"Middle age" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a tall, dark man of middle age. He had a very solemn face and wore a black tie and choker and clothes that ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... without perceiving the satirical note. "Now there's De Maupassant's Fort comma la Mort—quite the most interesting variation—shows the turn a genius can give. There the triangle is the man of middle age, the mother he has loved in his youth and the daughter he comes to love. It forms, you might say, the head of a whole subdivision ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... appropriated to the friends of the deceased. In those pews were seated men in whose hair the silver threads were beginning to mingle, and women who were themselves mothers of families who all met around the coffin of their aged mother. Childhood, youth and middle age were all represented in that company of mourners. Their pastor, Mr. M., delivered a very appropriate discourse from the words, "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord." In the course of his sermon he took occasion to ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... threw back her heavy veil with a quick gesture. She was past middle age, and her hair was beginning to silver, but her full, proud figure and clear olive skin retained traces of the beauty peculiar to the Basque province. But, once you had seen her eyes, and comprehended the great sadness that was revealed in their deep shadows and hopeless expression, you saw ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... it reached the corner of a narrow cross road. There it stopped before a frame building bearing the sign, "Hamilton and Company, Dry Goods, Groceries, Boots and Shoes and Notions." There was a narrow platform at the front of the building and upon this platform were several men, mostly of middle age or older. Mary-'Gusta noticed that most of these men were smoking. If she had been older she might have noticed that each man either sat upon the platform steps or leaned against the posts supporting its roof. Not one was depending solely upon his own muscles for support; he sat upon ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... were completed in 1275. Then he commenced the facade of the church and its towers from a plan so bold and sublime that the conception of it places Erwin for ever at the head of the architects of the middle age[1]. In 1276 they laid the foundation of the northern tower; to consecrate the spot, the bishop walked solemnly round it, then took a trowel in his hand and thrust it into the ground, as a sign for beginning the work. They relate ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... German officer came in with his staff. He was a stout and well-built man of middle age or over, typically German in his general characteristics but not half bad looking. His uniform was covered with braid and medals. Every one paid him the utmost deference. He stopped in the middle ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... appearance of M. de Lesseps is very striking. Though long past middle age, he has a fresh and even youthful appearance. Both face and figure are well preserved; his slightly curling gray hair sets off in pleasing contrast his bronzed yet clear complexion, his bright eye, and genial smile. He is somewhat over the medium stature, possessed ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... most attracted my attention appeared of middle age, was rather stout, of florid complexion, and (as I thought) looked very cross. He wore a sort of fancy jacket or roundabout, profusely trimmed ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... middle age, in a black silk dress still faintly bearing the creases of five days in a trunk, and accompanied by a mongrel dog, both being taken upstairs by Grayson, Mademoiselle, Pink, and Howard Cardew. ("He said Jinx was to come," she explained breathlessly to her bodyguard. "I ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the newcomer asked timidly. He was a short, slender man, past middle age, clad in a shabby overcoat, half threadbare, and a soft felt hat ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... had not at all his habitual ease of manner. "Poor mother!" he exclaimed; "nothing like this should have happened to her. She has so much pride of person. She's not at all an old woman, you know. She's never got beyond vigorous and rather dashing middle age." He turned abruptly to Thea and for the first time really looked at her. "How badly things come out! She'd have liked you for a daughter-in-law. Oh, you'd have fought like the devil, but you'd have respected each other." He sank into a chair ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... colored mammy took advantage of a wedding announcement to question her mistress, who remained a spinster still though approaching middle age. ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... extent of its power and sweetness. He felt himself to be many years younger! Old dreams and enthusiasms were suddenly revived. Once more his foot seemed to be poised upon the threshold of life! After all, he had not yet reached middle age! He was surprised to find himself so young. Marriage, although so far as regarded himself he had never imagined it a possible part of his life, was a condition against which he held no vows. Instinctively ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with every arrangement for the comfort of the occupants. The hall was not more than half full, the greater part of those present being women. Most of these were fair and beautiful; and even those who had long passed middle age retained, by the virtue of many cunning arts, well known to these people, much of the appearance and freshness of youth. I might here note that the prolongation of life in the upper classes, and its abbreviation in the lower classes, are ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... mother's hair was all gray, now, and she was heavier. She seemed shorter, but that would be because he'd grown a few inches in the last six years. For a moment, he was surprised that Flora actually looked younger. Then he realized that to seventeen, twenty-three is practically middle age, but to twenty-three, twenty-nine is almost contemporary. He noticed the glint on her left hand and caught it ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... little concerning. That he was a man of early middle age is inferable from the fact that he married the widow Martha Ford, who came in the FORTUNE in 1621. As she then was the mother of three children, it is improbable that she would have married a very young man. He appears, from certain collateral evidence, to have been a mechanic of some ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... man approaching middle age; low in stature, but broad, muscular, and powerful. He was clad in the full-dress uniform of a colonel of the United States Cavalry, wore boots reaching to the knee and decorated with large spurs; and his arms were an immense ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... seconds or sponsors who in the Middle Age armed the champion, and strengthened his valor by useful counsel until he entered the lists, so the sly old fox had said to the baroness at the last moment: "Don't forget your cue. You are a mediator, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... one of the lunch rooms in the Union Station at St. Louis late one night in the latter part of January an altercation occurred between two men. One was a tall, distinguished-looking man of middle age. The other was a ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... like——(here a stroke of presumption was just coming out of Tommy's mouth, but, recollecting himself, he added) a person like my father." And now he addressed himself to Harry's mother, a venerable, decent woman of middle age, and his two sisters, plain, modest, healthy-looking girls, a little older than their brother. All these he treated with so much cordiality and attention that all the company were delighted with him; so ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... gentleman of middle age was next in evidence. He had but recently assumed his present pastorate and was a deeply interested and attentive observer of all that was happening. In reply to the inquiry from the bench, he answered ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... Lucetta had been sublimed into a lady of means by some munificent testament on the part of this relative lent a charm to her image which it might not otherwise have acquired. He was getting on towards the dead level of middle age, when material things increasingly possess ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... for the first time, the great landholder, Nawab Allee, of Mahmoodabad. In appearance, he is a quiet gentlemanly man, of middle age and stature. He keeps his lands in the finest possible state of tillage, however objectionable the means by which he acquires them. His family have held the estates of Mahmoodabad and Belehree for many generations as zumeendars, or proprietors; but they have augmented ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... for, so soon as the first ray of sunshine rested on the top of the highest tree, he reared himself painfully from his recumbent posture and sat erect. The deep lines of his countenance and the scattered gray of his hair marked him as past the middle age; but his muscular frame would, but for the effect of his wound, have been as capable of sustaining fatigue as in the early vigor of life. Languor and exhaustion now sat upon his haggard features; and the despairing glance which he sent forward through the depths of the forest proved his ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... them. This is known as the free-association method, and simple as it seems, is one of the most effective in uncovering memories which have been forgotten for years. One of my patients, a refined, highly educated woman of middle age, had suffered for two years with almost constant nausea. One day, after a long talk, with no suggestion on my part, only an occasional, "What does that remind you of?" she told with great emotion an experience ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... attempt of the Gothic races to establish themselves beyond the sea, whether in the form of an organised kingdom, as the Vandals attempted in Africa; or of a mere band of brigands, as did the Goths in Asia Minor, under Gainas; or of a praetorian guard, as did the Varangens of the middle age; or as religious invaders, as did the Crusaders, ended only in the corruption and disappearance of the colonists. That extraordinary reform in morals, which, according to Salvian and his contemporaries, the Vandal conquerors worked in North Africa, availed them nothing; they lost more than they ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... satisfaction elsewhere with one that seemed to her more meet to afford it than her artificer of woollens. In this frame of mind she became enamoured of a man well worthy of her love and not yet past middle age, insomuch that, if she saw him not in the day, she must needs pass an unquiet night. The gallant, meanwhile, remained fancy-free, for he knew nought of the lady's case; and she, being apprehensive of possible perils to ensue, was ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... is known as lakay. He is usually a man past middle age whose wealth and superior knowledge have given him the confidence of his people. He is chosen by the older men of the village, and holds his position for life unless he is removed for cause. It is possible that, at his death, his son ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... underhanded dodgings, or infinitesimals of parlours, or shameless stuffing while others starve,—and all the loss of the bloom and odour of the earth, and of the flowers and atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivete, and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty,—is the great fraud upon modern civilisation and forethought; blotching the surface and system which civilisation undeniably ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... divinity students who brought to a place of more voluptuous and easy burgher society the secular vigor of New England pastors. Being always superior and always sincere, his rule had been ungrumblingly accepted. Another generation, at middle age, found him over them as he had been over their parents—a righteous, intrepid Protestant priest, good at denunciation, counsel, humor, or sympathy. The elders and deacons never thought of objecting to anything ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... as he had before prevailed upon them to sanction the journey of the princesses. But in the first days of April all the hopes of success which had been founded on his cooperation and support were suddenly extinguished by his death. Though he had hardly entered upon middle age, a constant course of excess had made him an old man before his time. In the latter part of March he was attacked by an illness which his physicians soon pronounced mortal, and on the 2d of April he died. He had borne the ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... always goes around with a couple of Airedales, and in woollen stockings, low shoes and mannish shirts, and shell-rimmed glasses, and you felt she wore Ferris waists. Her hair was that ashen blonde with no glint of gold in it. You knew it would become grey in middle age with no definite period of transition. She never buttoned her heavy welted gloves but wore them back over her hand, like a cuff, very English. You felt there must be a riding crop concealed about her ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... was a handsome, well-dressed man, past middle age, who had listened with absorbed attention to all that had been said, and who now seemed strangely agitated. In a moment he ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... blankly. He was a man nearing the middle age, with a lacing of red in his cheeks, a pleasant gray eye, and a singularly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... gentlemen, good morning!" he said, in a perfectly good Yankee twang. "Can I do anything for you to-day in my line? Step in, gentlemen; I'm John Higginbotham." They entered and, behind the desk, sighted a stout woman of medium size, middle age, and moderately ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... bound together by the strongest of brotherly ties. Richard had inherited his father's bigness and powerful constitution, Albert his mother's slenderness and fragility. But it was the mother who lived the longer, although even she did not attain middle age, and her last words to her older son were: "Richard, take care of Albert." He had promised, and now was thinking how he could keep ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... standard of physical fitness, marching along the excellent Indian roads, with a certainty of a good water supply at their night's camping place, and accompanied in many cases by travelling canteens and soda water machines. In our ranks were to be found many men of middle age, unused to active life, and many boys whose physique had not had time to respond to military training. Some had but recently joined us and were not acclimatised, others had not recovered their strength after the dysentery of Gallipoli. ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... money is not to be despised. Again you will be tested with photographs and paragraphs, with lectures and public dinners.... Worst of all there will come to you terrible hours when you yourself know of a sure certainty that your work is worthless. In your middle age a great barrenness will come upon you. You have been a little teller of little tales, and on every side of you there will be others who have striven for other prizes and have won them. Sitting alone in your room with your poor strands of coloured silk that had once been intended to make ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... was thus watching and lazily musing, a woman of middle age came and prostrated herself before me, touching the ground with her forehead. She carried in her robe some bunches of flowers, one of which she offered to me with folded hands. She said to me, as she offered it: "This is ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... in the old days it would have done. The decree of infallibility is itself the greatest witness of the steady progress of reaction in the Roman Church. That action, theoretically at least, does away with even that measure of popular constitution in the Church to which the end of the Middle Age had held fast without wavering, which the mightiest of popes had not been able to abolish and the council of Trent had not dared earnestly to debate. Whether the decree of 1870 is viewed in the light of the Syllabus of Errors of 1864, and again of the Encyclical of ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... The day was bitter and wintry, the men were thinly clad, and as the keen blast swept across the hill with considerable violence, the sleet-like rain which it bore along pelted into their garments with pitiless severity. The father had advanced into more than middle age; and having held, at a rack-rent the miserable waste of farm which he occupied, he was compelled to exert himself in its cultivation, despite either obduracy of soil, or inclemency of weather. This day, however, was so unusually severe, that the old man began to feel incapable ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... accustom themselves to flight can fly, if less rapidly than some birds, yet from twenty-five to thirty miles an hour, and keep up that rate for five or six hours at a stretch. But the Ana generally, on reaching middle age, are not fond of rapid movements requiring violent exercise. Perhaps for this reason, as they hold a doctrine which our own physicians will doubtless approve—viz., that regular transpiration through the pores of the skin is ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... outer edge of the crowd, a battered wreck of a man past middle age was being lifted into the ambulance. His eyes were closed, his face a dead, chalky white, and ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... to be more enthusiastic than middle age, so one may easily explain the fact that the pit is more exuberant in demonstration than the stalls without the theory of the electrical effect of contact on crowds, a theory which every journalist at some stage of his career believes himself ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... more or less famous in their day, and who were teaching while I was in Paris, come up before me. They are but empty sounds for the most part in the ears of persons of not more than middle age. Who of you knows anything of Richerand, author of a very popular work on Physiology, commonly put into the student's hands when I first began to ask for medical text-books? I heard him lecture once, and have had his image with me ever since as that of an old, worn-out man,—a ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... villas of that charming suburb, half-way down a narrow lane, and enclosed by high, melancholy walls, deep set in which a small door, with the paint blistered and weather-stained, gave unfrequented entrance to the demesne. A woman servant of middle age and starched, puritanical appearance answered the loud ring of the bell, and Ardworth seemed a privileged visitor, for she asked him no question as, with a slight nod and a smileless, stupid expression in a face otherwise comely, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the present time appreciate the debt of honor and gratitude they owe to the troubadour or wandering minstrel of the early Middle Age. Moncaut has well revealed it in his "History of Modern Love." Feudal tyranny then held the whole sex in the sternest slavery. One day, the wife, or the young daughter, confined in the upper story of the walled fortress, sees, passing by the castle, a poor youth with ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... inhabitants came and cut the strings that fastened the left side of my head, which gave me the liberty of turning it to the right, and of observing the person and gesture of him that was to speak. He appeared to be of a middle age, and taller than any of the other three who attended him, whereof one was a page that held up his train, and seemed to be somewhat longer than my middle finger; the other two stood one on each side to support him. He acted every part of an orator, and I could observe many periods of threatenings, ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his apprenticeship in the pulpit. Each had his bread to earn, and he must work, and work hard, in the way open before him. For twenty years the playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good estate to his native town. For forty years Emerson lectured and published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. He never became ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... so rudely irrupted himself was a man of middle age, wearing a coarse pea-jacket and blue jersey of a seaman, his peaked hat covered with dust, as Bones perceived later, when the sound of scurrying footsteps had ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... fifty-three years of age, and his hair was grey, but this grey hair did not impart a look of age to his appearance. His erect figure, the carriage of his head, his dashing, nay, almost swaggering walk, all belonged to a man in the prime of middle age. He wore a beard and thick moustache of grizzled auburn. His nose was aquiline, his forehead high and square, his chin massive. The form of his head and face denoted force of intellect. His long, muscular limbs gave evidence of great physical ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... many years before, in the time of the late king, the village had been one day thrown into a state of great excitement by the advent of a stranger. This had been Mwezi, at the time a man of middle age. He had come from the south and west—from Central Africa, that is—and he had said that he was seeking a white man whom it had been shown him he should find in that village. Pressed for details, he announced that he had come from a town far away by a wide river ...
— The Priest's Tale - Pere Etienne - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • Robert Keable
... acquaintance, Medi, to-day, a soldier and slave of the Sarkee. He has been occasionally my cicerone in Zinder. He had been captured from a child, and is now past middle age, and knows little of the loss of home. He was a friendly chap, and gave me all the information he could make me understand in Soudanee ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... glow of the afternoon sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... one of these. It was twelve years ago and already appears to me so old, so old that it seems now as if it belonged to the other end of life, before middle age, this dreadful middle age from which I suddenly perceived the end of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... elsewhere, not even in Jerusalem or Constantinople, for in the Moslem cities fountains were at the gates of the mosques and no worshiper entered the sacred edifice with soiled hands or feet. Three cases of slovenliness we noted particularly. A woman of middle age, with tangled hair, torn, untidy dress and soiled, stockingless feet partially covered by dilapidated slippers, was violating the rules of the church by sidling up to strangers and stealthily begging within ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... assembly, I noticed that it was mainly composed of comparatively young men, some in middle age, and a few beyond that period. They were nearly all plainly dressed, with a view to comfort rather than elegance. Many of the faces turned towards me wore a look of expectancy and suppressed enthusiasm; all had the earnestness which might be expected ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... yesterday. Before dinner, sat with several other persons in the stoop of the tavern. There was B——, J. A. Chandler, Clerk of the Court, a man of middle age or beyond, two or three stage people, and, nearby, a negro, whom they call "the Doctor," a crafty-looking fellow, one of whose occupations is nameless. In presence of this goodly company, a man of a depressed, neglected air, a soft, simple-looking fellow, with an anxious expression, in a laborer's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... he was advancing toward middle age, and had already shaken off some of the trammels which luxurious vice and heedless extravagance had cast around his young puissant intellect, he had achieved nothing either of fame or power. He had, it is true, given signs of rare intellect, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... pleasantly sensuous mind of the Greek, becoming a man, as he thinks, and putting away childish thoughts, is come with Zeno one step towards Aristotle, towards Aquinas, or shall we say into the rude scholasticism of the pedantic Middle Age? And we must have our regrets. There is always ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... and prosperous citizen of Christiania, the figure of Ibsen took forms of legendary celebrity which were equalled by no other living man of letters, not even by Tolstoi, and which had scarcely been surpassed, among the dead, by Victor Hugo. When we think of the obscurity of his youth and middle age, and of his consistent refusal to advertise himself by any of the little vulgar arts of self-exhibition, this extreme publicity is at first sight curious, but it can be explained. Norway is a small and a new country, inordinately, perhaps, but ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... speakers, by his voice, was an Englishman, of more than middle age; the other, a woman, who also spoke English, but with a ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... a tale. He knew, and had known for months, that the society of the Close was greatly exercised over the position of the Ransford menage. Ransford, a bachelor, a well-preserved, active, alert man who was certainly of no more than middle age and did not look his years, had come to Wrychester only a few years previously, and had never shown any signs of forsaking his single state. No one had ever heard him mention his family or relations; then, suddenly, without ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... hall of which he could only just see the ceiling. There was no light but the nickering taper held by the man, and by its uncertain glimmer Shorthouse turned to examine him. He saw an undersized man of middle age with brilliant, shifting eyes, a curling black beard, and a nose that at once proclaimed him a Jew. His shoulders were bent, and, as he watched him replacing the chain, he saw that he wore a peculiar black gown like a priest's ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... complaint. When cataract affects several members of a family in the same generation, it is often seen to commence at about the same age in each: e.g., in one family several infants or young persons may suffer from it; in another, several persons of middle age. Mr. Bowman also informs me that he has occasionally seen, in several members of the same family, various defects in either the right or left eye; and Mr. White Cooper has often seen peculiarities of vision confined to one eye reappearing in ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... a very goodly person, tall, and singularly well-featured, and all his youth well-favoured, of a sweet aspect, but high-foreheaded, which (as I should take it) was of no discommendation; but towards his latter, and which with old men was but a middle age, he grew high-coloured, so that the Queen had much of her father, for, expecting some of her kindred, and some few that had handsome wits in crooked bodies, she always took personage in the way of election, for ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... middle age of Mrs Blair had been more free from trial than is the common lot; but the last few years had been years of great vicissitude. She was now a widow and childless; for though it might be that her ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... to the time of his departure from Spain, had enjoyed two nick-names, El Galan and El Justador. He had been a bold and dashing cavalier in his youth, a famous tilter in tournaments in his middle age, and a hard-fighting soldier all his life. His patron was Bishop Fonseca. Whatever qualities he might possess for the important work about to be devolved upon him ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... He looked about him always, with the cold, easy nonchalance of the man of the world. Of being recognized he had not the slightest fear. His frame and bearing, and the brightness of his deep, strong eyes, still belonged to early middle age, but his face itself, worn and hardened, was the face of an elderly man. The more Aynesworth watched him, ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... instant later, heavy footsteps, belonging evidently to a wearer of foreign shoes, came around by the side of the house toward the garden. Kano looked up, frowning with annoyance. A fine-looking man of middle age appeared. Kano's ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... was that I learned something about the couple who had preceded us in the use of these rooms. They were of middle age and of great personal elegance but uncertain pay, the husband being nothing more nor less than a professional gambler. ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... myself to take up other interests. She burdens the remainder of my young years by making me, willy nilly, the guardian of her child. And, not content with that, she (indirectly) destroys what might have been the comfortable contentment of my middle age. ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... of Gehenna, again, after he dies: that is too dim and distant; too unlike anything which he has seen in this life (now that the tortures and Autos da fe of the middle age have disappeared) to frighten him very severely, except in rare moments, when his imagination is highly excited. And even then, he can—in practice he does—look forward to 'making his peace with God' as it is called, at last, and fulfilling Baalam's wish of dying ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... little interested in the scene more immediately before him; a party at whist; two cream-faced, giddy, unpolished youths, the one in a red cravat, the other in a green, opposed to two bland, grave, handsome, self-possessed men of middle age, decorously dressed in a sort of professional black, and apparently doctors of some eminence in the ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... gate of hell. Perhaps, like the writer of this story, you have stood by the long tables, and watched the people seated there; the white-haired, watery-eyed old men, whose trembling hands can scarcely hold the gold they put down with such feverish eagerness; the men of middle age, whom experience has taught to play cautiously, and stop just before the tide of success turns against them; the young men, who, with the perspiration standing thickly about their pale lips, and a strange glitter in their feverish eyes as they see hundreds ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... is no reflection on Mr. Beecher's successors, noble and true men, that he figures so prominently in them. The memory of those early days when, as a country lad, I came to Brooklyn, naturally centres around the man who from my boyhood, through early manhood and into middle age had a mighty influence ...
— Sixty years with Plymouth Church • Stephen M. Griswold
... French, and after giving the required information, volunteered anecdotes relating to various well-known people whom he had guided in the desert. Diana watched him interestedly. He seemed a man of about middle age, though it was difficult to guess more than approximately, for the thick, peaked beard that hid both mouth and chin made him look older than he really was. His beard had been his only drawback from Diana's point of view, for she ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... thus together, on apparently friendly terms, regard them with hostile glances. Dora Talbot, who is coquetting sweetly with a gaunt man of middle age, who is evidently overpowered by her attentions, letting her eyes rest upon Florence as she waltzes past her with Sir Adrian, colors warmly, and, biting her lip, forgets the honeyed speech she was about to bestow upon her companion, who is the owner of a considerable ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... of babes,'" said Mrs. Valentin, laughing gently. "I own it, dear. Middle age is suspicious and mean and unspiritual and troubled about many things. A middle-aged mother is like an old hen when hawks are sailing around; she ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... house, they proceeded to the spot in front of the store where the trading business was transacted. Captain Mackintosh, a fine-looking man of middle age, and two of his clerks, stood on one side, a quantity of goods piled up near them; while on the other was seen an Indian chief, standing near several bales of peltries, and attended by a band of nearly twenty followers. His appearance was picturesque in the extreme. His head was adorned with ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... tossed aside his sable hat and plume, and dropped his cloak, and stood before her in a rich dress of black velvet, trimmed with point lace, a broadsword belted to his waist. He was a man of middle age, of a fine, athletic figure, and handsome face, but there was an indescribable expression in his dark eyes, in the stern lines about his handsome mouth, that affected the gazer with a strange, ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... than be served: their desire is for a shining image superior, at best, to both lust and maternity. This consciousness, grown so dim that it is scarcely perceptible, yet still alive, is not extinguished with youth, but lingers hopeless of satisfaction through the incongruous years of middle age. There is never a man, gifted to any degree with imagination, but eternally searches for an ultimate loveliness not disappearing in the circle of his embrace—the instinctively Platonic gesture toward the only immortality ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... middle age does the man come, leaving everything behind him; but, in old age, "leaning on the top of his staff," he finds himself gathered in the place of worship, and though his ear may be dull and heavy, he leans far forward to catch the last ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Chalais, where his father and mother lived, without giving them any signs of life, although all were on very good terms. He loitered secretly in Poitou, and at last arrested there a Cordelier monk, of middle age, in the convent of Bressuire, who cried, "Ah! I am lost!" upon being caught. Chalais conducted him to the prison of Poitiers, whence he despatched to Madrid an officer of dragoons he had brought with him, and who knew this Cordelier, whose name has never transpired, although it is ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... had modestly withdrawn from the grating, and a stout, much ornamented woman of middle age, with a forward, but benevolent manner, had with a nod invited her to share her prayer-book. This lady was evidently no great scholar, for as she mumbled to herself the prayers as the women do, not being allowed to take part in the singing, Sara observed that she made ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Sarrasins were limited; but still more limited were their wants. She had a small income—he had a small income—the two incomes put together did not come to very much. But it was enough for the Sarrasins; and few married couples of middle age ever gave themselves less trouble about money. They were able to go abroad and join some foreign enterprise whenever they felt called that way, and, poor as he was, Sarrasin was understood to have helped with his purse more than one embarrassed cause or needy ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... Ontarian, suddenly, lifting his hand, his eyes brightening with an interest unwonted for a man beyond middle age. ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... its own, not less sweet than those of any Eden. She had faced more than once the question of being "taken into the orchard," as Conquest put it. The men who had asked her at various times to marry them had been like himself, men of middle age, or approaching it—men of assured position either by birth or by attainment. As the wife of any one of them her place would have been unquestioned. She had not rejected their offers lightly, or from any foregone conclusion. She had taken it as a duty ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... to ask her where, how many years ago, or under what circumstances. 'Teasing' of this sort does not appeal to the sophisticated at any time, but it seems unspeakably vulgar to touch on matters of sentiment with a woman of middle age. If she has memories, they are sure to be sad and sacred ones; if she has not, that perhaps is still sadder. We agreed, however, when the evening was over, that Dr. La Touche was probably the love of her youth—unless, indeed, he was simply an old friend, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was born. Here she grew into girlhood, knowing no companionship except that of her parents and Miss Hale, a woman past middle age, who, in her youth, had travelled abroad and had spent the greater part of her time in the study of languages and music. She had come to Bitumen with her father for the same reason that had brought ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... the object of his gaze was gradually attaining the verge of youth, and approaching to what is called in females the middle age, which is impolitely held to begin a few years earlier with their more fragile sex than with men. Many people would have been of opinion, that the Laird would have done better to have transferred his glances to an object possessed of far superior charms to ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... trouble thee, let this memento presently come to thy mind, that it is that which thou hast already often Seen and known. Generally, above and below, thou shalt find but the same things. The very same things whereof ancient stories, middle age stories, and fresh stories are full whereof towns are full, and houses full. There is nothing that is new. All things that are, are both usual ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... a highly educated physician of middle age. He reports that he had been neurasthenic all his life with slight ever-changing symptoms. He has always been troubled by the "perseveration" of tactual images which had a strong feeling tone and which were associated with seen or heard reports ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... devoid of grace, held enthralled a certain Man of middle age,[6] concealing her years by the arts of the toilet: a lovely Young creature, too, had captivated the heart of the same person. Both, as they were desirous to appear of the same age with him, began, each in her turn, to pluck out the ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... will you have, gentlemen?" inquired Captain R——, a tall, handsome man of middle age, who had been in command of a large ocean steamer ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... now past middle age, being near forty years old, but she bore herself with a degree of uprightness and vigour which defied the advance of time. She was readily convinced of the truth of Pedro's statement, and when she had bidden ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... dwarf. So absorbed was the woman in her sorrow that she neither saw nor heard them. Even when they stood close to her she did not perceive them, for her face was hidden in her bony hands. Leonard looked at her curiously. She was past middle age, but he could see that once she had been handsome, and, for a native, very light in colour. Her hair was grizzled and crisp rather than woolly, and her hands and feet were slender and finely shaped. At the moment he could discern ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... quickly, and Mr. King saw a pleasant-faced gentleman of middle age, whose keen gray eyes seemed to note everything ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... as usual, by the silent servant Peter, but by a woman of middle age, very quietly and neatly dressed, whom I had once or twice met on the way to and from my room, and of whose exact position in the ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... remarkable feature of the room was the man who sat at the desk. He was a man solidly built and, by his voice, of middle age. His face the new-comer could not see and for excellent reason. It was hidden behind a veil of fine silk net which had been adjusted over the head like a loose bag and ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... with stern features and a heavy brow. His eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted; he was past youth, but had not reached middle age—perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him and but little shyness. His frown and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... came a man and woman past middle age. Behind them followed a man of perhaps twenty-five, and a woman who was ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... to ascertain the value of our prisoners. One was a tall thin man, about fifty years of age, with a sharp eye, a hollow aguish cheek, a scanty beard, wearing a pair of silken drawers, and a shawl undercoat. The other was a short round man, of a middle age, with a florid face, dressed in a dark vest, buttoning over his breast, and looked like an officer of the law. The third was stout and hairy, of rough aspect, of a strong vigorous form, and who was bound with more care than the others on account ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... world. Light, hope, freedom, pierced with vitalizing ray the clouds and the miasma that hung so thick over the prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay and death. Kindled with new life, the nations teemed with a progeny of heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened Europe. But Spain was the citadel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... dim consciousness of the truth, but without fully penetrating into that of which we are conscious. I want to deepen and make clear to you this consciousness that the world has had essentially a Trinity of ages—the Classical Age, the Middle Age, the Modern Age; each of these embracing races and individuals of apparently enormous separation in kind, but united in the spirit of their age,—the Classical Age having its Egyptians and Ninevites, Greeks and Romans,—the Middle Age having its Goths and Franks, Lombards ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... resource but to seek to transfix him with a protracted and contemptuous stare, which, though failing to disconcert the object, put her in possession of the facts that he had mild blue eyes, that the remnants of his hair were red, that he was slightly above middle height and below middle age, and that there was little about his face and still less his figure to distinguish him from a multitude of men of the average type. Indeed, one could not even conjecture his nationality, for his type was one to be seen in all branches ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... do not see Thanatopsis in it." When the father was aware of the misunderstanding, he corrected it, but there were for a long time doubts whether a boy could have written a poem of this rank. In middle age the poet wrote the following to answer a question in regard to the time ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... a mandarin, of middle age, was garbed in a stiff, dark satin gown, heavy with gold and jewels which flashed brightly in the light of a camp-fire. His severe, dark face was long, and stamped with intelligence of a high order. He wore a mustache ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... the stars wherein dwelt the spirits that rule the universe and the destinies of men, and to descend to earth and for a time direct his gaze toward this humble mortal. He turned around and observed me for the first time. He was a large, portly, fine-looking gentleman of middle age, with very long black hair which gave him a strange appearance. He wore a pair of glasses low down on his nose; and from over these he condescended to direct his gaze at, and to study me for a moment as a naturalist might study some ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... pitied, and he put compulsion on himself to go and see the poor fellow, the subject of so sublime a generosity. Mr. Warwick sat in an arm-chair, his legs out straight on the heels, his jaw dragging hollow cheeks, his hands loosely joined; improving in health, he said. A demure woman of middle age was in attendance. He did not speak of his wife. Three times he said disconnectedly, 'I hear reports,' and his eyelids worked. Redworth talked of general affairs, without those consolatory efforts, useless ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... querulous habit due to low health. A female servant, who occasionally brought me food (I found that she also cooked it), bore herself in much the same way. This domestic was the most primitive figure of the household. Picture a woman of middle age, wrapped at all times in dirty rags (not to be called clothing), obese, grimy, with dishevelled black hair, and hands so scarred, so deformed by labour and neglect, as to be scarcely human. She had the darkest and fiercest eyes I ever saw. Between her and her mistress ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... admitted Tucker gently. "At your age I doubtless felt the same. The young want action, and they ought to have it, because it makes the quiet of middle age seem all the sweeter. You've missed your duels and your flirtations and your pomades, and you've been put into breeches and into philosophy at the same time. Why, one might as well stick a brier pipe in the mouth of a boy who is crying for ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... long projection, rising about a hundred feet, and grown densely with trees and bushes. It looked very quiet and peaceful and birds even were singing there among the boughs. The leader of the scouts, a bronzed man of middle age named Adams, turned ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... from which was to spring a great nation, "like to the stars of heaven in number," was frequently repeated, yet still deferred. Youth, manhood, middle age, all had passed, and still no child blest the tents of Sarah; and while Abraham still believed, and it "was accounted to him for righteousness," Sarah seems to have felt that not upon her was to be conferred the distinction of becoming ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... name, variously written—Hiawatha, Hayenwatha, Ayonhwahtha, Taoungwatha—is rendered, "he who seeks the wampum belt." He had made himself greatly esteemed by his wisdom and his benevolence. He was now past middle age. Though many of his friends and relatives had perished by the machinations of Atotarho, he himself had been spared. The qualities which gained him general respect had, perhaps, not been without influence ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... antecedent, and a monarch out at elbows stood for me as the last irony of our mortal life. Here was a king whose misfortunes could find no parallel. He had been in his youth the hero of a high adventure, and his middle age had been spent in fleeting among the courts of Europe, and waiting as pensioner on the whims of his foolish but regnant brethren. I had heard tales of a growing sottishness, a decline in spirit, a squalid ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... man of middle age, with a straggling reddish beard—turned upon him a tranquil but uninformed eye. "I suppose you would have been stopping at Government House," he remarked. "That was in Sir Roger Goldsworthy's time. They used to come out often to see my flowers. And so you remembered my name. I suppose it was because ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... pioneering coincides with areas which have since become peculiarly interesting to the British Empire; and three years later he was exploring on the opposite side of Africa, at Dahomey, Benin and the Gold Coast, regions which have also entered among the imperial "questions" of the day. Before middle age Burton had compressed into his life, as Lord Derby said, "more of study, more of hardship, and more of successful enterprise and adventure, than would have sufficed to fill up the existence of half a dozen ordinary men." The City of the Saints (1861) was the fruit of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... of middle age, tall, fine-looking, and she was evidently much excited. She was standing at one end of a well-set breakfast table, and was holding out a printed sheet to a gentleman who had been looking down at his plate, as if he were asking ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... which he meant to convey, and which he succeeded in keeping track of: Arthur and Guinevere, in the little song, ride along like primeval beings of the world—the situation seems the type of all seduction; the Lady of Shallot is not alone the recluse who sees life in a mirror, she is the cloistered Middle Age itself, and when her mirror breaks we feel that a thousand glasses are bursting, a thousand webs are parting, and that the times are coming eye to eye with the actual. In those younger days, Tennyson, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... outlay, only the vast, useless portals of their parish churches, of surprising height and lightness, in a kind of wildly elegant Gothic-on-stilts, giving to the streets of Troyes a peculiar air of the grotesque, as if in some quaint nightmare of the Middle Age. ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... furtherance of the Gospel; his chains were manifest "in all the palace, and in all other places;" [43] and many waxing confident by his bonds were much more bold to speak the word without fear. Let us not be misled by assuming a wrong explanation of these words, or by adopting the Middle Age traditions which made St. Paul convert some of the immediate favourites of the Emperor, and electrify with his eloquence an admiring Senate. The word here rendered "palace" [44] may indeed have that meaning, for we know that among the early converts were "they ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... the theory of probabilities: the errors were the writer's, not the printer's. General Paralysis of the Insane is known to have this effect on the writing. It attacks its victims about the period of middle age—the age at which the deaths of all the Orvens who died mysteriously occurred. Finding then that the dire heritage of his race—the heritage of madness—is falling or fallen on him, he summons his son from India. On himself he passes sentence of death: it is the tradition ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... over the coals was heavily bearded and past middle age, but his broad shoulders and huge frame still gave evidence of great strength and endurance. There was about him an air of anxious expectancy, and from time to time he rose from his crouching position and with ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... illness even! She read on with frantic eagerness; it was not a very long letter, but when Anne had read the two or three somewhat hurriedly written pages, her face had changed as if from careworn, pallid middle age, back to fresh, sunny youth. She fell on her knees in fervent, unspoken thanksgiving. She kissed the letter—the dear, beautiful letter, as if it were a ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... middle age, with hair already gray and face deeply furrowed. In ragged garments, resting his bandaged feet, he sat propped in the sitting-room. The warm air blowing from rich harvest fields came in at open door and windows. Attentive before him, Ephraim ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... uncourteously, extended, comes from a man of middle age, in height at least six feet three, without reckoning the thick soles of his bull-skin boots—the tops of which rise several inches above the knee. A personage, rawboned, and of rough exterior, wearing a red blanket-coat; his trousers tucked into the aforesaid ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... ask questions that would puzzle Plato, And all the schoolmen of the Middle Age,— If to make precepts worthy of old Cato, Be deemed philosophy, your boy's ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... sticking to his last failed to become a railroad president, though in the course of time he could tell where every man's shoe pinched; an importer who, in defiance of the Pure Food law, put new wine into old bottles, and labelled them Bordeaux; and a harmless-looking man of middle age, who continued to smile and smile, and had played Iago, Macbeth, and Hamlet's uncle. Before a sturdy-looking man dressed in working-clothes Cooper stopped for a moment and said, "Mr. C. W. ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... Profaneness would do when profaneness was in fashion, but now a deceitful profession. Take heed, professor, that thou dost not throw away thy old darling sin for a new one. Men's tempers alter. Youth is for pride and wantonness; middle age for cunning and craft; old age for the world and covetousness. Take heed, therefore, of deceit ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a surly looking man beyond middle age with large eyes that showed signs of dissipation. He had a small dark tuft beneath his lower lip and thin, black, ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... rode close up to the shepherds. They had been resting under an oak, and the cooking utensils, some baggage, and two asses near at hand, looked as if they, too, were travelers. L'Isle addressed a tall, dark man, of middle age, who seemed to be the head of the party. As soon as these men heard their own language from the mouth of a foreigner, so fluently and correctly spoken, their faces lightened up with interest and intelligence. They gave ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... sentiment of love responds to the most diverse objects. The ordinary young girl of Zibeline's age, either before or after her sojourn in a convent, considers that a man of thirty has arrived at middle age, and that a man of forty is absolutely old. Should she accept a man of either of these ages, she does it because a fortune, a title, or high social rank silences her other tastes, and her ambition does ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... voice hailed him; it was a rich and cheerful voice, and it came from under the trees. He turned in the direction of the voice, which seemed to be but a few yards off, and saw, sitting on a green bank under the shade, two figures. One was a man of middle age, dressed lightly as though for travelling, and Paul thought somewhat fantastically. His hat had a flower stuck in the band. But Paul thought little of the dress, because the face of the man attracted ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... those of Polonius are obtained from observation during youth and middle age. In old age the creation of generalisations ceases and we fall back on our acquired stock. They remain true, but the application fails. We must be increasingly careful in the use of these ancient ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford |
