"Childhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of my memory as from an illness? Why, without my memory I would not be myself, because every man is built up of his memories and really lives only as long as he goes through life like a loaded camera. Supposing I could not tell where I lived in my childhood, what color my father's eyes and my mother's hair were, and supposing at any moment that I were called upon to give an account, I could not turn the leaves of the past and point to the right picture, how quick they would be to diagnose my case as feeblemindedness, or imbecility. ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... days he had read of meetings in such places which even now would hardly bear thinking of. He went on thinking of them, however, until he reached home, and particularly of one which catches most people's fancy at some time of their childhood.' Now I saw in my dream that Christian had gone but a very little way when he saw a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him.' 'What should I do now,' he thought, 'if I looked back and caught sight of a black figure sharply defined ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... the mother prayed over it this prayer:—'O God, if thou wilt not let me be a mother, I have one refuge: I will go back and be a child: I will be thy child more than ever. My mother-heart will find relief in childhood towards its Father. For is it not the same nature that makes the true mother and the true child? Is it not the same thought blossoming upward and blossoming downward? So there is God the Father and God the Son. Thou wilt keep my little ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... 'Fighting with the 7th Royal Fusiliers.' It was composed in the early 'nineties, and produced such an overwhelming rush of recruits that the authorities could easily, had they so chosen, have raised several additional battalions." The writer of the present article remembers in his childhood to have learnt the following lines from his old nurse, who was the widow of a corporal in the army employed in the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... voice of childish laughter, hushed is childhood's merry tone, the fireside Grand'ther Baldwin and ...
— Ballads • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... as white as my departed wife's; although in her childhood, as I remember, she was very yellow, and I saw with amazement the mole between her breasts, whereof I had never heard aught before. But she suddenly screamed violently and started back, seeing that the constable his wife, when nobody watched her, had run a ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... months at the time) and my father's sister became his housekeeper. I had but one brother a year older than myself. How well I remember him, a fine noble-hearted boy full of love and affection. We were neglected by our father and aunt, and left to get through our childhood's days as best we could. We would wander together hand in hand by the river side or in the woods, and often cry ourselves to sleep in each other's arms at our father's want of affection for us. We enjoyed none of the gayeties, ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... and rebellious, this music is their music, music of home. It stretches out its arms to them, they have only to give themselves up. Chicago and its saloons and its slums fade away—there are green meadows and sunlit rivers, mighty forests and snowclad hills. They behold home landscapes and childhood scenes returning; old loves and friendships begin to waken, old joys and griefs to laugh and weep. Some fall back and close their eyes, some beat upon the table. Now and then one leaps up with a ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... "The tear down childhood's cheek that flows Is like the dew-drop on the rose; When next the summer breeze comes by And waves the bush, the ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... articulation with the industrial activities of the community, county uniformity of textbooks, selection and correlation of textbook material and its adaptation to the varying interests and needs of childhood, uniform system of reports and records, ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... by Admiral von Kufner in Marguerite's honour; for, having spent her childhood elsewhere, she had never experienced the wonder of this roof excursion so highly prized by Royalty, and for ever forbidden to all other women and to all but a few men of the teeming millions who swarmed like larvae in ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... household? Did I not bid you to hospitably entertain these strangers, whom now ye have striven to slay, and whom, had not they been brave and strong beyond the strength of men, ye would cruelly have murdered? Hath it not been taught to you from childhood that the law of She is an ever fixed law, and that he who breaketh it by so much as one jot or tittle shall perish? And is not my lightest word a law? Have not your fathers taught you this, I say, ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... the city, and followed the course of the river with his eyes, he thought the more intensely of his, lost love. He had got her picture from her parents, as well as some toys she had played with in her childhood; above all he delighted in a nightingale, that in its moving plaints seemed to him to be only pouring forth the woes of his own heart. This bird had been fostered by Crescentia with the utmost care and fondness; and Antonio preserved it like something holy, as the last relic ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... with Margaret began, and concerning which the poet supplied her with information, was destined to influence the whole reign, since it furnished the occasion of the first open quarrel between Francis I. and the companion of his childhood, Charles de Bourbon, Count of Montpensier, and Constable of France. Yielding too readily on this occasion to the persuasions of his mother, Francis intrusted to Margaret's husband the command of the vanguard, a post which the Constable considered his own by virtue of his office. He felt mortally ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... spring of youth in Uncle Dick's soul that yet had all the fascinating flavour of ripe experience. He was clever, kindly, humorous and, withal, so crystal clear of mind and heart that an atmosphere partaking of childhood hung around him. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... pursue. But, possessing all that I can want, I find one day and one hour exactly like another, except that the latter is still more tedious than the former. Let your experience inform me, how the day may now seem as short as in my childhood, while nature was yet fresh, and every moment showed me what I never had observed before. I have already enjoyed too much; give me something ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... not yield when all those who might have been her friends strove to wrong her. Where would mamma have been,—and I,—had there been no Mr. Thwaite to comfort us? He was our only friend,—he and his father. They were all we had. In my childhood I had never a kind word from another child,—but only from him. Would it have been right that he should have asked for anything, and that I ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... became a passion, a passion new and sweet in its incantation out of the lost cravings of childhood. When the nearer freshness of the woods filled her nostrils, there from the live-oak moss in her night's abode, she smiled on the grave young fellow who had left her at the door. And both girls laughing together over ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... served to cover his head, but was without pleasant or painful associations—a place in which rats raced and mice squeaked; a place in which money might be made and hoarded, but on which little had been spent. It was a place he had known from childhood as the habitation of his parents, and which now was his own. His childhood had been one of drudgery without cheerfulness, and was not looked back on with regret. Home was not likely to be much more to him in the future than it was in the present. More comfortable perhaps, certainly more costly. ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... children that passed away in childhood, I can not but think that they succumbed to overtraining, being crammed quite after the German custom of stuffing geese so as to produce that delicious diseased tidbit known to gourmets as pate de foies gras. John Milton stood the cramming process ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... who lead an abnormal, because a lonely, childhood, he was in some ways very mature, in other ways still very babyish. He was at once secretive and—whenever anything touched his heart—emotionally expansive. To the indifferent observer Timmy appeared to be an exceptionally intelligent, naughty, ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... the most affectionate and good-humored mood, just as Levin often remembered him in childhood. He even referred to Sergey Ivanovitch without rancor. When he saw Agafea Mihalovna, he made jokes with her and asked after the old servants. The news of the death of Parfen Denisitch made a painful ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... scenes of his childhood had fallen back so swiftly into the far horizon, he was not lonely. His heart found a lovelier, if not a healthier home, than it had ever known before. For during those four peaceful and busy months ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... and the prophets were of continual occurrence. Therefore we may safely say that with these two forms of divine service, the sacrificial and the simply devotional and didactic, the apostles, the founders of the Christian Church, had been familiar from their childhood. They were at home in both synagogue and temple. They knew by sight the ritual of the altar, and by ear the ritual of the choir. They were accustomed to the spectacle of the priest offering the victim; they were used to hearing the singers ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... picture of childhood so charming that it sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of the goblet ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the mind a picture of a family so charming! Of you, dear sir, in your gracious childhood, how endearing the image! how tenderly guarded, how fondly cherished here by your side the little sister? Ah! the smiling picture, making glad the heart! This sister, Zenobia, let us say, grows up, ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... since separated from toilet operations, mention of locks of hair so carefully preserved may not inappropriately be made here. Many of these are associated with happy memories of childhood, others of more saddened recollections. It has been a common practice to preserve locks of hair of departed friends and relatives. In former days these locks of hair were often enclosed in lockets, some of which were very large. The simple lock did not always satisfy, ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... His name was a tower of strength before her enemies, and his wisdom the chief and dernier ressort in her councils. He was the most confidential private counsellor of the queen, who regarded him with the veneration and affection due to the friend of her childhood, when she was neglected by the corrupt court of one uncle, and the apathetic court of another, the sovereigns of the empire over which she also was destined to reign. The removal of the great Duke was an irreparable ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the crowded town; Pleasure and pain going up and down, Murmuring low on the ear there beat Echoes unceasing of voice and feet. Withered age, with its load of care, Come in this tumult of life to share, Childhood glad in its radiance brief, Happiest-hearted or bowed with grief, Meet alike, as the stars look down Week by week ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... very great, and he wept bitterly. He had watched over that young man from his earliest childhood with paternal affection and solicitude; and with pride he had seen him take public position as a member of the Virginia assembly. Now, at the age of twenty-eight years, he was taken from him. The mother was almost unconsolable, and the young wife was sorely ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... shown to criminals? Have you ever noticed how, in such a State as this, men condemned to death or exile remain in the country and walk abroad with the demeanour of heroes? See with what condescension and tolerance democrats despise the maxims which we have been brought up from childhood to revere and associate with the welfare of the Republic. We believe that unless a man is born virtuous, he will never acquire virtue, unless he has always lived in an environment of honesty and probity ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... for popular enthusiasm in the review of Jackson's early career. Born in such obscurity that it is doubtful to this day whether he was born in South Carolina, as he himself claimed, or on the North Carolina side of the line, as Mr. Parton thinks, he had a childhood of poverty and ignorance. He was taken prisoner as a mere boy during the Revolution, and could never forget that he had been wounded by a British officer whose boots he had refused to brush. Afterward, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... born in 1628, a year memorable as that in which the Bill of Rights was passed. Then began the struggle against arbitrary power, which was overthrown in 1688, the year of Bunyan's death, by the accession of William III. Of Bunyan's parents, his infancy, and childhood, little is recorded. All that we know is from his own account, and that principally contained in his doctrine of the Law and Grace, and in his extraordinary development of his spiritual life, under the title of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. His birth would ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... visibly the dawn's. Half-way down the ravines it resembled the light cast off a torrent water. It lay on the grass like a sheet of unreflecting steel, and was a face without a smile above. Their childhood ran along the tracks to the forest by the light, which was neither dim nor cold, but grave; presenting tree and shrub and dwarf growth and grass austerely, not deepening or confusing them. They wound their way by borders of crag, seeing in a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... perfectly well established fact that all its operations and functions, as an animating spirit in the human body, are fulfilled through the workings of material organs in the brain; that these organs are in childhood in an exceedingly immature, tender, and delicate condition; and that all sudden, sharp, and, especially, painful emotions, greatly excite, ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... Florence's childhood passed away amidst the flowery fields and bare hills that overlooked the beautiful river Derwent. The village, built of stone like so many in the North Country, lay far below, and on Sundays the two little girls, ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... state, or his employers, had sent him to Congress; and Portia, left motherless in her middle childhood, had grown up in an atmosphere of statecraft, or what passes for such, in an era of frank commercialism. Inheriting her mother's rare beauty of face and form, and uniting with it a sympathetic gift ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... disquietude he occasioned in their minds by thus abandoning the duties of his profession. He sometimes, but with the greatest mildness, hinted at the coldness with which Tigranes treated him, and reminded his friend of the pleasing intercourse of their childhood. But all his remonstrances were vain; Tigranes heard him at first with coolness, then with impatience or contempt, and at last ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there not have been in these pictures of the mind - when I beheld that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after much bandying of not always well-informed argument, that importance is pretty generally allowed by the competent. It has, fortunately, ceased to be fashionable to regard the dispute about Universals as proper only to amuse childhood or beguile dotage, and the quarrels of Scotists and Thomists as mere reductions of barren logomachy to the flatly absurd. Still, this importance, though real, though great, is not directly literary. The claim which makes it impossible ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... garret, where wretches, the young and the old, Half starved and half naked, lie crouched from the cold; See those skeleton limbs, those frost-bitten feet, All bleeding and bruised by the stones of the street; Hear the sharp cry of childhood, the deep groans that swell From the poor dying creature who writhes on the floor; Hear the curses that sound like the echoes of Hell, As you sicken and shudder and fly from the door; Then home to your ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... up the form of that island princess for the love of whom he had submitted his body to the cruel hands of the tattooer, and now sat on the lumber, at the pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so strange a figure of a European. Or perhaps, from yet further back, sounds and scents of England and his childhood might assail him: the merry clamour of cathedral bells, the broom upon the foreland, the song of the river on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... outset included that precious brother in my sketch, it was because I should almost as soon have deemed it necessary to include by name my own head or my own heart. He too was musical, and sang sweetly, and I cannot look back on my childhood without confessing that its cup ran over with the profusion of delights that my God ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... not the smallest objection) was to rescue us small jetsam and save us from many dreadful Christian heresies, more especially those of Rome. But he came from the north of Britain and argued (I suppose) that what porridge had done for him in childhood it might well do for us— a conclusion against which our poor little southern stomachs rebelled. It oppressed me worse than any, for since the discovery of my sleep-walking habit my supper (of plain bread and water) had been docked, so that I came ravenous ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... remembrance of Mademoiselle de Warens, who was born there; of my father, who lived there; of Mademoiselle de Wulson, who had been my first love; and of several pleasant journeys I had made there in my childhood, mingled with some nameless charm, more powerfully attractive than all the rest. When that ardent desire for a life of happiness and tranquillity (which ever follows me, and for which I was born) inflames my mind, 'tis ever to the country of Vaud, near the lake, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Darrell and his friend, however, her face lighted with the old-time, sunny smile and her cheeks flushed with pleasure. She bestowed upon Mr. Britton the same affectionate greeting with which she had been accustomed to meet him since her childhood's days. He was visibly affected, and though he returned her greeting, kissing her on brow and cheek, he was unable to speak. Her color deepened and her eyes grew luminous as she turned to welcome ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... was in the ears of the Jesuit that the powerful, the noble, and the beautiful, breathed the secret history of their lives. It was at the feet of the Jesuit that the youth of the higher and middle classes were brought up from childhood to manhood, from the first rudiments to the courses of rhetoric and philosophy. Literature and science, lately associated with infidelity or with heresy, now became the allies of orthodoxy. Dominant in the south of Europe, the great order soon went ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... twelve years he had been selling penny song-sheets on the streets and in saloons. He was usually in rags, but a score of the wildest inhabitants of that dive told me that Doc was their "good angel." He could play the songs of their childhood, he was kind and gentle, and men couldn't be vulgar ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... purely imaginary work which must of necessity deal with the supernatural, without running into a mere riot of fantastic absurdity; but genius Mrs. Ingelow has, and the story of 'Jack' is as careless and joyous, but as delicate as a picture of childhood."—Eclectic. ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... Park Corner. Now it is a suburb of London with, I believe, 30,000 inhabitants. My father was one of the masters in a large semi-public school which at one time had a high reputation. I am not aware that any portents preceded my arrival in this world, but, in my childhood, I remember hearing a traditional account of the manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same reason, probably, a neighbouring beehive had swarmed, ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... my heart are the scenes of my childhood, When fond[11-2] recollection presents them to view; The orchard, the meadow, the deep, tangled wild-wood, And every loved spot that my infancy[11-3] knew. The wide-spreading pond, and the mill[11-4] that stood by it; The bridge and the rock where the cataract fell; The cot of my father, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... worse, for which her letters had not prepared me. Consulting our medical friend, Mr. MacGlue, I found that he, too, had noticed my mother's failing health, but that he attributed it to an easily removable cause—to the climate of Scotland. My mother's childhood and early life had been passed on the southern shores of England. The change to the raw, keen air of the North had been a trying change to a person at her age. In Mr. MacGlue's opinion, the wise course to take would be to return to the South before ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... in the world did you ever see a child cry over a broken toy? Did the sight pain you to any extent? Did you not know that a new toy could be purchased that would quite obliterate all thoughts of the other? Did the simple griefs of childhood carry any deep and lasting consternation to the mind of a grown-up man? Of course it did not. You are sensible enough to know that. Well, we here in this world look on the pain and struggles and trials of people in the world ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... traces of a superior social organization, such as the hereditary power of chiefs, respect for the priestly caste, and attachment to ancient customs. Employed only in fishing and hunting, the Carib was accustomed to the use of arms from childhood; war was the principal object of his existence, and the proofs through which the young warrior had to pass before being admitted to the ranks of the braves, remind us of the customs ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... sing thy beauty's light, Such various forms, and all so bright, I've seen thee, from thy childhood, wear, I know not which to call most fair, Nor 'mong the countless charms that spring For ever ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... parsonage," as she always said after that. Aunt Prudence came to bid her good-bye before she went away to live with her married son, and Beth never realized before how much she loved the dear old creature who had watched over her from her childhood. Just once before she returned to college she went back to look at the old home, with its shutters closed and the snow-drifts on its walks. She had thought her future was to be spent there, and now where would ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... to me when, a few minutes later, Dicky came back toward our table. With him, talking earnestly, as if he had been a childhood friend, walked the mysterious stranger. I told myself that I had known it would be ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... be left without healthful entertainment and kindly instruction so long as SOPHIE MAY (Miss Rebecca S. Clarke) lives and wields her graceful pen in their behalf. MISS CLARKE has made a close and loving study of childhood, and she is almost idolized by the crowd of 'nephews and nieces' who claim her as aunt. Nothing to us can ever be quite so delightfully charming as were the 'Dotty Dimple' and the 'Little Prudy' books to our youthful imaginations, but we have ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... to the water's edge, slake their thirst in their dainty way, and flutter off. By the brookside path now and then wander prattling children; a youth and a maiden hand in hand wend their way along the cool stream's brink. The words of the children and the lovers are unknown to me, but the story of childhood ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... gratitude the great-uncle to whom I owe my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have not forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous west of England builder; including my father he had three nephews, and for each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made by an out-of-work carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the toyshop, you understand, but a really adequate quantity of bricks ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... years, Unto the utmost verge of Memory's land, Where earth and sky in dreamy distance meet, And Memory dim with dark oblivion joins; Where woke the first remembered sounds that fell Upon the ear in childhood's early morn; And wandering thence along the rolling years, I see the shadow of my former self Gliding from childhood up to man's estate. The path of youth winds down through many a vale, And on the brink of many a dread abyss, From out whose darkness comes no ray of light, Save that a ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... and more conceited than women. The dulness is natural enough, on the broad ground that the males of all animals (being more sensual and selfish) are duller than the females. The conceit is easily accounted for. The English boy is told from childhood, as the negro boy is, that men are superior to women. The negro boy shows his assent to the proposition by beating his mother, the English one by talking down his ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... doubly due, For all the hedges[2] in my view, Afford a verdant cover; I now can build my nest once more, From childhood's prying glance secure, And from the hawk's keen eye, tho' o'er The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... existence this poor son of a poor mother went through, is easily told. Education he had none; of joys of childhood he knew nothing; even his daily allowance of coarse food was insufficient. He thus grew up, weak and in ill-health; but with a cheerful spirit nevertheless. Parker Clare knew more songs than any boy in the ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... outdoor sports and an open-air life, and from his earliest childhood he had longed to live entirely in the forest close by. After many arguments and entreaties he succeeded in persuading the king to give him two great oak trees for his ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... until she'd been assured that Madame Roulaire had come from service in an English fam'ly, and that they'd written on crested notepaper indorsin' her in every point, giving her whole hist'ry from childhood up. ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... it had come about, during the years between their childhood and their youth, that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their confidences, their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to understand in some miraculous way, and to make the burden ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... Where are childhood's merry hours, Bright with sunshine, crossed with showers? Are they dead, and can they never Come again ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the soul of those younger hours may have remained, may have shared with us our more ethereal pleasures, while it frowned on our prosaic sports. At least, to some such fancy as this, united with the idea of second childhood before alluded to, must be referred the folly of which I have been guilty in addressing a person, who, so far as bodily presence is concerned, is to me an entire stranger, and to whom ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... her childhood (a girl) should be under the will of her father; in her youth, of her husband; her husband being dead, of her sons; a woman should never enjoy her ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... "Amoretti," "Colin Clout's Come Home Again," the "Epithalamium" the finest bridal song in any language, and above all in the six published books of "The Faerie Queene" (1589 and 1596), in which all his gifts and graces as a poet are at their best; "He may be read," says Professor Saintsbury, "in childhood, chiefly for his adventure; in later youth, for his display of voluptuous beauty; in manhood, for his historical and ethical weight; in age, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... him not pretty. He was merely small, and dark, and foreign, and reserved, and horribly self- contained. His black hair was perfectly straight, his lips made a straight line in his face. He had no dimples, no curls, none of the appealing graces and charms of childhood. He was seven—seven decades, she almost thought, with a sudden throb of pity for him. But he had one quality of childhood—helplessness. To that, at least, the Community to which she had finally decided to intrust him would surely respond. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... means! By all means!" said the Prince. "I used to know some in my childhood days. Charming and poetic.... I know.... I know.... We shall be delighted to hear Mademoiselle sing, eh, Blakeney?" he added good-humouredly, "and for your rout to-morrow will you not also invite ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... interesting to follow the career of Proclus, the last rector of the Neoplatonic School, "whose life," says Gibbon, "with that of his scholar Isidore, composed by two of their most learned disciples, exhibits a most deplorable picture of the second childhood of human reason." By long fasting and prayer Proclus pretended to possess the supernatural power of expelling ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... the beautiful Countess. During the hour and a half of display he pointed out to King all of the great personages, giving a Baedeker-like account of their doings from childhood up, quite satisfying that gentleman's curiosity and involving his cupidity at ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Antonio, "how do you tell that?" Antonio's experience fell far short of that of his master, who from childhood had spent his ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... that are breaking forth From the women and men of the brave old North! Sad are the sights for human eyes, In fireless homes, 'neath wintry skies; Where wrinkles gather on childhood's skin, And youth's "clemm'd" cheek is pallid and thin; Where the good, the honest—unclothed, unfed, Child, mother, and father, are craving for bread! But faint not, fear not—still have trust; Your voices are heard, and your claims are just. England to England's ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... charge of that body of women who are unhampered, "free." These women have more, or less, intelligence, time, and means. They owe society a return for their freedom, their means, and their education. Nature has made them the guardians of childhood. Can they decently shirk the obligation any more than a man can decently shirk his duty as a citizen? Indeed, the case of the woman unresponsive to her duty toward youth is parallel to that of the man unresponsive to his duty ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... daylight gives, as always happens, a strange power in dealing with morning and the things of the morning. Not less is this Hellenist of the Middle Age master of dreams, of sleep and the desire of sleep—sleep in which no one walks, restorer of childhood to men—dreams, not like Galahad's or Guenevere's, but full of happy, childish wonder as in the earlier world. It is a world in which the centaur and the ram with the fleece of gold are conceivable. ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... savings was twofold: birthday presents and Christmas-boxes. They were the chief cares and triumphs of Madam Liberality's childhood. It was with the next birthday or the approaching Christmas in view that she saved her pence instead of spending them, but she so seldom had any money that she chiefly relied on her own ingenuity. Year by year it became more difficult to make anything which would "do ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... fitting them to the exact length, and to the exact position,—and especially, when, at last, he watches the first successful operation of his contrivance,—he must have enjoyed a pleasure, which very few, even of the joyous sports of childhood, could have supplied. ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... well be styled "attention," and riveted on that desert land to which Fate—as he called his own conduct—had driven him. Yet, strange to say, his mysterious spirit found leisure to fly back to old England and revisit the scenes of childhood. But he had robbed himself of pleasure in that usually pleasant retrospect. He could see only the mild, sorrowful, slightly reproachful, yet always loving face of his mother when in imagination he returned home. ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... is the only complete picture of a good woman to be found in any of the author's stories. Taken in childhood by her parents to the penal settlements, and separated there for years from youthful society, familiarised with the constant aspects of crime and suffering, and habitually in the society of her ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... view. But you will observe that the order followed in History has a good deal of the natural course of argument and meditation: and that it is not a very foreign idea that these heresies are the loud thinking {121} of a mighty host, as it outgrows its childhood, and ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... evening in my childhood, and so vivid has my later memory of it become that I can still see the sheets of water that rolled from the lead pipe on our roof, and can still hear the splash! splash! with which they fell into the gutter below. For three days the clouds had hung ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... saving whatever was possible of the ancient religion. The Spaniards coveted gold and silver. The most precious possessions of the Incas, however, were not images and utensils, but the sacred Virgins of the Sun, who, like the Vestal Virgins of Rome, were from their earliest childhood trained to the service of the great Sun God. Looked at from the standpoint of an agricultural people who needed the sun to bring their food crops to fruition and keep them from hunger, it was of the utmost importance ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... no fashionable silk and satin-clad guests, or a body of mighty ecclesiastics to perform the ceremony. The old rector, who had known them both from childhood, made them man and wife, while Lord Barminster gave the bride away. She had chosen to be but simply dressed, and followed only by two bridesmaids—sisters of Mortimer Shelton, who acted as best man. Among the few guests there, were ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... a drowning man, his hours of joy, of struggle, of triumph, of defeat, of high endeavour: all the thick-packed hours of vivid life. Ah, how Fantomas had haunted him from childhood onwards! ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... a fast horse and his obsession in regard to his own racers. Lucy had often tantalized her father with the joke that if it ever came to a choice between her and his favorites they would come first. But was it any longer a joke? Lucy felt that she had left childhood behind with its fun and fancies, and she had begun ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... it truly in life. My childhood seems as near to me now as it was when I was twenty—nearer, I sometimes think; but the years of my early manhood have rushed by like that ribbon and are ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... older than Nature and her Time By all the timeless age of Consciousness, And my adult oblivion of the clime Where I was born makes me not countryless. Ay, and dim through my daylight thoughts escape Yearnings for that land where my childhood dreamed, Which I cannot recall in colour or shape But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed And yet is not as light remembered, Nor to the left or to the right conceived; And all round me ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... future wit, historian, and orator was utterly neglected; but his grandmother, the Marchioness of Halifax, supplied to him the place of both parents, his mother—her daughter, Lady Elizabeth Saville—having died in his childhood. At the age of eighteen, Chesterfield, then Lord Stanhope, was entered at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It was one of the features of his character to fall at once into the tone of the society into which he happened to be thrown. One can hardly imagine his being 'an absolute ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... patter of soft feet, the converts, the doubtful, and the open scoffers, troop up to the veranda. You must be infinitely kind and patient, and, above all, clear-sighted, for you deal with the simplicity of childhood, the experience of man, and the subtlety of the savage. Your congregation have a hundred material wants to be considered; and it is for you, as you believe in your personal responsibility to your Maker, ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... From childhood Deena had loved to express herself in rhyme, and of late years she had found her rhyming—so she modestly called it—a safety valve to a whole set of repressed feelings which she was too simple to recognize as starved affections, and which she thought was nature calling to her from without. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... visible luxuriance, to be interpreted as readily as a child's look by an intruder. In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced the provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature finality. Thus she had but little pretension to beauty, save in one prominent particular—her hair. Its abundance made it almost unmanageable; its color was, roughly speaking, and as seen here by firelight, brown, but careful ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... but bearded men. The period of perfect knowledge so far as my history is concerned began when I found myself an object of the love and care of the wife of a renowned Pacha, governor of the city of Brousa. She called me Mirza. My childhood was spent in a harem, and I passed from it into a school to enter upon my training as a soldier. In good time I became a Janissary. An opportunity presented itself one day, and I distinguished myself. My master, the Sultan, rewarded me by promotion and transfer to the Silihdars, [Footnote: ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... when Miss Beale and Mr. Hammond were exchanging their vows in the rectory of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, of which both bride and groom have been members since childhood, Captain John Strawn of the Homicide Squad was listening to Tracey Miles' account of the strange disappearance of Dexter Sprague last night from an impromptu bridge game, after he had announced his intention of taking advantage of the fact that ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... hospitality administers to us, sanctifies by his presence the feast of which he partakes, inaugurates with appropriate benedictions, and graces it, I may say, both before and after meat. Gentlemen, Charles Honeyman was the friend of my childhood, his father the instructor of my early days. If Frederick Bayham's latter life has been chequered by misfortune, it may be that I have forgotten the precepts which the venerable parent of Charles Honeyman poured into an inattentive ear. He too, as a child, was not ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... serious diarrhea. Acute indigestion is, as a general rule, the forerunner of cholera infantum. The influence of hot weather must always be kept in mind as the underlying factor which no doubt conduces to gastro-intestinal disease of infancy and childhood. The depression incident to a spell of hot and possibly humid weather tends to interfere with the digestive process of babies and children. When this function is carried on imperfectly, the strength and vitality of the child fails, and if immediate steps are not taken to check ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... handling the butter, looking out of the little ivy-grown window, taking charge of the poultry. "They'll feed 'em different, maybe," she thought; "and they won't get half the eggs, I know they won't." How hard it would be, too, to leave the faces she had known from childhood, all so familiar, and some of them so dear: not human faces alone, but all sorts of kind and friendly ones, belonging to the dumb animals, as she called them. She would miss the beasts sorely, and they would miss her: the cows she was learning to milk, the great horses ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... been stationed here for two years, and hardly knew of its existence. Of course, it's a deep-rooted local tradition, and every villager has heard the story in childhood, and most of them believe it. Many of them actually think they have heard moans and shrieks coming from the rise during this last week or so. It's a lonely sort of place, with very little to talk about; it doesn't take much to get a story like that ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, "that in violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... failing—his propensity to fear; and there is no failing to which schoolboys are more intolerant. Of moral courage—that is, of courage in the cause of right—Charles had plenty; of physical courage, little. Apart from the misfortune of having had supernatural terror implanted in him in childhood, he would never have been physically brave. Schoolboys cannot understand that this shrinking from danger (I speak of palpable danger), which they call cowardice, nearly always emanates from a superior ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... letters are still gay, showing unabated interest in the world around him. He retained that remarkable sympathy for the young which had characterised his life. The children of Carlisle had grown out of childhood. Lord Morpeth was going to Oxford,(229) Lady Caroline was married. His adopted daughter, the Mie Mie of so many of the preceding letters, had become a woman, and the care and affection with which Selwyn had watched over her growth and upbringing was now transferred ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... regarded as permanent unless this life is looked upon simply as a preparation for heaven. As an educative system it had its bounds and limits; it could train to a certain point and no farther. To prolong it beyond that stage would be to prolong carefully nurtured childhood to the grave, never allowing it to be displaced by self-reliant manhood. The legal status of the Indians before the law was that of minors, and no provision was made for their arriving at their majority. The clergy looked upon these wards of the State as the school-children of the church, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... on the social bearings of many a struggle. In case she became too arbitrary on any occasion Grant had fallen into the way of calling the Ape, and asking him to remove her, whereupon the youth would carry off his small mother in his arms and insist that, as he put it, from a childhood expression, with a long "a," she "'have herself." There was ever this quality of the whimsical about life in this home. And I am inclined to believe that the world is better ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... lived, always looked upon him with that tenderness which the barbarity of his mother made peculiarly necessary; but her death, which happened in his tenth year, was another of the misfortunes of his childhood; for though she kindly endeavoured to alleviate his loss by a legacy of three hundred pounds, yet, as he had none to prosecute his claim, to shelter him from oppression, or call in law to the assistance of justice, her will was eluded by the executors, and no part of the money ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... "Of course, to you it's a new sensation to have the window in your breast. Whereas I, from innocent childhood to earnest manhood, have ever ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... gloom and modern din, another spirit breathed upon him,—a spirit of green woods and blue waters, the freshness of May mornings, the prattle of tender infancy, the gambols of young lambs on the hill-side. From his childhood, Poetry walked hand in hand with Painting, and beguiled his loneliness with wild, sweet harmonies. Bred up amid the stately, measured, melodious platitudes of the eighteenth century, that Golden Age of commonplace, he struck down through them all with simple, untaught, unconscious directness, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... mother she shall see no more! How many a widow, in a strange land, wishes that her poor, worn-out body could be laid among her kinsfolk, in the little churchyard where she used to gather daisies in her childhood! It takes a great deal of love to keep down the 'climbing sorrow' that swells up in a woman's throat when such memories seize upon her, in her moments of desolation. But if a foreign-born woman does willingly give up all ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... shadow. Its courts, its many chambers, its ample porches with room for thronging worshippers, represented in some poor way the wide sweep and space of that higher house; and the sense of Sonship, which drew the Boy to His Father's house in the earliest hours of conscious childhood, speaks here. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... awakened with the wild birds;—her life remained as unfettered by formalities as her fine feet by shoes. Excepting Carmen's old prayer-book,—in which she learned to read a little,—her childhood passed without books,—also without pictures, without dainties, without music, without theatrical amusements. But she saw and heard and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens and the earth, is yet eternally new and eternally young ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... wonder at this enduring illusion. Man is still in his childhood; for he cannot respect an ideal which is not imposed on him against his will, nor can he find satisfaction in a good created by his own action. He is afraid of a universe that leaves him alone. Freedom appals ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... tell Violet of sins which her noble heart must render so inconceivable as almost to make it impossible for her to sympathise with one who committed them? And Eva; could he ever wound the tender affection of his sweet sister, by revealing to her the disgrace of the brother whom, from her childhood, she had idolised? He sometimes thought that he would confess to Julian or Lillyston; but his courage failed him when the time came, and he fed on his own heart in solitude, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... of your readers inform me as to the derivation of this word, or give any instance of its recent use? I have frequently heard it in my childhood (the early part of the present century) among the rural population of Oxon and Berks. It was generally applied to circumstances of a melancholy or distressing character, but sometimes used to express a peculiar state of feeling, being apparently intended to convey ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... was that in childhood he had learned that here he was beyond his father's land, or that some early sense of loneliness in the place had been developed by a brooding fancy into a fixed feeling, I cannot well say; but certainly, as often as he came—and he liked to visit ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... expanse of his father's mind), inherited also the defects of his organization and temperament. What would have become of the elder Coleridge but for the friends in whose home his later years found a refuge, no one can say. With no such friends or home, poor Hartley became a cast-away. After a childhood of singular genius, manifested in many modes and forms, and described with charming effect by his brother in the best passages and anecdotes of the memoir, he was launched without due discipline or preparation into the University of Oxford, where the catastrophe of his life ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... I was taught to love and revere the Federal Union and those who made it. In early childhood I read the words of the Father of his country, in which he exhorted the people to cling to the union of these States as the palladium of liberty, and my young heart bounded with joy in reading the burning words of lofty patriotism. I was taught in infancy to admire, as far as ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... the street, for fear, you know, of soiling my robe, if I floundered in them!" said May, laughing. Helen did not understand the hidden and beautiful meaning couched under May's expressions; she had heard but little of her baptismal robe since the days of her early childhood, and had almost forgotten that she was "to carry it unspotted to the ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... fairy princesses of your childhood books?" she asked suddenly. "What would you say if one should quickly appear in ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... one is apt to learn too late, that in childhood one takes the happiness of home for granted, and kicks against the pricks of its grievances, not having felt the far harder buffetings of the world. Moreover (which one does not think of then), that parental blunders and injustices are the mistakes and tyrannies of a special love ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... recorded that Joy's ideal of "cherubic childhood," Winnie standing as representative cherub, underwent then and ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... peoples takes the place of books among civilized nations. Story and legend are handed down from father to son, and the wandering bard is a most welcome guest. Next only to valour oratory sways and influences the minds of the people, and a Ulysses had greater influence than an Ajax. From his earliest childhood Beric had listened to the stories and legends told by bards in the rough palace of his father, and his sole schooling before he went to Camalodunum had been to learn these by heart, and to repeat them with due emphasis and appropriate gesture. His father had been one of ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... nineteen when our tale opens. Lindsay's family consisted of one son and two daughters; but his wife, who was a widow when he married her, had another son by her first husband, who had been abroad almost since his childhood, with a grand-uncle, whose intention was to provide for him, being a man of great wealth ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... management that were coming upon her shoulders. In the dark she would rise and cry, "Calm me, O God, and keep me calm." Then she would go and look at the sleeping children and comfort herself with the sight. "Surely," she would say, "I have more reason to trust God than childhood has after all the ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... husband the earl; she declared that her aunt had never dreamed of the cedilla before the expedition to Spain. When, for example, Alfred Nargett Pagnell had a laughing remark, which Aminta in her childhood must have heard: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... explaining China's preeminence as a silk producer. Numerous villages are passed, and from them the traveler obtains a fair idea of the rustic life of China. Now and again a pagoda is visible, crowning an elevation, and recalling childhood's school-book illustrations. You jump at the convenient conclusion that these structures of from six to ten stories had to do with the religion of the country, which surmise is erroneous, for the ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... Graham learned about Paula in various chats with her aunt. Of Philip Desten, Paula's father, Mrs. Tully could never say enough. Her eldest brother, and older by many years, he had been her childhood prince. His ways had been big ways, princely ways—ways that to commoner folk had betokened a streak of madness. He was continually guilty of the wildest things and the most chivalrous things. It was this streak that had enabled him to win various fortunes, and with equal facility to lose them, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... a terror. To him there was no wrath in the thunder any more than in the greeting of the dog that found him in his kennel. To him there was no being in the sky so righteous as to be more displeased than pitiful over the wrongness of the children whom he had not yet got taught their childhood. Gibbie sat calm, awe-ful, but, I imagine, with a clear forehead and smile-haunted mouth, while the storm roared and beat and flashed and ran about him. It was the very fountain of tempest. From the bare crest of the mountain the water poured down its sides, as if its springs were in the ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... is a dose of second childhood," "Butter Fingers" prescribes one day. "He evidently didn't have any ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... at simplicity and universal philanthropy, leaving for most durable outcome of their philanthropy the guillotine, as the most durable outcome of ours may be execution by electricity;—so in our own society the talk of benevolence and the cult of childhood are the very fashion of the hour. We, of this self-conscious, incredulous generation, sentimentalise our children, analyse our children, think we are endowed with a special capacity to sympathise and identify ourselves with children; we play at being children. And the result is that ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... at last is truly great That was not greatly true at first; In childhood's play are seeds of fate Whose flower in manhood's work shall burst. In the clinched fist of baby Thor Might seem his hammer clutched ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... slight political exception, he is the broadest and tenderest and most catholic in his feelings of all living breathing creatures. However, the ladies of his party have all been brought up from their childhood onward in a mingled atmosphere of smoke and democracy; so that he no more thinks of abstaining from tobacco in their presence than he thinks of commiserating the poor fish for being so dreadfully ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Although this class is potentially one of the most interesting, it is at the same time one of the most abused. Ray Cummings can write classics in this field, but the efforts of most the others are atrocities. I'll wager that their favorite childhood sport was mowing down whole regiments of lead soldiers with oxy-acetylene torches. It shows in their writings. Why can't they think of something original? Why can't they make their stories logical? ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... proportion. The eye of childhood is wonderfully misled in that matter. Promise a little child the moon, and show him the ladder to be used, he sees nothing inadequate in the means; so Grace Hope was delighted with ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... one hobby of my life. My father and grandfather before me were strong fencers, and one of my earliest recollections is being given a toy foil and put through the parades. There is a saying that "a swordsman is born not made," and it is a true one. But, unless there is hard study and training from childhood, the birth gift is wasted and there is only a made-fencer in the end. My good sire had appreciated this fact, and not only gave me the best instructors obtainable in America, but, in my second year's vacation from "The Point," he took me to Paris ...
— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars • John Reed Scott
... time forward the mind of Abraham Lincoln was filled with a high and noble purpose. In his earliest childhood his mother had taught him to love truth and justice, to be honest and upright among men, and to reverence God. These ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... He was always silent when questioned about his early life; and all that Lupin knew was that he had been an orphan since childhood and that he had lived all over the place, changing his name and taking up the queerest jobs. The whole thing was a mystery which no one had been able to fathom; and it did not look as though the police would make much ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... mistake in calling my brother, John Sherman, an abolitionist. We have been separated since childhood—I in the army, and he pursuing his profession of law in Northern Ohio; and it is possible we may differ in general sentiment, but I deny that he is considered at home an abolitionist; and, although he prefers the free ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... that the general origin of poetry was due to two causes, each of them part of human nature. Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation. The truth of this second point is shown by experience: though ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... a good hill in itself, conical in shape, as a hill should be according to the exacting ideas of childhood, with a sweeping view of the coast and the Channel; but its fame as a resort of holiday makers comes less from its position and height than from the circumstance that John Oliver is buried upon it. John Oliver was the miller of Highdown Hill. When not grinding corn he seems ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... with a certain tender but shrinking regret that Dolly seemed to attach undue importance to the mere upholsteries and equipages of life,—to rank, wealth, title, servants, carriages, jewelry. At first, to be sure, Herminia hoped this might prove but the passing foolishness of childhood: as Dolly grew up, however, it became clearer each day that the defect was in the grain—that Dolly's whole mind was incurably and congenitally aristocratic or snobbish. She had that mean admiration for birth, position, adventitious advantages, which is the mark of the beast in the essentially ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... me to understand them, I will not enter into. Also several authorities, not mission authorities alone, state with ethnologists that the African is incapable of learning, except during the period of childhood. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... to hear The laugh of childhood ringing clear In woody path or grassy lane Our feet ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... nineteen when she died. Oh, no, it wasn't age; she told me that she used to be very different. She was a Christian from childhood, but she said that she was ashamed to claim the name. There was nothing Christlike about her; still she was a member of the Church. As I remember her, and as I look at other people, my judgment is that, in her early Christian life, she was much like most of the ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... Of my father's childhood it is but natural that I should know very little more than the knowledge possessed by the great public. But I never remember hearing him allude at any time, or under any circumstances, to those unhappy days in his life except in the one instance ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... that excessive tenderness was a fault on the right side; now, how completely have you proved the contrary! I do not intend to defend your mother's conduct toward you; she has been unkind to you in your childhood, and has never shown the affection that a mother ought; but is not her fault a fault on the right side? Jack, you recollect my saying 'what a difference,' when you told me what you had done for your mother; I then referred to my ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... And although from his earliest childhood he was inclined to the worship of the gods,[121] and gradually, as he grew up, became more attached to it, yet he was influenced by many apprehensions which made him act in things relating to that subject ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... amongst notable people, his daily life was like a leaf out of English history, and his case quite different to the case of obscure persons living simply and monotonously on the Yorkshire moors. On which Eleanor observed that the simple and truthful history of a single mind from childhood would be as valuable, if it could be got, as the whole of Mr. Pepys' Diary from the first volume to the last. And when Eleanor makes a general observation of this kind in her conclusive tone, I very seldom dispute it; for, to begin with, she is generally right, and ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... throw any interest into a chapter on childhood. There is the same uniformity in all children until they develop. We cannot, therefore, say much relative to Jack Easy's earliest days; he sucked and threw up his milk, while the nurse blessed it for a pretty dear, slept, and sucked again. He crowed ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Rosa'll hev all I possess. She was my poor brother Isaac's only child. After her mother was taken, he, poor fellow, went altogether to the bad, and until she came here she mostly lived among strangers. It's been a wretched sort of childhood for her—a wretched sort of childhood. Ye'll take care of her, Anthony, will ye not? ... Nay, but I could not hev wished for a better man for her, and there's ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... in any land that has only known one master from its childhood; but there is no harder problem than to perfect and perpetuate free government by the people themselves; for it is not one king that is needed: all must be kings. It is easy to set up Masaniello, that in a few days ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a young lady forsooth!—I must not be out late, I must not put forth my views; I must not choose my acquaintance, I must be a mere helpless, useless being, growing old in a ridiculous fiction of prolonged childhood, affecting those graces of so-called sweet seventeen that I never had—because, because why? Is it for any better reason than because no mother can bear to believe her daughter no longer on the lists for matrimony? Our dear mother does not tell herself that this is the reason, but she ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... disappointments. But those are not the worst evils of life, and we have good children, which is its first blessing. I have often told you my son Tom bore a strong resemblance to you, when I loved you preferably to any thing the world contained. This, which was the case with him in childhood and early youth, is still so in mature years. In character of mind, too, he is very like you, though education and situation have made a great difference. At that period of existence, when the temper, morals, and propensities are formed, Tom had a mother who watched over his health, his well-being, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... the week, thus sharing his life with them. His sisters still remember how they longed for these Saturday evenings. At the village school he received his early education. He seems from his earliest childhood to have been of a calm, self-reliant nature. It was his father's habit to lock the door at dusk, by which time all the children were expected to be in the house. One evening David had infringed this rule, and when he reached the door it was barred. He made no cry nor disturbance, but having procured ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... of the Mother of the Incarnation to our Blessed Lady, dating from her earliest years, had grown with her growth, and strengthened with her strength. Her childhood's prayer had been that, even in this life, she might be permitted to see her dear Heavenly Mother, and, if the petition was not granted literally, it may at least be said to have been at this time answered substantially. She did not see the Blessed Virgin, she says, with her corporal eyes, but, from ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... birthplace or one's rank, and say for example, 'I will be a shepherdess?' How unhappy is the lot of princesses! From the cradle, the sentiments of the heart are prohibited to them; and when they have advanced beyond childhood, they are ceded like a town, and must not even weep. Since I have known you, what have I not done to bring my future life within the reach of happiness, in removing it far from a throne? For two years I have struggled in vain, at once against my evil fortune, ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... been frequently renewed. For even in our own time the plough and the spade have not seldom turned up ghastly memorials of the slaughter, skulls, and thigh bones, and strange weapons made out of implements of husbandry. Old peasants related very recently that, in their childhood, they were accustomed to play on the moor at the fight between King James's men and King Monmouth's men, and that King Monmouth's men always raised the cry ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of Socrates was never idle or meaningless chat. He felt that he had a special mission to fulfil, that in a sense he was an envoy to man from the gods, and declared that, from childhood on, a divine voice had spoken to him, unheard by others, warning and restraining him from unwise acts or sayings. It forbade him to enter public life, controlled him day by day, and was frequently mentioned by him to his disciples. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... to bless him. His wife responded to all his sympathies, and rendered his home a perennial joy. Clinton had been told of his fourth bright birthday, and the gladness of life budded on his heart, and bloomed on his face. Fanny unfolded the graces of childhood as you have seen water-lilies unfold leaf after leaf. Fabens tore himself away from his lambs at seven in the morning, and taking his luncheon in a basket, he proceeded to a distant clearing to work till night. At ten o'clock Clinton was presented a new coat and trowsers, which his mother had just ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... an unprecedented development in the significance of education. One direct consequence has been an increased reverence for childhood. In this movement which has increased the dignity of children and schools, two large forces have been at work,—one social and the other scientific. The growth of the democratic spirit among men and institutions has made the education of children a public necessity, and lifted the ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... Reader, I present thee with the Life and Death of Mr. Badman indeed: Yea, I do trace him in his Life, from his Childhood to his Death; that thou mayest, as in a Glass, behold with thine own eyes, the steps that take hold of Hell; and also discern, while thou art reading of Mr. Badmans Death, whether thou thy self art ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... he wondered, he turned over and over in his mind all the names he could think of that he might choose for his own; for the time was come for him to put away the name of his childhood and to take on that by which he should be ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... would be next to impossible to induce young people to yield to the will of their elders in an affair in which the passions are readily aroused if they were allowed to reach the age when the passions are strongest and the will has become independent Hardly out of childhood, the man and the woman are naturally more tractable. On the other hand, it is easy to see how many dangers threatened such youthful marriages in a society where matrimony gave to the woman wide ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... Eustace; "can that need any other vindicator than my honour? or rather, does any man impugn it? We have loved from our childhood; but it has been with that innocence which enables us to look forward to years of ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the services. A bright-faced girl of one-and-twenty, with little black eyes like coals of fire, a tight ulster, like a riding habit, and a small billycock hat, rather dismayed those who still held that bonnets ought to be the Sunday gear of all beyond childhood; but the mother, in ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I detected strawberries," submitted the other,—"a pleasant odor which recalls childhood ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various |
