mother and child sitting together ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... persons, like me not precocious in the nursery or the school-room, but naturally fond, as I was passionately, of beautiful forms and colors, would be surprised, if they would try their baffled skill again in aftertimes, to find how much the years had been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... could hardly endure poverty with contentment. The grinding need for money, the absolute necessity of luxurious living, had been pressed upon her from her childhood. She had seen it and acknowledged it, and had told him, with precocious wisdom, that that which he offered to do for her sake would be a folly for them both. She had not stinted the assurance of her love, but had told him that they must both turn aside and learn to love elsewhere. He had done so, with too complete readiness! She had dreamed of a second ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... in the larval stage. Some of them provide me with the oil beetle and the Sitaris, rare finds at one time, today of no use to me. Others contain the Melecta [a parasitic bee] in the form of a highly colored pupa, or even in that of the full grown insect. The Osmia, still more precocious, though dating from the same period, shows herself exclusively in the adult form, a bad omen for my investigations, for what the Anthrax demands is the larva and not the perfect insect. The fly's grub doubles my apprehensions. Its development is complete, the larva on which ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... office. When they passed the office-windows she looked the other way, but before she was well past, her aunt Eva hit her violently and laughed loudly. Ellen shrank, coloring a deep crimson. Then her mother also laughed, and even Amabel, shrilly, with precocious recognition of the situation. Only Mrs. Zelotes stalked along ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... nephew and asked, "Do I know this young gentleman? There is not light enough to see him," with a voice in which Jock, shy and awkward, felt all the old objection to his presence as a burden upon Lucy, which in his precocious toleration he had accepted as reasonable, but did not like much the better for that. And then she sat down somewhat sullenly at the fire. The next minute Lucy came hastily in with many apologies: "I did not hear the carriage, aunt. ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... he would not smoke any more, but I've been afraid ever since to turn a corner, for fear I shall see the precocious young man walking ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... development. This indeed will be most freely admitted by those who feel most strongly that all the old cunning of the master hand is yet in the wayward loving Bella Wilfer, in the vulgar canting Podsnap, and in the dolls' dressmaker Jenny Wren, whose keen little quaint weird ways, and precocious wit sharpened by trouble, are fitted into a character as original and delightfully conceived as it is vividly carried through to the last. A dull coarse web her small life seems made of; but even from its taskwork, which is undertaken ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... old, who are so very patient, and so very—(what's the word for a child that knows a deal more than he has any business to know at his age? Stop! I've got it!—precocious—that's the word)—so very patient and so very precocious that they will sit quiet in the same place for two hours; making believe all the time that they understand every word of the service, whether they really do or not. I don't deny that there may be such children, though I never met with them ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... farther from its highest development than is the brain of an animal. It not only grows for a longer time, but it becomes stronger than that of other living beings. The brain of man may be said to be exceptionally young at birth. The lower animal is born precocious, and acts precociously; it resembles those infant prodigies whose brain, as it were, is born old into the world, but who, in spite of, or rather in addition to, their rich endowment at birth, in after life develop as much mental power ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... vague uneasiness. The vast forehead, broad and high, of the new-comer, who was bald at the age of thirty-seven, now seemed darkened by annoyance. His firm, judicial mouth expressed a habit of chilling sarcasm. Claude Vignon is imposing, in spite of the precocious deteriorations of a face once magnificent, and now grown haggard. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five he strongly resembled the divine Raffaelle. But his nose, that feature of the human face that ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... and a light laugh rippled over the man's lips. "And Miss Tuttle is 'first lieutenant,'" he continued, "and gallantly came forward to share the self-imposed mission of her friend 'to go to the front.' There's pluck there, too; but you are a precocious pair—you two— and keep one busy guessing what you will do next. All the same, with the right check-rein, I believe you'll both make fine women, and—the school would surely lose some of its ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... lover one more phase of girlhood; she, who had been a precocious and forward child, and then a shy and silent girl, came out now a bright and witty young woman, full of vivacity, modesty, and sensibility. Time cured Compton of his one defect. Ruperta stopped growing at fifteen, but Compton went slowly on; caught her at ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... descent. His father, Marquis Mirabeau, was a man of liberal sentiments,—not unknown to literary fame by his treatises on political economy,'—but was eccentric and violent. Although his oldest son, Count Mirabeau, the subject of this lecture, was precocious intellectually, and very bright, so that the father was proud of him, he was yet so ungovernable and violent in his temper, and got into so many disgraceful scrapes, that the Marquis was compelled to discipline him severely,—all to no purpose, inasmuch as he was injudicious in his treatment, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... mind was still running upon his precocious grandson, was seen to shake his head from side to side, while a laugh, working like an earthquake, below the surface, produced various extraordinary appearances in his face, chest, and shoulders, - the more alarming because unaccompanied by any noise whatever. These emotions, however, ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... "If you thought for a minute, Prout, you would see that the 'precocious flow of fetid imagery,' that King complains of, is borrowed wholesale from King. He 'nursed the pinion that impelled the steel.' Naturally he does not approve. Come into the smoking-room for a minute. It isn't fair to listen to boys; but they should be ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... took off her leg, And laid it down like a cribbage-peg, For the Rout was done and the riot: The Square was hush'd; not a sound was heard; The sky was gray, and no creature stirr'd, Except one little precocious bird, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Universal Biography. Nothing is overlooked; neither the names of the professors at the Bourges College, nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy, melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called Tristesse (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems Paquita la Sevillane and Le Chene de la Messe; three sonnets, a description of the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, with a tale called Carola, published as the work he was engaged ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... moving others or all of them, who can not move his brows or corrugate his forehead at will, and whose inflection is very monotonous, illustrates a condition of arrest or atrophy of this later, finer, accessory system of muscles. On the other hand, the child, precocious in any or all of these later respects, is very liable to be undeveloped in the larger and more fundamental parts and functions. The full unfoldment of each is, in fact, an inexorable condition precedent for the normal development to full and abiding maturity of the higher and more refined ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... throughout his life, he was absolutely free from any touch of priggishness or precocious piety. He complained once to my sister that when he was taken out walks by his elders, he heard about nothing but "poetry and civilisation." In a friendly little memoir of him, which I have been sent, I find the following passage: "In his early childhood, when reason was just beginning ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sympathy. The son, a sorrowful little motherless boy, was sent to the Moravian school at Niesky, and then to Barby. He was to escape the contamination of the universities, and the woes through which his father had passed. Even there the spirit of the age pursued him. The precocious lad, in his loneliness, raised every question which the race was wrestling with. He long concealed these facts, dreading to wound the man he so revered. Then in a burst of filial candour, he threw himself upon his father's mercy, only to be abused and measurelessly condemned. He had ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... small unpainted house in which were several windows which had been repaired with old hats and masses of newspaper. As he neared the house he saw in a cove in the weeds a barrel lying on its side, and seated in the mouth of the barrel was a child with a thin, sallow, dirty, precocious face and with a cat in her arms. The child stared at the intruder, who stopped and pushed his hat to ...
— All He Knew - A Story • John Habberton
... a person than George Canning (as a schoolboy) was the author of the second of the two parodies reproduced in the present volume. A group of precocious Eton lads, Canning, J. Hookham Frere, John Smith, and Robert (Bobus) Smith, during the years 1786-1787 produced forty octavo numbers of a weekly paper called The Microcosm. They succeeded in exciting some interest among the literati,[7] were coming out in a "Second ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... were not laid aside on my return home. To the best of my ability I had given Nurse Bundle an epitome of the sermon on alms—deeds which had so taken my fancy, and I have reason to believe that she was very proud of my precocious benevolence. Whilst the subject was under discussion betwixt us, she related many anecdotes of the good deeds of the "young gentlemen and ladies" in a certain clergyman's family where she had lived as nursemaid in her younger days; and my imagination was fired by dreams of soup-cans, ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... is not at all incredible. You saw the child pass through the Rue Richelieu last year, who amused himself with killing his brothers and sisters by sticking pins in their ears while they slept. The generation who follow us are very precocious." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in 1608. He was the son of the Comptroller of the Household of Charles I. He was uncommonly precocious; at five is said to have spoken Latin, and at sixteen had entered into the service of Gustavus Adolphus, 'the lion of the North, and the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... seventh of that name; and I used to think, even when he was a toddling little baby, what plans of education would be best suited to develop his talents. I know that a parent's partiality is a magnifying glass of high power; but, to the best of my belief, he was a most precocious child. I think so now, as I look back upon the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... brilliant and beautiful persons, assembled in the publisher's Saturday Salon, for although a youthful minor poet, he was modest and lovable. Perhaps his Oxford tutorship was sobering. At any rate his head remained unturned by his precocious fame, and to meet these other young men and women—his reverend seniors on the slopes of Parnassus—gave him more pleasure than the receipt of 'royalties'. Not that his publisher afforded him much opportunity of contrasting the two pleasures. The profits of the Muse went to provide ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... when, if they were true poets, they would not have too much in their whole being with which to feel, and to inhale silently, those perfumes which later only they may know how to diffuse in their verse? There are precocious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... moral maladies: childhood suffers from them less than youth or maturity. Russia is still in that stage of civilization which is naturally subject to attacks of feverish and mystical religion, but one day it will emerge from it; and the precocious skepticism of a large portion of its educated classes shows plainly that no inexorable fate condemns the national ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... a precocious boy," prompted Eustace Eubanks, who was one of us. "He is well aware that we would not ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... his court more assiduously to his uncle. It was not very hard to ingratiate himself in that quarter; for his manners were insinuating, and his precocious experience of life made him entertaining. The old neglected billiard—room was soon put in order, and Dick, who was a magnificent player, had a series of games with his uncle, in which, singularly enough, he was beaten, though his antagonist had been out of play for years. He evinced a ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. |
