"Infantile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... journey she was sitting by the child's couch to enjoy the sight of him as much as possible. Wholly absorbed in gazing at his infantile grace and patrician beauty, she did not hear the door open, and started in terror at the sound of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fish, you may cook him in a thousand ways, but it is doubtful whether, even with the finest sauce, a pompano will taste half as good as the infantile muskellunge, several pounds under the legal weight, fried unskilfully in pork fat by a horny-handed woodsman, kneeling before an open fire, eighteen minutes after you had given up all hope of having fish for dinner, and had resigned yourself to the dubious prospect of salt ...
— How to Cook Fish • Olive Green
... by, when William Henry Phippin's son, Archelaus, bugler to the corps (aged fifteen), took the whooping-cough, public opinion blamed Captain Pond no less severely for having enlisted a recruit who was still an undergraduate in such infantile disorders: and although the poor child took it in the mildest form, his father (not hitherto remarkable for parental tenderness) ostentatiously practised the favourite local cure and conveyed him to and fro for three days and ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... straight on their trunks, the leaves and branches spreading in conventional style; his rocks have the usual gradations which we find in the old school; the views of distant cities are absolutely fantastic and infantile creations; only the green plain is often illumined, in an unusual manner, by tiny flowerets of many hues, while mystic roses crown the angels' locks, adorn overflowing baskets, or rise on long stalks at the foot of the Virgin's ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... mental science that most obviously subserves physical research: but of Physics themselves (astronomy being scarcely a physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... intimate connection between vigour of mind and vigour of body is almost always clearly shown. A child with rickets, unable to exercise his body in free play, as a rule shows a flabbiness of mind in keeping with his useless muscles and yielding bones. Such children talk late, are infantile in their habits and ways of thought, and are more emotional and unstable than healthy children of the same age. The connection between bodily ailments and instability of nervous control is even more clearly seen in the frequent combination of rheumatism ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... in the habit of driving him in a baby carriage to the Queen's Park for an airing, and one afternoon the mother lay in wait for the appearance of the infantile equipage. She was afraid to approach the servant with a bribe, as, in the event of her refusal, the Wilkies would be placed on their guard, and would set a strict watch over all the child's movements. She accordingly sat down at a distance, ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... callow; codlin, codling; foetus, calf, colt, pup, foal, kitten; lamb, lambkin^; aurelia^, caterpillar, cocoon, nymph, nympha^, orphan, pupa, staddle^. girl; lass, lassie; wench, miss, damsel, demoiselle; maid, maiden; virgin; hoyden. Adj. infantine^, infantile; puerile; boyish, girlish, childish, babyish, kittenish; baby; newborn, unfledged, new-fledged, callow. in the cradle, in swaddling clothes, in long clothes, in arms, in leading strings; at the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... most happy production of the pencil: the figure possesses great infantile beauty; and the landscape is rural, and in perfect harmony with the subject. This work has been cleverly copied by Messrs. Sargeant and Lilley in oil, and by Miss ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... under her cream-tinted dress. One tiny well-gloved hand was outstretched in greeting, while the other pressed a thick, green-covered volume against her side. Her decision and quick, tactful manner bespoke the mature woman of the world; but her upraised face had preserved a girlish and even infantile expression of innocence in its large, fearless, grey eyes, and sensitive, humorous mouth. Mrs. O'James was a widow, and she was two-and-thirty years of age; but neither fact could have ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hope in their world-disgusted eyes, dipped their unwilling beaks in food, put chips upon their backs to help them maintain an earthly equilibrium—so little desired by them, however, that oftener they have toppled over and turned their infantile legs entreatingly upward; but I have ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... vulture and a jackal as happened of old. Indeed, the occurrence took place in the forest of Naimisha. Once upon a time a Brahmana had, after great difficulties, obtained a son of large expansive eyes. The child died of infantile convulsions. Some (amongst his kinsmen), exceedingly agitated by grief and indulging in loud lamentations, took up the boy of tender years, that sole wealth of his family. Taking the deceased child they proceeded in the direction of the crematorium. Arrived ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... say that he had not enough mastery over form to express himself perfectly like Tennyson or Swinburne is like criticising the griffin of a mediaeval gargoyle without even knowing that it is a griffin; treating it as an infantile and unsuccessful attempt at a classical angel. A poet indifferent to form ought to mean a poet who did not care what form he used as long as he expressed his thoughts. He might be a rather entertaining ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the help of the California State Library, California Society for the Prevention of Blindness, and many social and civic organizations, has conducted a continuous campaign, and has succeeded in passing a law which is both simple and effective, and which has resulted in lowering the percentage of infantile blindness, and in arousing the public to a sense of its duty in this regard. Dr Glaser and the above-named organizations have also rendered yeoman service in securing the passage of laws prohibiting the use of a roller towel, and for the ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... at Forney's Crag was a hoary-headed old vagabond of a house, that had passed the heyday of its youth long before that great encyclopaedia, the oldest inhabitant, emitted his first infantile squawk. Each successive season caused it to lean a little more and the most casual observer must perceive that it couldn't by any possibility become much ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... reproduced without addition or omission because they had been practised by the ancestors of long ago, and formulas hallowed by the mos maiorum, that were no longer understood or sincerely cherished. Never did a people of advanced culture have a more infantile religion. ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... the small negroes of the pygmy type, the so-called Negritos. It is not known how far they represent a distinct and perhaps earlier experiment in negro-making, though this is the prevailing view; or whether the negro type, with its tendency to infantile characters due to the early closing of the cranial sutures, is apt to throw off dwarfed forms in an occasional way. At any rate, in Africa there are several groups of pygmies in the Congo region, as well as the Bushmen ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... like him as I do?" But Percy was a common-place, selfish fellow—of that I was convinced—whatever his other qualities, good or bad, might be; and I sincerely hoped that any designs he might have of marrying his cousin, might prove as vain as his late infantile passion for the moon. For I beg to assure my readers that the circumstances in which I have introduced Adela Cathcart, are no more fair to her real character, than my lady readers would consider the ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... become an enigma again. But yours is not the creed of a simpleton. You are playing with me—revealing your wisdom from beneath a veil of infantile guilelessness. I ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... tried to butter her last muffin with the handle of her knife. "But I don't see how if a girl really cared about a man she could let anything—" she said and then stopped with a burning flush. And now Oliver knew that he had to be very careful. He looked over his tools and decided that infantile bitterness was best. ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... but the young man on the edge of life never dreamed. What motives or emotions drove his masters on their various paths he made no pretence of guessing; even at that age he preferred to admit his dislike for guessing motives; he knew only his own infantile ignorance, before which he stood amazed, and his innocent good-faith, always matter of simple-minded surprise. Critics who know ultimate truth will pronounce judgment on history; all that Henry Adams ever saw in man was a reflection of his own ignorance, and he never saw quite so much of it ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... let me come back and don't kill me I will do your work. I was afraid of the bomb, but now I am afraid of the guns." It sounded a little infantile, but he was pretty sure none of those present had any sound knowledge of ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... chilled drinks and chatting in groups. It wasn't the artistic crowd usual at Thalvan Dras' dinners; most of the guests seemed to be business or political people. Thalvan Dras had gotten Vall and Dalla into the small group around him, along with pudgy, infantile-faced Brogoth Zaln, his confidential secretary, and Javrath ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... artifice within artifice, to themask below mask, of these dancers to tambourines amid the "boulingrins du pare aulique" of mock-classic fantasies. He gives himself up to this Watteau cult all the more easily because he himself has so infantile a heart. He is like a child who enters some elaborate masked ball in his own gala dress. It is natural to him to be perverse and wistful and tragically gay. It is natural to him to foot it in the moonlight along with ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... theatre, only it was the operating theatre. The patient on this occasion was a doll, the surgeon a lad of seven, himself a victim of infantile paralysis, and the head nurse assisting was aged nine, and wears a brace on each leg. The stage was the children's ward of the hospital. Here are several pathetic little people, orthopedic cases, brought in for treatment during ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... good service in times past; but their office was only provisional, and, having served to advance the philosophy of forces beyond themselves, they must now take rank among the outgrown and effete theories which belong to the infantile period of science. This change, as will be seen, involves the fundamental conceptions of science, and is nothing less than the substitution of dynamical for material ideas in dealing with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... malsperteco. Inexplicable neklarigebla. Inexpressible neesprimebla. Inextricable nemalplektebla. Infallible neerarebla. Infallibility neerarebleco. Infallibly neerareble. Infamous malglora, malfama. Infamy malgloro, malfamo. Infancy infaneco. Infant infaneto. Infantile infana. Infantry infanterio. Infatuation delogiteco. Infect infekti. Infelicity malfelicxeco. Infer impliki. Inferior, an subulo. Inferior malsupera. Inferiority malsupereco. Infernal infera. Infidelity malfideleco. Infinite ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the grey walls and red copper on the tiles. In the same way the literature that my soul demands—a sad voluptuousness—is the dying poetry of the last moments of Rome, but before it has breathed at all the rejuvenating approach of the barbarians, or has begun to stammer the infantile Latin of the first ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... appear frequently, and not unfavorably, on the pages of this singular diary. Thus, when the Dauphin was three years old, the king, being in bed, took him and a young Frontenac of about the same age, set them before him, and amused Himself by making them rally each other in their infantile language. The infant Frontenac had a trick of stuttering, which the Dauphin caught from him, and retained for a long time. Again, at the age of five, the Dauphin, armed with a little gun, played at soldier with two of the Frontenac children in the hall at St. Germain. They assaulted a town, ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... it is unwise to keep children out after they have attained the age of seven or eight years, but up to that age the climate appears to agree very well with them and they enjoy an immunity from measles, whooping cough and other infantile diseases. This enforced separation from wife and family is one of the greatest disadvantages in a ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... in another stride, and held the portal ajar. Henry had no alternative but to pass beneath the commissionaire's bended and respectful head. Once within the gorgeous twilit hall of the Louvre, Henry was set upon by two very diminutive and infantile replicas of the commissionaire, one of whom staggered away with his overcoat, while the other secured the remainder of the booty in the shape of his hat, muffler, and stick, and left Henry naked. I say 'naked' purposely. Anyone who has dreamed ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... several urchins of an inquiring turn of mind drew near and began to make infantile comments, and asked with charming freedom if it ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... the beauty of the Christ Child, The gentleness, the grace, The smiling, loving tenderness, The infantile embrace! All babyhood he holdeth, All motherhood enfoldeth— Yet who hath seen ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... at the clear eyes, the oval face, and the fine, sensitive mouth and thought of the youth's claim to the crime battered sobriquet of The Oskaloosa Kid. The man wondered if the mystery of the clanking chain would prove as harmlessly infantile as these two whom some accident of hilarious fate had cast in the roles of debauchery ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her sister's birthday, Annie read fortunes in the teacups, Alfred imitated the supercilious manner of a lady who had called that afternoon upon Mrs. Breckenridge, and Helda, a milk-blond Dane with pink-rimmed eyes, laughed with infantile indiscrimination at everything, blushing an agonized scarlet whenever Alfred's ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... fate of these infantile members of the boat population is sad. They are exposed to a "rough-and-tumble" existence as soon as they are ushered into the world, especially should the poor innocent have the misfortune to be born ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... when life with me was young, And fresh as fleet-winged time's infantile hour, When Hope her treacherous chaplet 'round me flung, And daily ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... the rickets as a new disease, scarce so old as to afford good observation, and wondered whether it existed in the American plantations. In old medical books which were used by the New England colonists I find manifold receipts for the cure of these infantile diseases. Snails form the basis, or rather the chief ingredient, of many of these medicines. Indeed, I should fancy that snails must have been almost exterminated in the near vicinity of towns, so largely were they sought for and ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... for instance, was placed in one of the corners and immediately produced a hall of a thousand columns; for, thanks to the mirrors, the real room was multiplied by six hexagonal rooms, each of which, in its turn, was multiplied indefinitely. But the little sultana soon tired of this infantile illusion, whereupon Erik altered his invention into a "torture-chamber." For the architectural motive placed in one corner, he substituted an iron tree. This tree, with its painted leaves, was absolutely true to life and was made of iron so as to resist all the attacks ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... social system. In a book which serves as the philosophical testament of the century,[3242] Condorcet declares that this method is the "final step of philosophy, that which places a sort of eternal barrier between humanity and its ancient infantile errors." "By applying it to morals, politics and political economy the moral sciences have progressed nearly as much as the natural sciences. With its help we have been able to discover the rights of man." As in mathematics, they have been deduced from one primordial statement only, which ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... (Gen. 2:19, 20). Adam had not only the power of speech, but the power of reasoning and thought in connection with speech. He could attach words to ideas. This is not the picture, as evolution would have us believe, of an infantile savage slowly groping his way towards articulate speech by imitation of the sounds ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... anthropological demonstration, such as that which not only made generally known, but convinced every one, that the body develops spontaneously; because, in reality, the question of infant welfare was not concerned with the more or less perfect forms of the body. The real infantile question which called for the intervention of science was ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... incongruous coat of grease. But I was under no temptation to smile. I had to confine my mind pretty closely to the general principle, and rather studiously to ignore the particular instance, before I could bring myself to answer the almost infantile inquiry in those ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... specimens of smart sayings, the rising generation of children are little better than idiots. And the parents must surely be but little better than the children, for in most cases they are the publishers of the sunbursts of infantile imbecility which dazzle us from the pages of our periodicals. I may seem to speak with some heat, not to say a suspicion of personal spite; and I do admit that it nettles me to hear about so many gifted infants in these days, and remember that I seldom said anything smart when I was a child. ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... two cloaks, give one (said our Lord) to the poor; In such bounty as that lies the trial: But a child that gives half of its infantile store Has small ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... or that of the Bridgewater treatises of our own, it always looks the same to us,—incredibly perspectiveless and short. Even Lyell's, Faraday's, Mill's, and Darwin's consciousness of their respective subjects are already beginning to put on an infantile and innocent look. Is it then likely that the science of our own day will escape the common doom; that the minds of its votaries will never look old-fashioned to the grandchildren of the latter? ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... that had not given him absolute restraint. The world was full of little men, but he refused to stay little. This war that had come between him and his father had been bred of the fumes of self-centered minds, turned with an infantile fatality to greedy desires. His poor old blinded father could be excused and forgiven. There were other old men, sick, crippled, idle, who must suffer pain, but whose pain could be lightened. There were babies, children, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... everything else fell flat. Christy made one or two super-subtle remarks which no one understood. There was nothing left for Pothering to say; the motion was then put before the House and the debate developed into a farce. Idiot after idiot got up and made some infantile qualification of an earlier statement—all of them talked off the point. So much so, in fact, that Turner was beginning a tale of a fight he had had with a coster down Cheap Street when Christy ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... thing in the show," chuckled Neale to Luke. "I can remember him when I was a little fellow and was first taken into the ring as the 'Infantile Wonder of the Ages'. I rode Scalawag. He was so fat then that I couldn't have rolled off ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... that these seances would have a dreadfully trying effect upon my infantile nerves; but, strangely enough, they did not. I never looked beneath my cot with the expectation of discovering a midnight assassin; for, in the first place, the outer doors of the house were always kept so ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... too busy dining out and going to the opera to mingle much with his colleagues. But as no one is wholly consistent, Mr. Mungold had lately belied his ambitions by falling in love with Kate Arran; and with that gentle persistency which made him so wonderful in managing obstreperous infantile sitters, he had contrived to establish a precarious footing in ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... so happy as when listening to their own voices. Most birds sing and make a joyful noise only at the nesting season. Not so the barbets; they call all the year round; even unfledged nestlings raise up the voices of infantile squeakiness. ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... Lily's assurance that she much preferred the friendly proximity of the kitchen fire, Mrs. Struther proceeded to prepare a bottle of infantile food, which she tenderly applied to the baby's impatient lips; and while the ensuing degustation went on, she seated herself with a beaming countenance ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... trouble sprang from the not anticipated misfortune of Isabella Linton evincing a sudden and irresistible attraction towards the tolerated guest. She was at that time a charming young lady of eighteen; infantile in manners, though possessed of keen wit, keen feelings, and a keen temper, too, if irritated. Her brother, who loved her tenderly, was appalled at this fantastic preference. Leaving aside the degradation of an alliance with ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... scores of millions of the lower castes, labelled and treated as 'untouchable,' infant-marriage, the prohibition of the re-marriage of widows, which, especially in the case of child-widows, condemns them to a lifetime of misery and semi-servitude, the appalling infantile mortality, largely due to the prevalence of barbarous superstitions, the economic waste resulting from lavish expenditure, often at the cost of lifelong indebtedness, upon marriages and funerals, and so forth and so forth. How many of the Western-educated ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... occult heights in the doctrine of Christ designed by the Supreme Wisdom to counteract corresponding occult depths in the Mystery of Darkness. I do not think it is at all necessary, or even possible, for us to scale these heights or fathom those depths, with our present infantile intelligence, but if we realize how completely the law of our being receives its fulfilment in Christ as far as we know that law, may we not well conceive that there are yet deeper phases of that law the existence of which we can only faintly surmise by intuition? Occasionally just ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... done by a series of perforations made in a circle with flint instruments, and a round piece of skull in this way removed; traces of these drill-holes have been found. The operation was done for epilepsy, infantile convulsions, headache, and various cerebral diseases believed to be caused by confined demons, to whom the hole gave ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... from sinking. Her hands were clasped before her in prayer, but instead of looking upward toward that power which alone could rescue them, her unconscious looks wandered to the countenance of Duncan with infantile dependency. David had contended, and the novelty of the circumstance held him silent, in deliberation on the ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... delighting as formerly in her infantile ways, appeared to avoid them, she gave orders she was not to be brought to her bed in the morning as usual. When they met on the stairs, she passed by without looking at her. At the most she would go up to her and say in a ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... body of the boy, his eccentric ways, his quickness in learning, and his infantile simplicity had all conspired to win the affection of Jack, so that he would have protected him even without the solicitation of Susan Lanham. But since Susan had been Jack's own first and fast friend, he felt in honor bound to ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... of his ghastly smiles. In repose his features had a curious character of evil, exhausted austerity; but when he smiled, the whole mask took on an unpleasantly infantile expression. A recrudescence of the rolling thunder invaded the room loudly, and passed ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... the state of innocence man would have been born, yet not subject to corruption. Therefore in that state there could have been certain infantile defects which result from birth; but not senile defects leading to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... and picked it up again with a rapidity of movement peculiar to these agile creatures. He seemed to question the dumb wood with faltering sagacity and in his gestures there was something marvelous as well as infantile. At last he undertook with grotesque gestures to place the violin under his chin, while in one hand he held the neck; but like a spoiled child he soon wearied of a study which required skill not to be obtained in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... uncompromising, blind to fundamental justice. The affair was over. If he knew her, he knew also himself. The affair was over. He was in despair. His mind went round and round like a life-prisoner exercising in an enclosed yard. No escape! Till then, he had always believed in his luck. Infantile delusion! He was now aware that destiny had struck him a blow once for all. But of course he did not perceive that he was too young, not ripe, for such a blow. The mark of destiny was on his features, and it was out of place there.... He had lost Marguerite. And ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... xxviii.) that "These examples may suffice to show that, at almost every stage of life, the males in Scotland have a greater liability to death and a higher death-rate than the females. The fact, however, of this peculiarity being most strongly developed at that infantile period of life when the dress, food, and general treatment of both sexes are alike, seems to prove that the higher male death-rate is an impressed, natural, and constitutional peculiarity due to sex alone.") Dr. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... of life, and that you are floating fast from the shady sources of your years into heat, bustle, and storm. Your dreams are now faint, flickering shadows, that play like fire-flies in the coppices of leafy June. They have no rule but the rule of infantile desire; they have no joys to promise greater than the joys that belong to your passing life; they have no terrors but such terrors as the darkness of a Spring night makes. They do not take hold on your soul as the dreams of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... inevitable accompaniment of Sophia's beauty, as the penalty of that surpassing charm which occasionally emanated from the girl like a radiance. What startled and surprised Mrs. Baines was the perfect and unthinkable madness of Sophia's infantile scheme. It was a revelation to Mrs. Baines. Why in the name of heaven had the girl taken such a notion into her head? Orphans, widows, and spinsters of a certain age suddenly thrown on the world—these were the women ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... in Nature." When a lady in Italy said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a Christian to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile degree. But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities. Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... two-year-old (to whose sex I cannot speak with certainty); and I never heard it fretting or wailing. Whenever it saw me, it used to break out into a real uproarious laugh, as if our common imprisonment was the very best joke that had ever been presented to its infantile mind. I am ashamed to avow, that my own sense of the ridiculous was by no means so keen. The mother evidently pined far more than the baby; for her face grew, every day, more white and worn. What was the offense of either against the Government, I never heard; ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... "Don't be positively infantile, Boss. Newspapers don't print libel actions brought against other newspapers. It's unprofessional. It's unethical. It ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a precocious and clever child like all the infantile monarchs of the house of Stewart, had been established at Stirling, always a favourite residence of the Scotch Kings, where he held his baby Court in peace while his mother pined in England, and the Scotch lords struggled for the mastery, and succeeded ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... thus born into the very sphere of love, seemed ever a living joy. The father's wisdom guided the mother's tender love, and the little one was good and unselfish—and so gay in the infantile innocence and grace of her being, that oftentimes the young mother, leaning on the ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... demanded in infantile tones an equivocal-looking woman whose pale-rose tunic, painted cheeks, and locks shining with essences betrayed wretched pretensions to a youth long passed away—' is it true that Nyssia has two pupils in each eye? It seems to me that ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... brandishing a wisp of a stick as if there were a mighty power in it. Sally brings more chairs out upon the green, and the mammas and papas talk busily together, while the little ones run about enjoying their own infantile prattle; and just as Harry and Jennie are the happiest, with their pinafores full of buttercups and daisies, and their little faces flushed with exercise and joy, nurse comes to take them to the house, ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... by the rock, and in front, it was screened from all examination, by creeping plants, and the branches of cedars. What recess could be more propitious to secrecy? The spirit which haunted it formerly was pure and rapturous. It was a fane sacred to the memory of infantile days, and to blissful imaginations of the future! What a gloomy reverse had succeeded since the ominous arrival of this stranger! Now, perhaps, it is the scene of his meditations. Purposes fraught with horror, that shun the light, and contemplate the pollution of innocence, ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... THE SAME SPECIES. Then follows an interesting inquiry into the reasons for the extinction of human races. He recognises as the ultimate reason the injurious effects of a change of the conditions of life, which may bring about an increase in infantile mortality, and a diminished fertility. It is precisely the reproductive system, among animals also, which is most susceptible to ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... infantile gray eyes on him searchingly. "I reckon you're not," she said. "I reckon you're the sort of man people don't say things to unless they're right sure you will stand it. They don't trifle with you." She nodded her head with conviction. "Oh, I've heard them talk about you! I like that; that's like ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... months previously their youngest son, Frank, had been married to Miss Katherine Sefton, of Auburn, N.Y., and the young couple had settled down in Garden City, Long Island. That was the summer when the epidemic of infantile paralysis swept over the larger part of the United States. The young bride was stricken; the case was unusually rapid and unusually severe; at the moment of the Pages' arrival, they were informed that there was practically no hope; and Mrs. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... history was, then, the most pretentious as it was the most infantile of deceptions. Old Clio ought to be represented with a sphinx's head, mutton-chop whiskers, and one of those padded bonnets which babies wore to keep them from bashing their little brains out when ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... guide been merely blowing bubbles for our infantile amusement? Surely he has been too solemn. We could have sworn that some of the passages were written, if not with tears in his eyes, at least with a genuine sensibility to the solemn and romantic elements of life. Or was he carried ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... forward. She was thinking what a sweet babe she was, thus to accept the surface of things. How did she know that this laughing, light-spoken gallant, seemingly so open and artless—oh! more infantile than her very self!—was not deep and complex? Or that it was not he and Flora on whose case she was being lured to speculate? The boat, of whose large breathings and pulsings she became growingly aware, offered no reply. Presently from the right ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... begins its life on a lake plain, as in the example just cited, or upon a coastal plain lifted from beneath the sea or on a spread of glacial drift left by the retreat of continental ice sheets, such as covers much of Canada and the northeastern parts of the United States, its infantile stage presents the same characteristic features,—a narrow and shallow valley, with undeveloped tributaries and undrained interstream areas. Ground water stands high, and, exuding in the undrained initial depressions, forms marshes ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... who are most truly women the author's loyalty is pure and intense. Imogen, the "chaste, ardent, devoted, beautiful" wife,—Juliet, whose "ingenuousness and almost infantile simplicity" endear her to all hearts,—Miranda, that most ethereal creation, type of virgin innocence,—Cordelia, with her pure, filial devotion,—are painted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... caught signs of intelligence or affection between Frank and his mother; would sit apart and not speak for a whole night if she thought the boy had a better fruit or a larger cake than hers; would fling away a ribbon if he had one, and would utter [v]infantile sarcasms about the ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... that mother would die. We are aware that a certain part of the subconscious possesses everything which we can no longer remember consciously, and especially an entirely thoughtless, childish wish. One can confidently say that most of what arises from the subconscious has an infantile character, as does this so simple sounding wish: "Tell me, father, if mother died would you marry me?" The infantile expression of a wish is the predecessor of a recent wish for marriage, which in this case we discover is painful to the dreamer. This thought, the seriousness ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... answers that are incorporated in a doctrine called Freudianism. Freud is an Austrian Jew, a physician, and one that soon specialized in nervous and mental diseases. Early in his career he did some excellent work in the study of the paralysis of childhood (infantile hemiplegia), but his attention and that of an older colleague, Breuer, were soon drawn (as has occurred to almost every neurologist) to the manifestations of that extraordinary disease, hysteria. Hysteria ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... cases. We dismiss now one distinction which has been drawn between idiocy and imbecility—that the former is, and that the latter is not, necessarily congenital; one arising from the supposition that infantile mental deficiency is less likely to be so grave an affection than that which has been present from the moment of existence. Besides, the term is constantly being applied in common parlance to those who, originally of sound mind, have in ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... of a chimney-pot, learnt that Gould was not following, his infantile officiousness and good nature forced him to dive back into the attic to comfort or persuade; and Inglewood and Moon were left alone on the long gray-green ridge of the slate roof, with their feet against gutters and their backs against chimney-pots, looking agnostically ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... slowly. "They didn't quite act like the others and they sure died mighty fast. Darn it, I had it figured for that stuff in the book. Infantile paralysis. How about it, Doc? Sort of like a cold, stiff ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... man may acquire the ability to observe even a large number of facts, and still remain in the infantile stage of observation. I have read, in some work of literary criticism, that Dickens could walk up one side of a long, busy street and down the other, and then tell you in their order the names on all the shop-signs; the ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... the testicle. The testicle in the scrotum. Isolation of its tunica vaginalis. The tunica vaginalis communicating with the abdomen. Sacculated serous spermatic canal. Hydrocele of the isolated tunica vaginalis. Congenital hernia and hydrocele. Infantile hernia. Oblique inguinal hernia. How ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... home, in the family room. There was sufficient strength to enable her to raise her pallid but not emaciated hand to my face, even while she passed it over my cheeks, once more parting the curls on my temples, and playing with my hair, with infantile fondness. ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... that religious sincerity which a truly sport-loving populace will always put into them. The prejudice in favor of the home team, the cruel, frank unfairness toward the visiting team, were both insufficiently accentuated. The menaces were merely infantile. I inquired whether the referee or umpire, or whatever the arbiter is called in America, ever went in danger of life or limb, or had to be protected from a homicidal public by the law in uniform. And I was shocked by a negative answer. ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... her chamber. It was a large, dark, oak-paneled room, with a dark carpet on the floor and dark-green curtains on the windows and the bedstead. Over the mantelpiece hung the portrait of a most beautiful black-haired and black-eyed girl of about fourteen years of age, but upon whose infantile brow fell the shadow of some fearful woe. There was something awful in the despair "on that face so young" that bound the gazer in an irresistible and most painful spell. And Capitola remained standing before it transfixed, until the ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... had no heart for his fun. She could scarcely summon the strength and attention requisite for this fantastic infantile foolery when all her capacities were enlisted to support her dignity in the presence of this man, necessarily inimical, censorious, critical, who had once meant so much in her life. But she could not rebuff the baby! She would not humble his ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and on the next day it was taken to Poulets, a small hamlet, and a dependent of the commune of Mauvieres. All the linen and all the clothing of the sick of this locality, which had been the seat of sudor, especially infantile, was disinfected. On the 4th of July, the stove went to Concremiers, a commune about three miles distant, and there finished up the disinfection that until then had been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... true, but it was only one. And the lesson was given by a method so gentle, that no nervous, cerebral, or mental function was in any degree irritated or morbidly excited by it. Moreover, no one who knows any thing of the workings of the infantile mind can doubt that the impulse in the right direction given by this conversation was not only better in character, but was greater in amount, than could have been effected by either of the other methods of ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... In hereditary infantile syphilis, the prognosis is always uncertain: the more distant from the time of birth the manifestations appear the more favorable usually is ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... who had usurped the martin house in the yard, warned him off; the tiny golden warbler, who flitted about the shrubbery all day, threatened to annihilate him, but with infantile innocence he refused to understand hostility; he stared at his assailant, and he held his ground. The little flock of four was captivating to see, and though the mother looked ragged and careless in dress, one could but honor the little ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... impossible to sleep. I rose the first night, struck a light, and on examination found myself covered with myriads of tattle bugs, so small as to be almost imperceptible. By using my microscope I discovered them to be infantile bedbugs. After the first night I was obliged to sleep in the coach-house in order ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... them. In one little clearing some children were scattering manure. One, a sturdy little maiden, but a mere baby of about seven years of age, had a fork cut down to suit her size, and was handling it with infantile vigor, laying about her with great vim. It was such a comical sight that we stopped the car to watch her. As soon as she saw she was watched, she dropped the fork and scampered off to hide. A pretty little child, hardy and healthy and nimble ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... over again I have tried to point out to my sister the absurdity of calling her father by the infantile nickname of papa. I have reminded her that she is (in years, at least) no longer a child. "Why don't you call him father, as I do?" I ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... Catholic German; one of those men born old, who seem all their lives fifty years of age, even at eighty. And yet, his brown, sunken, wrinkled face still kept something infantile and artless in its dark creases. The blue of innocence was in his eyes, and a gay smile of springtide abode upon his lips. His iron-gray hair, falling naturally like that of the Christ in art, added to his ecstatic air a certain solemnity which was absolutely deceptive ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... barring customary colds and various forms of infantile pip. As for myself, I am flourishing like a green bay tree (appropriate comparison, Soapy Sam would observe), in consequence of having utterly renounced ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... weighted by his seventy years, in the vast and silent loneliness of the North, Old Tarwater, as in the delirium of drug or anaesthetic, recovered within himself, the infantile mind of the child-man of the early world. It was in the dusk of Death's fluttery wings that Tarwater thus crouched, and, like his remote forebear, the child-man, went to myth-making, and sun-heroizing, himself hero-maker and the hero in quest of the ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... against this sacrilege of art, she explained that it was by that system that Albert Duerer had been taught. This, of course, accounts for our having infant prodigies in art, as well as music and the drama. The rapidity with which Master Hoffmann was followed by infantile Lizsts and little Otto Hegner as soon as it became apparent that there was a demand for such phenomena, seems to indicate that in music at all events supply will follow demand as a matter of course, and if the infant artist can only be "crammed" in daubing on canvas as youthful musicians are ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... to the rescue and put us in good-humor again, hard as it is to conceive of armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with such visionary damsels as Ambition and Shamefastness. Nay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us as of children who play that everything is something else, and are ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... has come when love would have them no longer infantile, but capable of standing and walking, "not to speak of trying to climb." Such a short and easy method of dealing with Roman Catholic dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence; it is quite possible to ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... lingering and singing accent, which they usually transport into other tongues. When the subjects are serious or melancholy, after such recitatives or improvised lamentations, they have a sort of lisping infantile manner of speaking, which they vary by light silvery laughs, little interjectional cries, short musical pauses upon the higher notes, from which they descend by one knows not what chromatic scale of demi and quarter tones to rest ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Presently he raised his eyes and glanced at Hilda. She was holding a letter daintily between her two forefingers, cornerwise, and with little puffs of her pouted lips was spinning it round, evidently enjoying the infantile amusement immensely. ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... lovely girl, wearing a headdress composed of a turban with a lappet. The hair is of a rich fair chestnut hue; the dark eyes are moistened with recent tears; a perfectly formed nose surmounts an infantile mouth; unfortunately, the loss of tone in the picture since it was painted has destroyed the original fair complexion. The age of the subject may be twenty, or ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the breastplate, and which uttered oracles by a voice.... We incline to Mr. Mede's opinion that the Urim and Thummim were 'things well known to the patriarchs' as divinely appointed means of inquiries of the Lord, suited to an infantile state of religion. "Cyclopedia of Biblical ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... too, and the garment was as heavy as broadcloth and as stiff as a board. Nothing could have been more unsuitable for a boy to wear than that was. I rebelled and protested with all the strength of my infantile nature, but it was needs must—I had either to wear them or to remain in bed indefinitely. Swallowing my pride, in spite of my mortification, I put them on and sallied forth, but little consoled by the ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Captain Cooke as his master. Cooke must have been a clever musician in spite of the military title he had gained while fighting on the Royalist side in the Civil War. He had an extraordinarily gifted set of boys under him, and he seems to have trained them well. When some of them tried their infantile hands at composition he encouraged them. Pepys heard at least one of their achievements, and records his pleasure. And it must be remembered that Pepys was a composer and connoisseur—he would go many miles to hear a piece of music. Cooke died in 1672, and ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... fond of her, and would have utterly spoiled her, had not her temperament fortunately been one not easily injured by unrestrained liberty of action. Before she was able to walk, he would take her to the forge, and keep her for hours on a sheepskin in one corner, whence she watched, with infantile delight, the blast of the furnace, and the shower of sparks that fell from the anvil, and where she often slept, lulled by the monotonous chorus of trip and sledge. As she grew older, the mystery of bellows and slack-tub ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... help and sustain thee, too gentle Spenser! I never will desert thee. But what am I? Great they have called me! Alas, how powerless, then, and infantile is greatness in the presence ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... equipment and steel helmet contemptuously into a corner. I took an infantile delight in clean, furnished rooms, in the white table-cloth, the shining silver, the cut flowers, and the oil-paintings on the wall. And we talked until ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... and the results form the subject of comparative descriptive psychology; the second division, namely, developmental or genetic psychology, deals with the sequence of events in the life of a single individual by which the infantile and adolescent types of mind become adult intellectuality; in the third place, in speaking of the palaeontology of mind, the phrase is used to refer to the varied and changing mental abilities of human races in historic and prehistoric ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... all parts to hear him, and marvelled at the discourses which came from his infantile mouth; and all Israel agreed that the Spirit of the Eternal dwelt ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... these moments of hesitation to me with the utmost particularity. He went right past the door, and then, with his hands in his pockets, and making an infantile attempt to whistle, strolled right along beyond the end of the wall. There he recalls a number of mean, dirty shops, and particularly that of a plumber and decorator, with a dusty disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead ball taps, pattern books of wall paper, and tins of enamel. ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... night Narcisse came home sober; and giving him some warm supper, followed by a delicacy that she had set aside for him as a dessert, and which, with a half human, half animal affection, she watched him devour, she broke the subject to him. He grinned with an infantile delight, as he heard the important secret, and discussed with her the project that might hinder the good fortune of the haughty foundling, whose disdain had long chagrined him, and under the recollection of whose scorn during the ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... her pen was something impassable. Fancy a butterfly, gnat, or other winged insect, attached to a twig which, clogged with mud, it rolls across a page. Her spelling was abominable. Her sentiments infantile. And for some reason when she wrote she declared her belief in God. Then there were crosses—tear stains; and the hand itself rambling and redeemed only by the fact—which always did redeem Florinda—by the fact that she cared. Yes, whether it was for chocolate creams, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... means," said Mr. Cradock, who always got the last word, "that your ego is at present in what is called the state of infantile dependence or tutelage. A necessary but an impermanent stage in its struggle towards the adult ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... the babe be praised if it is shown to the guests, even if it is a little monster of pink ugliness. Ladies, especially mothers, will see something beautiful, if only its helpless innocence, and gentlemen must behold infantile graces, if they cannot actually behold them. "Mother's darling" must be the great attraction at a christening, if it only improves the occasion by a succession ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost |
