"Childhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with less and less reserve, and, when grown up, lived with him on terms of the most entire friendship; so much so, that Locke mentioned the fact of his father having expressed his regret for giving way to his anger, and striking him once in his childhood, when he did not deserve it. In a letter to a friend, written in the latter part of his life, Locke thus expresses himself on the conduct of a father towards his son:—"That which I have often blamed as an indiscreet and dangerous practice in many fathers, viz. to be very ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... over the islands at sunrise, which is by no means usual. Pasquale sniffed the air as he rowed himself through the narrow canals. There was a mingled smell of stagnant salt water, cabbage stalks, water-melons and wood smoke long unfamiliar to him, and reminding him pleasantly of his childhood. Wherever a bit of stone pier ran along by an open space, scores of olive-skinned boys were bathing, and as he passed they yelled at him and splashed him. Many a time he had done the same, long ago, and had sometimes got a sharp ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... follow, their example? To produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy, proportion and grace, in every faculty of mind and body—that was their notion of education. To produce that, the text-book of their childhood was the poetry of Homer, and not of—But I am treading on dangerous ground. It was for this that the seafaring Greek lad was taught to find his ideal in Ulysses; while his sister at home found hers, it may be, in Nausicaa. It was for this, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... longing for some friend, some confidant to take counsel with. I knew no such friend. I did not dare to speak of my misgivings to others. In spite of my earnest desire for guidance, for more light, the strong grip of childhood's influences was impossible to shake off. I could not rid my conscience of the sin ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... commanded to undertake the accusation of Marcus Silanus, [13]—on his refusal, he was put to death. His mother was Julia Procilla, a lady of exemplary chastity. Educated with tenderness in her bosom, [14] he passed his childhood and youth in the attainment of every liberal art. He was preserved from the allurements of vice, not only by a naturally good disposition, but by being sent very early to pursue his studies at Massilia; [15] ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... the "little shepherd" did not know who he was nor whence he came—he had just wandered from door to door since early childhood, seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who gladly fathered and mothered this waif about whom there was such a mystery—a charming waif, by the way, who could play the banjo better that anyone ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... unworthy of his position. They reminded him of his own childhood, when he had dreamed of becoming one of the Lesser Gods, or even Zeus himself! Zeus had provided the best answer to those dreams, Forrester knew. "Now I am a man," Zeus had said, "and I put away ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the husband of one of my cousins, about infantine incidents he told me something which had occurred to him in his childhood; and suddenly, almost as quickly as a magic lantern throws a picture on to a wall, this which had occurred to me came into my mind. I have since thought over it a hundred times, but cannot recollect one circumstance relating to the adventure ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... that Milly entered the great infirmary, the charm of her childhood laid its spell upon all who came near her. Not only was the gloomy ward brighter for her presence, but patients and nurses were infected with her strange personality and undefinable influence. Even the doctors lingered a moment longer at her bedside, looking pensively ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... the seventeenth century, large and abundant materials, whether it affects the species or the individual. In truth, human nature is never seen in worse colours than in that dark and dismal review. Childhood, without any of its engaging properties, appears prematurely artful, wicked and cruel[1]; woman, the victim of a wretched and debasing bigotry, has yet so little of the feminine adjuncts, that the fountains ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... charged the garrison to obey his orders in all things, as if they had been given by himself. He also called in the principal tenants and delivered a similar charge to them. The English men-at-arms were well pleased to be commanded by one whom they had known from childhood, and whose father they had been accustomed to regard as their master during the absences of Sir Eustace and Dame Margaret. The archers had not, like the men-at-arms, been drawn from the Summerley estate, but the devotion of their leader ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... (1799) and Fleetwood (1805) are perhaps better than anything in Caleb: Mandeville (1817) and Deloraine (1833) are senilia.[15] The graceful figure of the heroine Marguerite in St. Leon is said to be modelled on Mary Wollstonecraft, and there are some fresh pictures of youth and childhood in Fleetwood. But St. Leon, besides its historical shortcomings (which, once more, we may postpone), is full of faults, from the badly managed supernatural to an only too natural dullness and languor of general story: nor has ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... indeed was utter self-effacement, complete absorption in the love of another. And she felt a profound gratitude, a sweet solace in the thought, mingled with a sort of angry bitterness against evil fortune. Then, suddenly, the happy years of her childhood and her long youth spent beside him who had always been so kind and so good-humored, rose before her—how he had gradually won her affection, how she had felt that she was his, after the quarrels which had separated them for a time, and with what ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Barrow she had always carried the small tangles of childhood to a remote corner of the pine-woods for solution, and the habit had grown with her growth, so that now, when a rather bigger tangle presented itself, she turned instinctively to the solitude of the cliffs at Monkshaven, where the murmur of the sea was borne ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... may be worth while to inquire into the history and characteristics of this young woman. Her biographer, Dr. Adam Clarke, informs us that "from her childhood she was gay and sprightly; full of mirth, good humor, and keen wit. She indulged this disposition so much that it was said to have given great uneasiness to her parents; because she was in consequence often betrayed into inadvertencies which, though of small moment ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... garden. She detained my hand for a moment and then in the very voice of the Flora of old days, with the exact intonation, showing the old mistrust, the old doubt of herself, the old scar of the blow received in childhood, pathetic and funny, she murmured, "Do you think it possible that he should ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... always young. Powerful memories were stirred within them by the sight of the round tower, Fort Saint-Nicolas, the City Hall designed by Puget, [*] the port with its brick quays, where they had both played in childhood, and it was with one accord that they stopped on the Cannebiere. A vessel was setting sail for Algiers, on board of which the bustle usually attending departure prevailed. The passengers and their relations crowded on the deck, friends taking a tender but sorrowful leave of each other, some ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Russian, but my childhood and youth were passed at Hamburg. Owing to the early age at which I lost my father, my recollections of him are necessarily but imperfect. I remember him as a tall handsome man, somewhat careworn, constantly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... childhood! how affection clings And hovers round thee with her seraph wings! Dearer thy hills, though clad in autumn brown, Than fairest summits which the cedars crown! Sweeter the fragrance of thy summer breeze Than all Arabia breathes along the seas! The stranger's gale wafts ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... speaker was visible to but few in the room there was no doubt as to her identity, or as to the person addressed as feyther. Mary Powlett was indeed the niece and not the daughter of Luke Marner, but as he had brought her up from childhood she looked upon him as her father. It was her accent and the tone of her voice which rendered it unnecessary for any of those ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... must differ. There is such a thing as genius, and where that is there is but small question of rules or even of youth or age, maturity or immaturity. And even apart from the question of genius the mind of childhood is a very precious thing, and "the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." Nay, the mere fact of youth with its trials, is a great thing; we shall never again have such a chance, such fresh, responsive hearts, such capacity for feeling—for suffering—that school ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... considered as an image of the year, and the year as the representation of life. The morning answers to the spring, and the spring to childhood and youth; the noon corresponds to the summer, and the summer to the strength of manhood. The evening is an emblem of autumn, and autumn of declining life. The night with its silence and darkness shows the winter, in which all the powers ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... understand, no, nor can the wisest philosopher who ever lived; and a most important word too; for we cannot get rid of it, we cannot help thinking of it, cannot help saying it all our life long from childhood to the grave. After death, too, we shall probably be saying that word to ourselves, each of us, for ever and ever. If the whole universe, sun, moon, and stars, and all that we ever thought of, or can think of, were destroyed and ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... is in a more restricted field, but it discloses no less the nobility of a right-minded child, and how loyalty wins the way to noble deeds and life. This is another beautiful literary creation of Hector Malot which every one can recommend as an ennobling book, of interest not only to childhood, page by page to the thrilling conclusion, but to every person who loves romance ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... good night downstairs. I left Miss Seymour reading sentimental ballads on pauper childhood to the old ladies; it must now be close ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... of a psychiatrist, who told him that his rejection of murder had its roots in an unhappy childhood. The phobia had been further complicated by the traumatic qualities of his experience in the Dream Shop. Because of this, murder, the highest social good, had become repugnant to him. This antimurder neurosis ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... in the past, And be a child again, and die at last In the protecting arms of our great Mother Who bore us both, O well-beloved brother. Thou in thy sorry dreams, I in my childish grief, Thy heart in tears, mine eyes amazed with tears, Thy sorrow rich with the repining years, My sorrow frail as childhood, and as brief." Who art thou, haunting boy, nocturnal elf? "I am the Dead; the Dead that was thyself." Then falls a darkness on that starless shore. Afar I hear the closing ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... in language of my own, the maiden's story is in substance the same as she related. Yet were not these things narrated as past events; she merely recounted them as impressions of her childhood, and of her destiny yet unaccomplished. And mystical as the tale most assuredly was, my knowledge of the strange arts of the island priesthood, and the rapt fancies indulged in by many of their victims, deprived it in good part of the effect it ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... return was hailed with such joy as reconciled him to domestic life. He forgot little Atala Judici, for excesses of profligacy had reduced him to the volatility of feeling that is characteristic of childhood. But the happiness of the family was dashed by the change that had come over him. He had been still hale when he had gone away from his home; he had come back almost a hundred, broken, bent, and his expression ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... as sheep, cows, dogs, and barn-yard fowls, were animals of the past, which the majority of the onlookers had only read about or seen pictures of, or perhaps, in a few cases, heard described in childhood, by grandfathers long since sleeping ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... feeling throughout the world that there is an analogy between the individual man and organized society. There are books written to show that States must and do pass through the various stages through which an individual passes, namely, infancy, childhood, youth, middle age, old age, decay. By a perfectly natural parallel the majority of men apply the same morality to the State which they apply to the individual, and they insist upon it that a State must be moral in every respect; that it must have a conscience; that it must have virtue; that ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... of the young savage. Content received a merited and grateful reward for his prudence, in the approbation of one whom he still continued to revere with a mental dependence little less than that with which he had leaned on his father's wisdom in the days of his childhood. ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... mistake in calling my brother, John Sherman, an abolitionist. We have been separated since childhood—I in the army, and he pursuing his profession of law in Northern Ohio; and it is possible we may differ in general sentiment, but I deny that he is considered at home an abolitionist; and, although he prefers the free institutions under which he lives to those of slavery which prevail here, ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... from agitation of mind, such as pain, cupidity, passion, and fear, because those feelings have the force of necessity, bring authority and belief. And of this kind are those circumstances from which at times the truth is discovered; childhood, sleep, ignorance, drunkenness, insanity. For children have often indicated something, though ignorant to what it related; and many things have often been discovered by sleep, and wine, and insanity. Many men also have without knowing ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... in Mary Olivier's search for Reality, her relations with her mother, father and three brothers, and her final passage from the bondage of infancy, the conflicts of childhood and adolescence, the disenchantments (and other drawbacks) of maturity, to the freedom, peace ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... translation published in this country simultaneously with the issue of the French edition. Containing all the essential facts of Millet's outward life, besides a great number of the artist's letters, together with his autobiographical reminiscences of childhood, Sensier's work is the principal source of information, from which all later writers draw. Yet it is not an altogether fair and satisfactory presentation of Millet's life. Undue emphasis is laid upon his struggles with poverty, and the ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... right, Miss Huntington," Mr. Lawrence said, bestowing a glance of approbation upon her, and secretly well pleased with this evidence of her decision of character, "and it would have been far better if Bertha had had a firm rule like this from early childhood. All her other governesses have yielded to her, and I fear I have not carried as steady a hand with her as I should have done. Keep on as you have begun, Miss Huntington, and you will secure my unbounded gratitude, if you can conquer this ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... aurora may be even more beautiful than usual, its waving draperies more fantastic, more gorgeous-hued, but it is unnoticed by the Lapps who have seen it from childhood. Men, women, children, servants, guests, and animals, crowd into the small, low homes, without a thought of Santa Claus coming to visit them. Children have no stockings to hang up, and there are no chimneys for Santa to descend. In fact, he and his reindeer, with their loads ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... at home, three years at an Indian day school half a mile from her home, and two years in the central school of the City of Brantford was the extent of her educational training. But besides this she acquired a wide general knowledge, having been, through childhood and early girlhood, a great reader, especially of poetry. Before she was twelve years old she had read every line of Scott's poems, every line of Longfellow, much of Byron, Shakespeare, and such books as Addison's "Spectator," Foster's Essays and ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... intent upon collecting the reminiscences of his childhood, that he had failed to perceive the effect it had upon his companion, and the darkness now prevented his face from being seen—but the agonized sobs that broke from him now and then told that the fountains of his heart were stirred, ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... large collection of songs for the nursery, for childhood, for boys and for girls, and sacred songs for all. The range of subjects is a wide one, and the book is handsomely ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... nieces, one of whom, Lizzie, as we called her, had the beautiful eyes—the grand features in both the poet and his sister. Those eyes of his sister Elizabeth are most touchingly alluded to by Whittier when he refers to his sister's childhood in ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... morsels that he could find, eyeing her all the while, and saying that she must take plenty of nutriment or her beauty would suffer and her strength wane. Benita bethought her of the fairy tales of her childhood, in which the ogre fed up the princess whom ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... me down the long trail of years. Evermore that April day stands out as the beginning of things for me. Dim are the days behind it, a jumble of happy childish hours, each keen enough as the things of childhood go; but from that one day to the present hour the unforgotten deeds of busy years run clearly in my memory as I lift my pen to write somewhat of ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... frequently than his only son Harry. War had been that young gentleman's chief joy in life from the cradle. He began by shaking his fat fists at the Universe in general. War-to-the-knife with nurse was the chronic condition of a stormy childhood. Intermittent warfare with his only sister Emmie chequered the sky of his early boyhood, and a decided tendency to disobey wrung the soul of his poor mother, and was the cause of no little anxiety to his father; while mischief, pure and simple for ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... his errors. He compares the poet of the Odyssey to the sunset: the Iliad is noonday work, the Odyssey is touched with the glow of evening—the softness and the shadows. "Old age naturally leans," like childhood, "towards the fabulous." The tide has flowed back, and left dim bulks of things on the long shadowy sands. Yet he makes an exception, oddly enough, in favour of the story of the Cyclops, which really is the most fabulous and crude of the fairy tales in the first and greatest of romances. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... comprehensive view. The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix every locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good deal moved. I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.' The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again—convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that; for they forced ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... were first cousins, and nearly of the same age. They had spent much of their time together in their childhood, and their early attachment to each other, strengthening as they grew older, was now becoming something more than girlish affection. Anne was an only daughter; and Elizabeth, though the eldest of a large family, had not ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that Mr. Howells would consider it a chastisement to be hopelessly ennobled. But my thoughts went wanderting back at my breakfast to-day to those far-away times, the fresh memory of which was still reverberating about my childhood, when the last new Duke was an ardent and ingenuous young patriot, who never dreamed of being a peer, and who hoped to refashion his country to the harp of Amphion. So I turned, with assuredly no feeling of disrespect, to that ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... illusions, feels all chilly and bare amidst the ice of reality, then he returns to the joys of infancy, he warms himself again with the memory of his mother, and sits once again in the pleasant corner of the family fire-side, on the little stool of his childhood. ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... story," began Mrs. Home: then she paused, and continued, "My father died when I was two years old. During my father's lifetime I, who am now so poor, had all the comforts that you must have had, Miss Harman, in your childhood. He died, leaving my mother, who was both young and pretty, nothing. She was his second wife, for five years she had enjoyed all that his wealth could purchase for her. He died, leaving her absolutely penniless. My mother was, as I have said, a second wife. My father had two grown-up sons. These ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... the least honourable part of his nature, fell suddenly to nothing, and Frank dropped with his head beside the white face upon the pillow, and lay with his arm across the woman whom he loved, and sobbed as he had not sobbed since his childhood. Her cheek was wet with his tears. He never saw the doctor until he came beside him and touched ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... observes must feel and reflect; and whoever feels and reflects must soon lose the simple faith of childhood. We shall see!" said Bee, rising and drawing her gray silk scarf ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... lead me by the hand, And let my heart have rest, And bring me back to childhood land, To find again the long-lost band Of playmates ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... The anvil din of steel, as on the silk The slash of rending, so upon the strings Her plectrum fell. . . . Then silence over us. No sound broke the charmed air. The autumn moon Swam silver o'er the tide, as with a sigh The stranger stirred to go. "I passed," said she, "My childhood in the capital; my home Was near the hills. A girl of twelve, I learnt The magic of the lute, the passionate Blending of lute and voice that drew the souls Of the great masters to acknowledgment; And lovely women, envious of my face, Bowed at the shrine in secret. ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... sort of brotherly-love tone that struck a stranger, at first, as very curious. This was, in a great measure, attributable to the fact that the social circle had been for years a constant quantity, and everybody in it had known everybody else since childhood. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... without division or intestine sedition; my judgment is to have all the blame or all the praise; and the blame it once has, it has always; for almost from my infancy it has ever been one: the same inclination, the same turn, the same force; and as to universal opinions, I fixed myself from my childhood in the place where I resolved to stick. There are some sins that are impetuous, prompt, and sudden; let us set them aside: but in these other sins so often repeated, deliberated, and contrived, whether sins of complexion or sins of profession and vocation, I cannot conceive that ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... an arch, and would please every one, would be to collect all the Burmese residents in the district in their best dresses, and allow them to group themselves as their artistic minds would suggest; their grouping and posing would be something to remember. Burmese woman study movement from childhood, and nothing more beautiful could be conceived than their colour schemes; I've seen arrangement of colours to-day in dresses, delicate as harmonies in Polar ice, and others rich and strong as the colours of a ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... Which from remotest glens two warring winds Involve in fire which not the loosened fountain Of broadest floods might quench, shall all the kinds 1075 Of evil, catch from our uniting minds The spark which must consume them;—Cythna then Will have cast off the impotence that binds Her childhood now, and through the paths of men Will pass, as the charmed bird that haunts the serpent's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Moore intended us to see in this creation of his fancy a sweet, amiable, but most unfortunate young woman, whereas all he has told us about her points to an exactly opposite conclusion. In reality, he wished us to see a young lady who had been an habitual complainer from her earliest childhood; whose plants had always died as soon as she bought them, while those belonging to her neighbours had flourished. The inference is obvious, nor can we reasonably doubt that Moore intended us to draw it; if her plants were the very first to fade ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... be her mother felt the pleasure of childhood when the Adjutant, revisiting an old corps and finding them doing the same faithful work as during her term, would beam upon them and remark,' Still at ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... now living in the village, who, in their childhood, were supposed to be healed by this superstitious ceremony, derived down perhaps from our Saxon ancestors, who practiced it before their conversion ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... purchase of real estate and tithes, till he became the wealthiest citizen of his native town. He was also the owner of improved property in London, near St. Paul's Cathedral, bought three years before his death. No doubt the bitter recollections of the privations of his childhood, and the humiliations resulting from his father's heedless improvidence, stimulated his purpose to retrieve the misfortunes of his family, establish them in comfort and dignity amid the familiar scenes of his youth, and retire ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... cousin once removed to Kew and Kew's sister Jay, and had kindly brought them up from childhood. He was now at the further end of the sixties, and embittered by many things: an unsuitable marriage, the approach of the psalmist's age-limit, incurably modern surroundings, an internal complaint, and a haunting wish to relieve the Government of the management of the War. These drawbacks were ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... childhood. You and I, sister, know something about it; now don't we? Do you remember that little red school-house where we learned our letters, and the old broken-limbed apple-tree behind it? No wonder the limbs got scraggly; they couldn't stand horse for a whole school, year after year, without some ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... me. I blessed my brothers who had enriched my childhood with the lore of out-of-doors. I blessed even the difficult circumstances of my father's finances, which had forced me as a little girl to seek my pleasures in fields and woods and tilled gardens. Had ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... and the hopelessness of the old scrambling misrule of which he is the representative. But the tragedy of the Rival Kings (Kongsemnerne) is left for Ibsen to work out in full; the portraits of Skule and Hacon are only given in outline. In the part describing Hacon's childhood among the veterans of the Old Guard (Sverre's men, the "ancient Birchlegs"), and in a few other places, there is a lapse into the proper Icelandic manner. Elsewhere, and in the more important parts of the history especially, it would ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... feel sure now, that it was something to do with Vere. I was, I became deeply interested in Vere—interested in a new way. She was growing up. She was passing from childhood into girlhood. She was developing swiftly. That development fascinated me. Of course I had always been very fond of Vere. But this summer she meant more to me than she had meant. One day—it was the day I came back to the island after my visit ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... the inalienable right of every person, from childhood on, to have access to knowledge. In our form of society, this right of the individual takes on a special meaning, for the education of all our citizens is imperative to the maintenance and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... At length the time is come, when Spain shall be From the long yoke of Moorish tyrants free. All causes seem to second our design, And heaven and earth in their destruction join. When empire in its childhood first appears, A watchful fate o'ersees its tender years; Till, grown more strong, it thrusts and stretches out, And elbows all the kingdoms round about: The place thus made for its first breathing free, It moves again for ease and luxury; Till, swelling ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... began the consoling verses. She stopped suddenly, however, for the doctor did not seem to listen. He was sitting motionless, holding his hand before his eyes. Thinking that he had fallen asleep, she remained silent. But the verses had recalled his childhood days; he seemed to hear his mother and see her loving eyes, for when he was a little boy she had sung this song to him. A long time he sat there, till he discovered that Heidi ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... of Florence, and took up arms for the Guelf faction, to which his family belonged. He fought in 1289 at the battle of Campaldino against the city of Arezzo and the Ghibellines who had taken possession of that city. Florence had been strangely peaceful in his childhood because the Guelfs were her unquestioned masters at the time. It must have {23} been a relief to Florentines to ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... days of her youth, pictured a life with any of these men in it, and the future was suddenly tremendous, unfathomable. There were vast possibilities in it of misery, of danger, of difficulty; and behind these a vague, new feeling of a possible happiness far exceeding the happiness of her peaceful childhood. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... arm, in the blush and wealth of unspent love, asking to go with him, who loved her better than his life. But in a quick vision he saw her with him, she who was delicately nurtured and used from childhood to all that care and money could give, he saw her with him, sharing his misery, his hunger and his wandering, suffering silently for love's sake, but suffering much, and he could not bear ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... excitement of 1843 was agitating certain parts of North America, in one place at least a little band of white-robed people ascended a hill in sure expectation of the Second Advent, and patiently returned to be the laughing stock of their neighbours. This tradition, as I heard it in my childhood, was repeated as if it embodied nothing but eccentricity and absurdity, yet it naturally struck a child's mind with peculiar feelings of awe and pathos. Such an event appeared picturesque matter for a story. It was not easy ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Galland, a Frenchman, continued (1823) by Von Hammer an Austro-German, and finished by Mr. John Payne (1882-84) an Englishman. But we must not forget that it is wholly and solely to the genius of the Gaul that Europe owes "The Arabian Nights' Entertainments" over which Western childhood and youth have spent so many spelling hours. Antoine Galland was the first to discover the marvellous fund of material for the story-teller buried in the Oriental mine; and he had in a high degree that art of telling a tale which is far more captivating than culture ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... countryside. You must not consider Josie O'Gorman an especially brave girl, for she had no thought of fear in such solitary wanderings. Although but seventeen years of age, she had been reared from early childhood in an atmosphere of intrigue and mystery, for her detective father had been accustomed to argue his cases and their perplexities with his only child and for hours at a time he would instruct her in all the details of his profession. It was ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... into heartfelt tears, "Yes, yes," she cried, "my hourly fears, My dreams, have boded all too right,— We part—forever part—to-night! I knew, I knew it could not last,— 'T was bright, 't was heavenly, but 't is past! O, ever thus, from childhood's hour, I've seen my fondest hopes decay; I never loved a tree or flower But 't was the first to fade away. I never nursed a dear gazelle, To glad me with its soft black eye, But when it came to know me well, And love me, it was sure to die! Now, too, the joy most ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... a memory for faces and attitudes; with me this memory has always been strongly developed. I remember the playmates of my childhood, and I see them as they were at six and ten years of age, without the slightest confusion ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... their departure, narrated how they approached the sacred edifice, ever dear to them, by the most hallowed associations, and with tears in their eyes kissed its very walls, how they made an emphatic pause in losing sight of the romantic scenes of their childhood, with its kirks and cots, and thousand memories, and as if taking a formal and lasting adieu, uncovered their heads and waived their bonnets three times towards the scene, and then with heavy steps and aching hearts ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... indeed, the presumption to correct Rousseau, or to substitute an expurgated "Emile" for the authentic "Emile." We have simply wished to draw the attention of the teachers of childhood to those pages of this book which have least grown old, which can still be of service, can hasten the downfall of the old systems, can emphasize, by their energy and beauty of language, methods already inaugurated and reforms already undertaken. These methods and reforms cannot be too often recommended ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... view, Galton collected the history of eighty pairs of identical twins, thirty-five cases being accompanied by very full details, which showed that the twins were really as nearly identical, in childhood, as one could expect to find. On this point, Galton's inquiries were careful, and the replies satisfactory. They are not, however, as he remarks, much varied in character. "When the twins are children, they are usually distinguished ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... their windows, they must be put to death. The Turks have I know not how many black, deformed eunuchs (for the white serve for other ministeries) to this purpose sent commonly from Egypt, deprived in their childhood of all their privities, and brought up in the seraglio at Constantinople to keep their wives; which are so penned up they may not confer with any living man, or converse with younger women, have a cucumber or carrot sent into them for their diet, but sliced, for ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... fatal ring, Unless by Heaven's peculiar grace, escape. There we grow early gray, but never wise; There form connections, and acquire no friend; Solicit pleasure hopeless of success; Waste youth in occupations only fit For second childhood, and devote old age To sports which only childhood could excuse. There they are happiest who dissemble best Their weariness; and they the most polite, Who squander time and treasure with a smile, Though at their own destruction. She that ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... deceased had resided in the village from childhood. They had inhabited one of the neatest cottages, and by various rural occupations, and the assistance of a small garden, had supported themselves creditably and comfortably, and led a happy and a blameless life. They had one son, who had grown up to be the staff and pride of ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... have beheld my own dear home, and the old, familiar faces,—all stony, pale, and dim. At such times, how painfully the exile's heart is tried by the apparition of any object, however insignificant, to which his happy childhood was accustomed! I think my heart was never more sharply wrung than once at Prome, in the porch of a grim old temple of Guadma;—a kitten was playing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... I feel like anything but laughing it is only a passing malignity of soul. I see myself double, like a melancholy Highlander. In your presence my long happy childhood passes bodily before my eyes. All the joy and pain it brought me I feel as vividly again as though I were still the boy who went into the wood for you in search of wild adventures and caught robin-red-breasts. And yet the fine creature I see before me is so different ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... From his childhood Luther was thus trained and attempered to fear God, reverence truth and honesty, and hate hypocrisy and lies. Possibly his parents were severer with him than was necessary, but it was well for him, as the prospective prophet of a new era, to learn ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... well knew—that they were men who "couldn't say No." So keenly were the three sisters alive to this fault—it could hardly be called a crime, and yet in its consequences it was so—so sickening the terror of it which their own wretched experience had implanted in their minds, that during Ascott's childhood and youth his very fractiousness and roughness, his little selfishness, and his persistence in his own will against theirs, had been hailed by his aunts as a good omen that he would grow up "so ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... son, who died at five years old, and described the graces and beauties of his countenance, the prettiness of his expression, the vivacity of his understanding, which began to shine through the veil of childhood: "I had still left me," says he, "my son Quintillian, in whom I placed all my pleasure and all my hopes, and comfort enough I might have found in him; for, having now entered into his tenth year, he did not produce only ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... oneness may also prevent the too frequent heart-burnings among shy and sensitive children. This is as easily cultivated as is the opposite, and is of great importance both in childhood and in later life. The seeming injustice of the teacher may often be made clear, and seen to be just, when the welfare of the whole school is taken into consideration. This is a matter of the natural enlargement of the child's mental horizon, and if the proper ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... practice, and practice begun in early youth. Some of the extraordinary feats attributed to the outlaws in the woods and to the archers of the ancient English army are quite possible, but must have necessitated the constant use of a bow from childhood, so that it became second nature. But almost any man who has strength to set a cross-bow, with moderate practice, and any idea at all of shooting, could become a fairly good shot with it. From the cross-bow to a gun was a comparatively easy step, and it ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... afraid of you, but being as you are, and you and I both so young, I feel only that I have made your acquaintance twelve years ago, and have already a right to your intimacy; at all events it does seem as if we were destined, from our earliest childhood, to be friends. I wonder whether you feel as strangely drawn towards me as I do to you; I have never had a friend—shall I find one now?" She sighed, and her fine dark ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... golden glade, and with all their faces mistily glorified by the evening light, he saw a group of little girls, singing and dancing as they performed some quaint and graceful pageant of childhood. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... wisdom and care in his regard. Society professes to respect it, and so it does, but it subjects it to so many untimely trials and injurious customs, that that very respect is fearful. A young girl, fresh from childhood, blossoming into a woman, rosy health in her veins, innocence in her heart, caroling gaiety in her laugh, buoyant life in her step, the rich glance of an opening soul in her eye, grace in her form with the casket of mind richly jeweled, is indeed an object of beauty. ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... Sported in youthful days near the fountain adjoining the market, And from the rudeness of boys I often managed to save them. But those days have long pass'd the maidens grew up, and with reason Stop now at home and avoid the rougher pastimes of childhood. Well brought up with a vengeance they are! To please you, I sometimes Went to visit them, just for the sake of olden acquaintance But I was never much pleased at holding intercourse with them, For they were always finding fault, and I had to bear it First my coat ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... mother—quite unconscious, meanwhile, of the conclusions she suggested to Miss Chancellor. Tarrant was a moralist without moral sense—that was very clear to Olive as she listened to the history of his daughter's childhood and youth, which Verena related with an extraordinary artless vividness. This narrative, tremendously fascinating to Miss Chancellor, made her feel in all sorts of ways—prompted her to ask herself whether the girl ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... wild lament: "Ah, he who ever freely did His duty ere his sire could bid, Our refuge and our sure defence, This day will go an exile hence, He on Kausalya loves to wait Most tender and affectionate, And as he treats his mother, thus From childhood has he treated us. On themes that sting he will not speak, And when reviled is calm and meek. He soothes the angry, heals offence: He goes to-day an exile hence. Our lord the king is most unwise, And looks on life with doting eyes, Who in his folly casts ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... silent after that. He was engrossed with thoughts connected with his unexpected return to the home of his childhood; and in imagination could see the excitement their unheralded appearance was certain ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... who really had a nominal right to the title. Not that it was an unfamiliar word to her. The old aunt who had occupied the mother's place in the household since Ruth was a wee creature of two years, she had learned almost from the instincts of childhood to call "mamma." And as she grew older and was unused to any other name for Mrs. Wheeler, the widowed aunt, she toned it into the familiar and comfortable word "mother," and had always spoken to and of ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... the present is much less familiar to us, in its petty details, than the past, with childhood's glow upon it. I see plainly in my memory what my prentice eyes saw; and I should never succeed in reproducing with the same accuracy what I saw last week. I know my village thoroughly, though I quitted it so long ago; and I know hardly anything of the towns to which ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... being could have passed a happier childhood than myself. My parents were possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence. We felt that they were not the tyrants to rule our lot according to their caprice, but the agents and creators of all the many delights which we enjoyed. ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... debatable ground, and have no desire to enter an argument upon the subject. It is doubtless better to believe the tenets taught us in our childhood, than to seek at mature age to unravel a mystery which it is self-evident the Great Creator never intended that man in this state of existence should become acquainted with. However, I'll say no more on such a subject, it is quite foreign to the matter of my travels, and does not ease my fever ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... and recalls so many blighted hopes. The child had gone into the house. Bertrande, still sitting at the door, resting her forehead on her hand, thought sadly of her uncle's words; recalling in imagination the past scenes which they suggested, the time of their childhood, when, married so young, they were as yet only playmates, prefacing the graver duties of life by innocent pleasures; then of the love which grew with their increasing age; then of how this love became altered, changing on her side into passion, on his ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... more inclined than I had ever done since my childhood to burst into tears. I think I should have done so from very vexation and disappointment, had I not been obliged to hurry to my station, putting my letter in my pocket as I ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... Hood or Red Riding, Who peasant and prince have delighted, Despite of all social dividing, And the times of their childhood united. ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... circumstances and particulars that concerned the person of Richard, Duke of York, which he was to act, describing unto him the personages, lineaments, and features of the King and Queen, his pretended parents; and of his brother and sisters, and divers others, that were nearest him in his childhood; together with all passages, some secret, some common, that were fit for a child's memory, until the death of King Edward. Then she added the particulars of the time from the King's death, until he and his brother were committed to the Tower, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... has the entire charge of the nursery, and the mother is too much occupied to do more than pay a daily visit to it, it is desirable that she be a person of observation, and possess some acquaintance with the diseases incident to childhood, as also with such simple remedies as may be useful before a medical attendant can be procured, or where such attendance is not considered necessary. All these little ailments are preceded by symptoms so minute as to be only perceptible to close observation; such as ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... die young he hath left us at dinner; it is bed-time with a man of three score and ten; and he that lives a hundred years hath walked a mile after supper. This life is but one day of three meals, or one meal of three courses—childhood, youth, and old age. To sup well is to live well, and that's ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... an instant, as Alice leaped, with the happy facility of childhood, totally out of one ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... affected in his blooming face; and, while a happy temper played about his lips, there was a light in his large blue eyes, reminding the beholder of his great father, from whom he also inherited a forehead which, when the attractions of his childhood had passed away, would at once assert his manly ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... thronged with whey-faced apes, the moisture of whose brains has exuded in nourishing a frowning hedge, of which the dark luxuriance encircles the whole face, resembling the old pictures of the saints wherewith our childhood was amused, encompassed with a glory! When the whiskered 'petit-maitres' of Hyde-Park shall begin to transport their adorable persons to this new world on a summer's trip, they will be astonished not a little to be stared at on landing through opera-glasses ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... pacific league, when backed by the league's guarantee that no colony from the Fatherland will be exposed to the eventual risk of coming under the discretionary tutelage of the German Imperial establishment and so falling into a relation of step-childhood ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... me, at that instant, that I ever should have looked upon him differently, I, who had sat upon his knee in my childhood, and cried myself to sleep within his arms, why should I shrink from him now, when his shoulders were bending with their burden of sorrow, and his hair growing silver, with the bitter touches ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... pays in still other coin for the repressions arising from faulty childhood training. Unable to find expression for herself either in marriage or in devotion to work, because some old childish repression is still denying all outlet to her legitimate desire, she frequently falls into a neurosis; or if she escapes a real breakdown, she gives expression to ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... when the pin feathers are just appearing on his upper jaw and when the world is all before him to conquer and lay at his feet, has deliberately shot six No. 40 calibre bullets into various places in the person of his venerable father, who has nurtured him from childhood, stored his mind with useful knowledge, or perchance played mumblety peg with a shingle across the place where in later years another father may plant oblong pieces of leather, because of his habit of leaning his youthful stomach across the gate ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... crept. Mine eyes no more Had knowledge of her; yet there mov'd from her A hidden virtue, at whose touch awak'd, The power of ancient love was strong within me. No sooner on my vision streaming, smote The heav'nly influence, which years past, and e'en In childhood, thrill'd me, than towards Virgil I Turn'd me to leftward, panting, like a babe, That flees for refuge to his mother's breast, If aught have terrified or work'd him woe: And would have cried: "There is no ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... violently and irrevocably from earth. The instinct of command, loftiness and breadth of views, find their place with the holy priest and with the nun; the mind of M. de St. Cyran was less practical and his judgment less simple than that of the abbess, habituated as she had been from childhood to govern the lives of her nuns as their conscience. A reformer of more than one convent since the day when she had closed the gates of Port-Royal against her father, M. Arnauld, in order to restore the strictness of the cloister, Mother Angelica ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... entrance, an old iron kettle hanging on a projecting root, a coffee pot standing on a ledge of a rock, and fragments of broken dishes scattered about, and entered with all her heart into an adventure so suddenly recalling the vanished scenes of her gypsy childhood. The eyes of the boy glistened with delight as he perceived the ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... curiosity. She wondered what the first wife had been like, whether she could make doughnuts, and, above all, if she had been pretty. Sometimes she remembered, with a wild impulse to tell him because it seemed so desperately funny to her, the unhappy couple that had formed a part of her childhood's memories, who used to quarrel violently whenever the husband drank too much, and his wife, in his helplessness, used ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... long, perhaps, upon a threadbare subject; yet it brings up with it a thousand delicious recollections of those happy days of childhood, when the imperfect knowledge I have since obtained had not yet dawned upon my mind, and when a fairy tale was true history to me. I have often been so transported by the pleasure of these recollections, as almost to wish that I had been born in the days when the ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... Having from childhood shown a propensity towards painting, the strong inclination was fostered by his parents, and art was looked upon as his future profession. Upon leaving school about 1843, he studied first at an art academy ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... The only modern thing, save the freshly gathered leaves,—which also seemed but a memory of his childhood,—to remind him of the present and the errand upon ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... character, Bonaparte fixed upon him as one of the pillars for the reestablishment of the Catholic worship, made him an Archbishop of Paris, and procured him the rank of a Cardinal from Rome. But he is now in his second childhood, entirely directed by his grand vicaries, Malaret, De Mons, and Legeas, who are in the pay of, and absolutely devoted to, Bonaparte. An innocent instrument in their hands, of those impious compliments pronounced by him to the Emperor and the Empress, he did not, perhaps, even understand ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... subjective mind that they became a part of him, and actions in conformity with those lessons became afterward almost automatic. Alexander and Napoleon are perhaps the best illustrations of this passionate grasping of military principles; for though both had been educated from childhood in military matters, the science of strategy was almost non-existent in concrete form, and both men were far too young to have been able to devote much time or labor to it. But each was a genius of the highest type, and reached decisions ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... girls' names that she would like to ask; and Mrs. Ripwinkley looked at it with a smile. There was Ada Geoffrey, the banker's daughter, and Lilian Ashburne, the professor's,—heiresses each, of double lines of birth and wealth. She could remember how, in her childhood, the old names sounded, with the respect that was in men's tones when they were spoken; and underneath were Lois James and Katie Kilburnie, children of a printer and a hatter. They had all been ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... parents and guardians, is not a free agent. Lazy fathers are tempted to support themselves in idleness on the wages of their young children. Often poverty leads the parents to rob their children of health, of schooling, and of the joys of childhood. The competition of child-labor also depresses the wages of adults, and thus ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... his belt, and in an instant had stabbed him to the heart with his own weapon Tossing the dead body from the saddle, Grimoald seized the bridle and rode swiftly on, avoiding the Avars, and in the end rejoining his flying brothers. It was a deed worthy the childhood of one who was in time to become a ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... woman has stamped upon me, the grief that has broken my heart, the heart of the friend and playmate of her childhood, in no way affects M. de Bragelonne, an excellent officer, a courageous leader, who will cover himself with glory at the first encounter, and who will become a hundred times greater than Mademoiselle de la Valliere is to-day, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... "Why, down below, we think of youth as being so generous and ardent and imitative! We speak of youth as the time to learn, and form fine habits; if a man is wilful and selfish in after-life, we say that it was because he was too much indulged in childhood—and we attach great importance to the impressions ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the cocoa-nut, the palm, the mango, the tree-fern, the banana, will remain clear and separate; but the thousand beauties which unite these into one perfect scene must fade away: yet they will leave, like a tale heard in childhood, a picture full of indistinct, but ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... lamb; and the employment of her intellectual faculties, or the acquirement of a new idea, gives her a vivid pleasure, which is plainly marked in her expressive features. She never seems to repine, but has all the buoyancy and gaiety of childhood. She is fond of fun and frolic, and when playing with the rest of the children, her shrill laugh sounds ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... parallels, even in the tenderness between a father and child. I know, Doctor Manette—how can I fail to know—that, mingled with the affection and duty of a daughter who has become a woman, there is, in her heart, towards you, all the love and reliance of infancy itself. I know that, as in her childhood she had no parent, so she is now devoted to you with all the constancy and fervour of her present years and character, united to the trustfulness and attachment of the early days in which you were lost ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... that is only a prejudice from childhood—one hears his nurse cry out—one is afraid—and the impression sticks. But if you should consider the spider with a strong microscope, you would be astonished at the finish of his members, at their admirable arrangement, and ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... had, has scared her so that I protest I have never been tranquil; and, were I not the most long-suffering creature in the world, would have liked to be rid of the whole pack of you. And now, forsooth, that you have grown out of childhood, long petticoats, chicken-pox, small-pox, whooping-cough, scarlet fever, and the other delectable accidents of puerile life, what must that unconscionable woman propose but to arrange the south rooms as a nursery for possible grandchildren, and set up the Captain with a wife, and make him marry ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... imaginary work which must of necessity deal with the supernatural, without running into a mere riot of fantastic absurdity; but genius Miss Ingelow has, and the story of Jack is as careless and joyous, but as delicate, as a picture of childhood. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... I shall want every one I love around me to share in my happiness; and you, dear Peg, are associated with some of the brightest recollections of my childhood." ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... our mental and spiritual faculties, the need for exercise is still more urgent. To neglect to exercise a given limb, or organ, or sense, or faculty, would result in its becoming weak, flabby, and in the last resort useless. In childhood, when the stress of Nature's expansive forces is strongest, the neglect of exercise will, for obvious reasons, have most serious consequences. If a healthy child were kept in bed during the second and third years of his life, the damage done to his ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... The lesson that Hawthorne teaches is, that evil does not reside in error, but in neglecting to be instructed by our errors. It is this which makes the difference between a St. Paul and a Nero. The fall of man was only apparent; it was really a rise in life. The Garden of Eden prefigures the childhood of the human race. Do we not all go through this idyllic moral condition in childhood, learning through our errors that the only true happiness consists in self-control? Do not all judicious parents protect their children from a knowledge ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... it was no uncommon thing to hear about hidden treasures along our coast. Indeed, from earliest childhood I have heard of gangs of pirates burying treasures in many of our secret hiding-places; so common were such stories that we had ceased to pay attention to them. Consequently I had given but little attention to the conversation I had heard between Cap'n Jack and Betsey, neither did I attach much value ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... only change our time. Blessed be this slip of a boy who is a man before he is an infant, and teaches us what rapid transit can do for our race! The only thing that can possibly hinder us in our progress will be second childhood; ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... welded such a facile pen, is a source of the most poignant regret. It is a crying shame, for I think I am correct when I say that there does not exist on the civilized globe a statue of this peerless woman, but she will always live as long as there are infant minds to form, or tender recollections of childhood to remember. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... a refined and beautiful boy; framed for all spiritual delights. As his life is described, it has neither duties nor occupations; no concern with the outer world; no contact even with that of Adelaide, his supposed protectress. He is dreaming away his childhood in the silent gloom of the castle, or the sunny outdoor life of the hills and woods. He lives in imagination, blends the idea of his own being with everything he sees; and for years is happy in the bare fact ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... grave at the foot of the hill. She had played in childhood with that faithful old soldier. Many a tale had he told her of her gallant father when, as a young man, he gayly rode away to the wars, leaving her lady mother in tears behind. She could sympathize with waiting women now, and understand. Those were such deeds of daring ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... rollicking ease into our seats (for we are a bold, devil-may-care race, the C's of Battersea), and an oath is administered to us in a totally inaudible manner by an individual resembling an Army surgeon in his second childhood. We understand, however, that we are to well and truly try the case between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the bar, neither of whom has put in an ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... for nuns. It seems, however, that they have never played such an important part as in Buddhism. At the present time, the few female orders among the ['S]vetambara consist entirely of virgin widows, whose husbands have died in childhood, before the beginning of their life together. It is not necessary to look upon the admission of nuns among the ['S]vetambara as an imitation of Buddhist teaching, as women were received into some of the old Brahmanical orders; see my note to Manu, VIII, 363, (Sac. Bks. of the ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... awoke before it was light. To speak more strictly, they awoke before it was daylight; for a large lemon moon was only just setting in the forest of high grass above their heads, and the sky was of a vivid violet-blue, nocturnal but bright. Both men had simultaneously a reminiscence of childhood, of the elfin and adventurous time when tall weeds close over us like woods. Standing up thus against the large low moon, the daisies really seemed to be giant daisies, the dandelions to be giant dandelions. Somehow it reminded them of the dado of a ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... with her grave and gentle words, like the accompaniment that sustains and harmonises the voice of the singer. Her influence was one thing, not to be divided or discussed, only to be felt with gratitude and joy. To Will, her presence recalled something of his childhood, and the thought of her took its place in his mind beside that of dawn, of running water, and of the earliest violets and lilacs. It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that means. If the waifs grow up to be predatory animals, we must maintain them first of all in reformatories, and afterwards, at intervals during their lives, in prisons. If they grow up without shaking off the terrible mental darkness of their starveling childhood, we must provide for them in asylums. A thoroughly neglected waif costs this happy country something like fifteen pounds per year for the term of his natural life. Very good. At this point some hard-headed person says, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman |
