"Early childhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the disaster of beliefs through these magical books, and am free once more as in my early childhood to indulge myself in the iridescent idea of ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed and rocked in the tempest of emotion, was the strange reminiscence of early childhood in it all. It was like being a little boy again, nestling in an innocent, unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts. The tears he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous, unashamed tears ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... and loses that effeminate delicacy that provides for nothing and cares for nothing but its own selfish, quiet enjoyment, I shall rejoice with joy unspeakable. My strong hands have tilled the fields; and in my early childhood have harnessed the horse, and brought the wood to the door; have led him to the blacksmith's shop to be shod. These are things I do not often tell in public. I have braved public opinion; I have tilled ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... over the details of her father's early life. They are, indeed, all she possesses of him, as she was still in early childhood when he died. So much and such charming narrations has she to give us of his military life, his musical ability, his courage and disinterestedness, that she herself does not manage to get born until nearly the end of the third ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... the State to let that pauper "grow up as best she could." It would probably have been money in the State's pocket had it surrounded "Margaret" in her early childhood with the choicest productions of art, engaged competent teachers to instruct her in the solid branches, in the accomplishments, in hygiene, in the principles and practice of integrity, and then have given her particular instruction in all matters ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... more to do. We need to prepare our children to read and succeed in school with improved Head Start and early childhood development programs. (Applause.) We must upgrade our teacher colleges and teacher training and launch a major recruiting drive with a great goal for America: a quality teacher ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... ventured to compose. After Glenfinlas, I undertook another ballad, called The Eve of St. John. The incidents, except the hints alluded to in the notes, are entirely imaginary; but the scene was that of my early childhood. Some idle persons had of late years during the proprietor's absence, torn down the iron-grated door of Smailholm Tower from its hinges, and thrown it down the rock." Sir Walter prevailed on the proprietor to repair the mischief, on condition that the young poet should write a ballad, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... "He does not doubt her sincerity in the least," thought Aunt Faith; "perhaps, after all, his influence will be strong enough to cure her one fault, the one blemish of her character, the tendency towards worldliness which I have noticed in her since early childhood." ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... and reprobate as the godless man seemed now, there had been a time when he had been rocked on the bosom of a mother,—cradled with prayers and pious hymns,—his now seared brow bedewed with the waters of holy baptism. In early childhood, a fair-haired woman had led him, at the sound of Sabbath bell, to worship and to pray. Far in New England that mother had trained her only son, with long, unwearied love, and patient prayers. Born of a hard-tempered sire, on whom that gentle woman ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to him a vivid impression of sudden light in the room, and he knew that something very familiar was happening to him, yet something that had not happened consciously for thirty years and more —since his early childhood in the night-nursery with the bars ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... that exactly. I have not seen enough of her. But I have seen nothing in her that I could wish to be different. She has had an unhappy life. Her troubles began in early childhood, and she has grown up among very painful surroundings. But I think you will say that no advantages could have given her more grace and ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... was a great believer in heredity, and the following personal experience may show him somewhat justified in his belief. In quite early childhood I commenced to feel a preference for the left side of my body: I washed, dried, and dressed the left side first; I preserved it carefully from all harm; I kept it warm. I was, comparatively speaking, totally indifferent to ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... before Mrs. Taylor began questioning Clotelle concerning her early childhood, and became more than ever satisfied that the slave-girl was in some way ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... that followed, every doubt he might have had as to her identity was dispelled. She talked freely of their early childhood, of their father's death, of their mother; she even spoke of her brother's coldness and hostility in terms which drove away the last shadow of doubt whether she was really his sister. But at first he made no corresponding revelations, remaining for ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... through early childhood, never saw their parents but happy and good-spirited. They never saw them worried nor ever saw them sad. That was, as one might say, Rosalie's chief offering to her darlings. It was splendid to Rosalie that her way of life, far from causing her (as prejudice would have prophesied) to neglect her ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... South Tipperary. He departed this life when I was about six years old yet I seem to remember him very clearly. A small, wiry, dapper man with a clean-shaven red face, a cold, light-blue eye and fiercely beetling brows, he occasionally filled my early childhood with terror. He usually wore knee-breeches, buckled shoes, a frieze coat, and a white choker. He had a most furious temper, and was consequently dreaded by his relations and his domestics. I remember once seeing him administer a terrible thrashing with a hunting-crop ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... of twelve children, of whom the first six died in early childhood, was born in Edinburgh, on the 15th of August, 1771. Of the six later-born children, all but one were boys, and the one sister was a somewhat querulous invalid, whom he seems to have pitied almost more than he loved. At the age of eighteen months the boy had a teething-fever, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... this part of the record of the Lord's work without observing her strong attachment to the children. In this she was very judicious. What momentous issues are at stake during early childhood. It is doubtless true that Christ meant to teach a practical lesson with reference to our tender watch-care of the little ones during His third brief interview with His disciples, after ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... he had trodden in early childhood, holding his mother's hand, where, at each recurring vacation during his school days, he had walked between his admiring sisters, in the consciousness that he was the pride of his family and of all the parish. ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... given on these occasions to social greetings; then followed familiar hymns, led by the piano and a volunteer choir of young people, after which an informal lecture was given by the pastor. Dr. Stueckenberg emigrated with his parents to America in early childhood, but has studied in the Universities of Halle, Goettingen, Berlin, and Tuebingen. His large acquaintance with German scholars enabled him to give most interesting reminiscences of the teaching and personality of some of these, his teachers and friends. Among the talks which we remember vividly ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... find it quickly. The Graded Index is intended primarily for the use of the parent. It sorts out and selects the best material for each age. First is given a brief, clear account of the tastes and needs of Infancy, Early Childhood, Middle Childhood, Late Childhood, and Adolescence. Then all the material in The BOOKSHELF is assorted under its score of important subjects, and put in the grade where it belongs. By this plan the child may be directed to what he wants and needs now, ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... days of early childhood are the forms of the Egyptian Pyramids, and now, as I approached them from the banks of the Nile, I had no print, no picture before me, and yet the old shapes were there; there was no change; they were just as I had always known them. I ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... pleasing recollections of the home of her early childhood, was one of a boy with curly black hair and smiling face, who brought her beautiful flowers, and made for her rabbits out of his handkerchief, and pretty little boats out of nut-shells. She remembered eagerly leaning over the water, ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... His early childhood, however, was passed almost wholly at Malaval, a tiny hamlet in the parish of Lavaysse, whose belfry was visible at quite a short distance; but to reach it one had to travel nearly twenty-five rough, mountainous miles, through a whole green countryside; ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... last the carriage stopped, and, by one of those stage effects so common in sleep, I found myself alone in a barn, without a fireplace, and open to the winds on all sides. I saw again my mother's gentle face, known only to me in my early childhood, the noble and stern countenance of my father, the little fair head of my sister, who was taken from us at ten years old; all my dead family lived again around me; they were there, exposed to the bitings of the cold and to the pangs of hunger. My mother prayed by the resigned old man, and my ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... The first impulse came perhaps in Russia in early childhood, where I got into the habit of regarding people around me as barbarous—neither ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... della Salario, a lady yet more distinguished for the sweetness of her manners and the gentleness of her disposition, than for her beauty. She brought the marquis one son and two daughters, who lost their amiable mother in early childhood. The arrogant and impetuous character of the marquis operated powerfully upon the mild and susceptible nature of his lady: and it was by many persons believed, that his unkindness and neglect put a period to her life. However this might be, he soon afterwards married Maria de Vellorno, ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... much-trodden Queen's path at Buxton, considering that it ascended steeply all the way, and made the solemn, much-enduring Earl pant for breath; but the Queen, her rheumatics for the time entirely in abeyance, bounded on with the mountain step learned in early childhood, and closely followed the brisk Emmott. The last ascent was a steep pull, taking away the disposition to speak, and at its summit Mary stood still holding out one hand, with a finger of the other on her lips ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... first time since early childhood, Martha blushed as she attempted to trip lightly upstairs. As a matter of fact, she DID trip on next to the top step and sprawled. Under ordinary circumstances she would have been as mad as a wet hen, but on this happy occasion she merely cried out, when her parents dashed into the ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... the most beautiful of all his poems Wordsworth calls by the cumbrous name of Intimations of Immorality from recollections of Early Childhood. This is his way of saying that when we are small we are nearer the wonder-world than when we grow up, and that when we first open our eyes on this world they have not quite forgotten the wonderful sights ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... did. I have heard that Adelpha hath kept the promise of early childhood to make a beautiful woman. When will ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... asleep on the cross. Murillo's Infant Saviour, plaiting a crown of thorns, also belongs to this class. These forms of symbolic illustration have their modern counterpart in the work of several German artists. As the Gospel narrative furnishes no actual incidents of the early childhood of Jesus, he is shown in some attitude which will suggest his divine calling. Painted by Ittenbach, he raises his right hand to point the heavenward way, while with his left he indicates his name inscribed ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... From early childhood I had been subject to a peculiar malady. I say malady for want of a better and truer word, for my condition had never been one of physical or mental suffering. According to my father's opinion, an attack of brain fever ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... assistant in the same business. John, a seven months' child, was born at the Swan and Hoop on 31 October, 1795. Three other children grew up—George, Thomas, and Fanny, John is said to have been violent and ungovernable in early childhood. He was sent to a very well-reputed school, that of the Rev. John Clarke, at Enfield: the son Charles Cowden Clarke, whom I have previously mentioned, was an undermaster, and paid particular attention to Keats. The latter did not show ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... my birth my father took to constantly travelling about. So it is no exaggeration to say that in my early childhood I hardly knew him. He would now and then come back home all of a sudden, and with him came foreign servants with whom I felt extremely eager to make friends. Once there came in this way a young Panjabi servant named Lenu. The cordiality ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... biography of a distinguished Negro churchman who for more than forty years rendered valuable service in the church in the United States. It begins with the usual account of the parentage, birth, and early childhood of the man and his preparation for his task, as is customary in biographical treatment. This part of the book brings out nothing particularly striking, except an appreciation of the valuable experiences of the subject of the sketch in his struggles ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... gentlemen. No ladies here? Good-evening, gentlemen. We going to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to play for me this evening?" It was the soft, amiable negro voice, like those I remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience in it. He had the negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have been repulsive if his face had not been so kindly ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... about with Rose, and was kept in her proper place by Annie, which revived in Doctor Millar the old regret that Providence had not blessed him with a son. He could not exactly make a son of May, since from her early childhood she was a little sensitive woman all over, but he did what he could. He had her taught Latin, Greek, and mathematics just to afford her the chance of being a scholar. He never told himself, and nobody ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... a fact more universally acknowledged than enforced or acted upon, that all great painters, of whatever school, have been great only in their rendering of what they had seen and felt from early childhood; and that the greatest among them have been the most frank in acknowledging this their inability to treat anything successfully but that with which they had been familiar. The Madonna of Raffaelle was born on the Urbino mountains, Ghirlandajo's ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... early as the 6th and 7th years presents are taken from their places of safe keeping or where they are on exhibition as ornaments, and kissed and fondled as expressions of love for the absent giver. This is interesting as evidence of love-fetichism appearing in early childhood. ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... and dislikes, family life and social surroundings, ambitions and prospects, memories and fancies, diet and habits must carefully be considered. Every element of a man's life history, impressions of early childhood, his love and his successes, his diseases and his distresses, his acquaintances and his reading, his talent, his character, his sincerity, his energy, his intelligence—everything—ought to determine the choice of the psychotherapeutic steps. As it is entirely impossible ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... her fourteenth year, though by some considered even prettier, was far less pleasing—pert, forward, and conceited as she had been in her early childhood; she was tall for her age, and with her perfect self-possession and grown-up air and manner, might be easily mistaken for seventeen. She had already more worldly wisdom than her sweet, fair niece would ever be able to attain, and was, in her own ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... church, his club and his home. He shared in its government; he took part in the stately ceremonies that honored its patron god; in the city he could indulge his taste for talking and for politics; here he found both safety and society. No wonder that an Athenian or a Roman learned, from early childhood, to love his city with ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... impertinent, of saying in this place that I have myself restored this ancient collegiate church, moved by Christian piety and by the affection which I bear to the venerable building, because it was my first instructress in my early childhood. This I did also because it appeared to me to be as it were abandoned, and it may now be said to have been called back to life from the dead. Besides increasing the light, for it was very dark, by enlarging the original windows and making new ones, I also took away the choir, which used ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... world, and those things are material and positive. Now, most religions are passive, and they tell us chiefly what we should not do." The doctor moved restlessly, and his eyes hunted for something along the opposite wall: "See here, my girl, take out the years of early childhood and the time we spend in sleep and dull old age, and we only have about twenty able, waking years. That's not long enough to get acquainted with half the fine things that have been done in the world, much less to do anything ourselves. ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... inn was kept by Henry Pickering, a man far above his occupation in manner, education, and culture. He had lived many years in France, where he had married a woman of good station, and where his only child, Bettina, whom we called Betty, was born and lived during her early childhood. Pickering's wife died in France, and his fortunes failed, so he returned to England, bought the Old Swan, ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... relation of the blush to age, Darwin says that early childhood knows nothing about blushing. It happens in youth more frequently than in old age, and oftener among women than among men. Idiots blush seldom, blind people and hereditary albinos, a great deal. The somatic process of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... important than all of the science, even the biology, that a man can learn in college. It is the business of the parent and teacher at this time to bring to birth and to sturdy growth high aims, purposes, ideals, the whole spiritual life. Your business in early childhood is with the physical, because that is the important thing at that time, if you can build a very healthy little animal, you have done well; but during the high school age you must build the spiritual. If you don't feel this, I cannot explain it to you; and ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... for granted that the expectant statue was to be unveiled within the next few days. I was glad to be in time—not knowing in how terribly good time I was—for the ceremony. Not since my early childhood had I seen the unveiling of a statue; and on that occasion I had struck a discordant note by weeping bitterly. I dare say you know that statue of William Harvey which stands on the Leas at Folkestone. You say you were present at the unveiling? Well, I was the child ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... this intimacy gave me a new insight into life, and revealed capacities and needs of the soul of which I had hitherto been ignorant. As I could never wholly break away from that love of chivalry which had been implanted in me in early childhood, it pleased me to look upon him as my "brother in arms," and I expressed a wish that he would give me this special title too, to the exclusion of every other intimate friend. He caught at the idea with a gladness of heart that showed me how lively was the sympathy between us. He declared that ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... study. Knowledge must come before action, and first-hand knowledge, acquired by observation, is worth more than theoretic acquirements; the first may supply for the second, but not the second for the first. There are two types of educators of early childhood which no theory could produce, and indeed no theory could tell how they are produced, but they stand unrivalled—one is the English nurse and the other the Irish. The English nurse is a being apart, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... devil and to God what respectively belongs to them, perhaps it would be well to show the causes of Oscar Husson's silly self-conceit, premising that he was born in the household of Madame Mere. During his early childhood his eyes were dazzled by imperial splendors. His pliant imagination retained the impression of those gorgeous scenes, and nursed the images of a golden time of pleasure in hopes of recovering them. The natural boastfulness of school-boys ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... "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 than ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... and about this miniature round table, used sometimes to sit with Pere Jerome two friends to whom he was deeply attached—one, Evariste Varrillat, a playmate from early childhood, now his brother-in-law; the other, Jean Thompson, a companion from youngest manhood, and both, like the little priest himself, the regretful rememberers of a fourth comrade who was a comrade no more. Like Pere Jerome, they had come, through years, to the thick of life's conflicts,—the ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... perfection. He was not, it is true, particularly intelligent. He did not begin to talk until he was over three years old; but this slowness of development was only in keeping with his mother's physical type, and his early childhood was a period of sheer delight to her in which no shadow ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... another individual who started out in life with a heavy hereditary burden. His early childhood, as far as can be determined, was normal. He entered school and here met the first obligation. He wavered, showed a tendency, that early, to be unable to lead a well-regulated life and in consequence his school attendance was irregular. The next difficulty ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... their sons to England to complete their education. This was done by Augustine Washington with his eldest son Lawrence, then about fifteen years of age, and whom he no doubt considered the future head of the family. George was yet in early childhood: as his intellect dawned he received the rudiments of education in the best establishment for the purpose that the neighborhood afforded. It was what was called, in popular parlance, an "old field school-house;" humble ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... perfectly baked apple pie and a neatly kept cash book. He had expected his wife to fall down on the mechanical aspects of typewriting, but he forgot that she had been running a sewing machine since she was fifteen years old. And even in his wife's early childhood people were still using lamps for soft effects and intensive reading. Any woman who knew the art of keeping a kerosene lamp in shape must of necessity find the oiling and cleaning of a typewriting ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the literature of the first volume forms a treasure house from which the parent may draw many a good story to tell, and where he may find more that will be excellent for him to read aloud. The taste for the best literature is often formed in early childhood. So no child is too young for Journeys and no child is too old. The real things we read over and over with increasing interest as the years go on. Elsewhere in this volume are directions for story-telling, and many especially ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... that workbox of old. It brought back her early childhood to find the key concealed in a little slot beneath it; hidden behind a corner of green cloth beyond suspicion; that opened, for all that, when the edge was coaxed with a finger-nail. It had been her first experience of a secret, and a fascination ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... "All his early childhood years were spent about his home playing in the well-kept yard gazing at the numerous boats that so frequently went puffing by. For a short time the family moved to the old Gillespie House further ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... of Abraham Lincoln's early childhood we know almost nothing. He lived a solitary life in the woods, returning from his lonesome little games to his cheerless home. He never talked of these days to his most intimate friends. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.] Once, ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... but he could not possibly cause the conversation to swing around so as to be able, even with considerable violence, to make the transition he desired. He first let her lead, and she talked to him about the East and the queer ways of the yellow Mongolians she remembered. These memories of early childhood, in the blessed period when care and responsibility had not yet disturbed the spirit's freedom, brought her a certain relief from gnawing reflections. When she tired it was his turn to lead, and he soon slipped into his old grooves and entertained her with stories ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... duties of the sphere in which they are to move. We speak to-day of public instruction; but it should ever be borne in mind that the education of the schools is but a part, and often only the least important part, of the training that the young receive. There is the training of infancy and early childhood, the daily culture of home, with its refining or deadening influences, and then the education of the street, the parlor, the festive gathering, and the clubs, which exert a power over the youth of both sexes that cannot often be ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... a written promise to comply with his Excellency's orders and went away. This policeman's visit and the unexpected invitation to see the governor had a most depressing effect on me. From my early childhood I have had a dread of gendarmes, police, legal officials, and I was tormented with anxiety as though I had really committed a crime and I could not sleep. Nurse and Prokofyi were also upset and could not sleep. And, to make things worse, nurse had an earache, and moaned and more than once screamed ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... the principles of things, and who make life rich in resource and interest are comparatively few. America needs poetry more than it needs industrial training; though the two ought never to be separated. The time to awaken the imagination, which is the creative faculty, is early childhood; and the most accessible material for this education is the literature which the race created in its childhood. The creative man, whether in the arts or in practical affairs, in poetry, in engineering or in business, is always the ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... And yet throughout the book of Genesis the word never occurs again; it is as if God's Holiness is in abeyance; only in Exodus, with the calling of Moses, does it make its appearance again. This is a fact of deep import. Just as a parent or teacher seeks, in early childhood, to impress one lesson at a time, so God deals in the education of the human race. After having in the flood exhibited His righteous judgment against sin, He calls Abraham to be the father of a chosen people. And as the foundation of all His dealings with that ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... the old story: the course of Honore Fouchard's and Silvine Morange's love had not run smooth. She, a pretty, meek-eyed, brown-haired girl, had in early childhood lost her mother, an operative in one of the factories of Raucourt, and Doctor Dalichamp, her godfather, a worthy man who was greatly addicted to adopting the wretched little beings whom he ushered into the world, had conceived the idea ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their life long—a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the full-grown man, who is man in the strict ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... her. For there, not a mile before them, where the low hills about the fishing village began to rise from the dull inland level—hills green on the land side, bare and scarped towards the sea and the island—she espied the wayside chapel at which the nurse of her early childhood had told her beads. Where it stood, the road from Commequiers and the road she travelled became one: a short mile thence, after winding among the hillocks, it ran down to the beach and the causeway—and to ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... reminiscences of her infancy and early childhood, very interesting to all the listeners. The narrator dwelt at length upon the evidences of early piety shown in the child's life, and Aunt Chloe remarked, "Yo' needn't be 'fraid, chillens, ob bein' too good to lib: my darlin' was de bes' chile eber I see, and yo' ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... children, my sister Mary and myself were the only two that survived the perils of infancy and early childhood. I, being the younger by five or six years, was always regarded as THE child, and the pet of the family: father, mother, and sister, all combined to spoil me—not by foolish indulgence, to render me fractious and ungovernable, ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... in the early childhood of all of us some tiny cell in the embryo brain remains dormant after the intelligence and other faculties have begun to quicken and waken. While that cell sleeps the child is callous to suffering, even ingenious in inflicting it. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... at least one village where beautiful children, who have been decoyed or purchased from their parents by these prostitute-hunters, are taken to be reared and trained for the profession. In Bombay there is actually a caste in which the girls are in early childhood "married to the dagger," or, in other words, dedicated to a life of prostitution. In some of the cities old men are employed as touts to secure customers for the women, who remain in their haunts, thus seducing ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... a convent of Mont-Saint-Sulpice, was violated, when she was barely fifteen years old, by a priest who dedicated her to the Devil. This priest himself had been corrupted, in early childhood, by an ecclesiastic belonging to a sect of possessed which was created the very day ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... returning with a boy alleged not only to be deficient in goodness, but redundant in ill: 'The lad, madam or sir, evinces very corrupt qualities, does he? No end to them.' 'But, have confidence, there will be; for pray, madam, in this lad's early childhood, were not those frail first teeth, then his, followed by his present sound, even, beautiful and permanent set. And the more objectionable those first teeth became, was not that, madam, we respectfully ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... ever met little girls except at children's balls, and in my early childhood I did not think further of any of them. But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... observance of the Sabbath Day in Scotland was to us a most pleasing feature in Scottish life, and one to which we had been accustomed from early childhood, so we had no desire to depart from it now. We were, therefore, very pleased when Mr. and Mrs. Mackenzie invited us to accompany them to the Free Kirk service, and, as half-past ten o'clock was the time fixed for our departure from the inn, we concluded that ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... of her mother's disease, consumption. I have known always, for the doctor told me, that she would become its victim sooner or later; and that if she lived to womanhood, he would be surprised. I also saw in early childhood, that she had inherited her mother's restless, eager, dissatisfied disposition, though the difference in her home life has modified it greatly; and knowing the weakness that would assail her if she lived, I have battled against ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... half afraid, I wandered in the forest shade. Thou, ever-joyous rivulet, Dost dimple, leap, and prattle yet; And sporting with the sands that pave The windings of thy silver wave, And dancing to thy own wild chime, Thou laughest at the lapse of time. The same sweet sounds are in my ear My early childhood loved to hear; As pure thy limpid waters run; As bright they sparkle to the sun; As fresh and thick the bending ranks Of herbs that line thy oozy banks; The violet there, in soft May dew, Comes up, as modest and as blue; As green amid thy current's stress, Floats the scarce-rooted watercress; ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... himself or his wife and family. In the astral world no support is necessary; food is no longer needed, shelter is not required, since he is entirely unaffected by heat or cold; and each man by the mere exercise of his thought clothes himself as he wishes. For the first time since early childhood the man is entirely free to spend the whole of his time in doing just exactly what ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... later character appeared in his early childhood. Almost from infancy he lived in his imagination rather than in the world of reality. "The schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly.... I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sunset came Mr. Turnbull, who took supper at The Haws, and was fetched away by his coachman at ten o'clock. With this old friend, who in Will's eyes looked no older now than when he first knew him in early childhood, they talked freely of the Applegarth business, and Mr. Turnbull promised to make inquiries at once. Of course, he took a despondent view of jam. Jam, he inclined to think, was being overdone; after all, the country ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... taught to read in his early childhood, and might have been often seen, before the acquaintance with the little brown neighbors, sitting in front of his father's cottage, reading. Among his amusements now, he was frequently engaged in taking some of the children of the neighborhood ...
— The Pearl Story Book - A Collection of Tales, Original and Selected • Mrs. Colman
... breathe the truth in Isabella's court. I dare not whisper it now save to thee, who would die rather than reveal it. Arthur, dearest Arthur, it was no Christian whom I wedded. We had been betrothed from early childhood, though I knew it not; and when the time came, I could not draw down on me a father's curse, or dash with agony a heart that so cherished, so loved me, by revelation of a truth which could avail me nothing, and would bring him but misery. ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... concealed from observation the stirring little scenes he thus enacted, a love of realism was increasing within him. Early childhood is not fastidious about the accessories of its drama—a cane is vividly a gun which may instantly, as vividly, become a horse; but at Penrod's time of life the lath sword is no longer satisfactory. Indeed, he now ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... the prelacy was as systematic and its rules as well defined, as in the Church of Rome. Except those in the service of Huitzilopochtli, and perhaps a few other gods, none obtained the priestly office by right of descent, but were dedicated to it from early childhood. Their education was completed at the Calmecac, a sort of ecclesiastical college, where instruction was given in all the wisdom of the ancients, and the esoteric lore of their craft. The art of mixing colors and tracing designs, the ideographic writing and ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... "sanctified from the womb," there was clear evidence afforded, that, in early childhood, he was the subject of gracious motions of the Spirit. At two years of age, he was observed to be aiming at secret prayer; and as his childhood advanced, he evinced love to the ways of God, by reading and pondering ...
— The Life of James Renwick • Thomas Houston
... son—at the big-headed, pasty-faced, and sickly Louis Willems—who rolled a glass inkstand, solid with dried ink, about the floor, and tottered after it with the portentous gravity of demeanour and absolute absorption by the business in hand that characterize the pursuits of early childhood. Through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning upon the safe in the far-off corner, then, travelling against the sun, cut at midday the ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... temples upon which it rested. She was very happy at the home she occupied, which was often enlivened by the joyous snatches of music that broke from her ruby lips as from a bird; but she had but a faint, a dream-like remembrance of the scenes connected with her early childhood. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... his grandest symphonies when stone deaf shows the extraordinary musical faculty he must have preserved to bear in his mind the grand harmonies that he associated with visual symbols. Still, it is impossible that Beethoven, had he been deaf in his early childhood, could ever have developed into the great ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... ONE who stands so near the girl as the mother. From early childhood she occupies the first place in the little one's confidence—she laughs, plays, and corrects, when necessary, the faults of her darling. She should be equally ready to guide in the important laws of life and ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... servants who had been hired for the time, one of whom was a young woman whose health had given way over her lace pillow, and Rachel was eloquent over the crying evils of the system (everything was a system with Rachel) that chained girls to an unhealthy occupation in their early childhood, and made an overstocked market and underpaid workers—holding Fanny fast to listen by a sort of fascination in her overpowering earnestness, and great fixed eyes, which, when once their grasp was taken, would not release ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "Magicians" of Mexico and Central America Dr. Brinton tells us much in his interesting little book (413). These sorcerers recruited their ranks from both sexes, and "those who are selected to become the masters of these arts are taught from, early childhood how to draw and paint these characters and are obliged to learn by heart the formulas, and the names of the ancient Nagualists, and whatever else is included in ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... mechanically a great store of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... they had a slightly distrustful expression. Hurry home, Clayton Reeve, before it becomes habitual. The nose was straight and sensitive, and the mouth the saving grace of the face, for nothing could alter its soft, beautiful curves, and the lips continued to smile as they had done in early childhood, when there was cause for smiles only. The mother's finger seemed to rest there, all invisible to others, and curve the corners upward, as though in apology for the hardened expression gradually creeping over ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... "In my early childhood I had been spared, by the tenderest of mothers, from many of the ablutions practised by the Hindoos, under the belief that they would be injurious to my constitution, which, though healthy, had never been robust. A foundation was thus laid with me for habitual remissness ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... presence of Eternity— his most ordinary actions, the most casual remarks, served to keep him in remembrance of that dreadful possibility. When one of his little boys clapped his hands at the thought of the approaching holidays, the Doctor gently checked him, and repeated the story of his own early childhood; how his own father had made him read aloud a sermon on the text 'Boast not thyself of tomorrow"; and how, within the week, his father was dead. On the title page of his MS. volume of sermons, he was always careful ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... enjoyment. Parson Frank was like a boy out for a holiday. He had not spent more than a day or two in town for many years; Anne had not been there since early childhood, and they adopted Clarence as their lioniser, going through such a country- cousin course of delights as in that memorable time with Ellen. They even went down to Eton and Windsor, Frank Fordyce being an ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... floor of the oven. To this child God was very good. Very likely God saw that this child would get worse and worse, and would never repent, and so it would have to be punished much more in hell. So God in his mercy called it out of the world in its early childhood." ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... now twenty-seven years old, and on paying a flying visit to his friend John Adams, in the home of his early childhood, attended divine service in his father's old church, and thrilled at the glimpse he had of Judge Quincy's youngest daughter, Dorothy, demurely leaving the meeting-house. Dolly was then seventeen years of age, and as lovely in her girlish beauty as any rose that ever bloomed, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... signal honour of knowing what we do not know in our early childhood, at a time when thought is already manifesting itself, far superior, however feeble it be, to the dull understanding of the animal? Has it the power to foresee an ending, an attribute which in its ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... "now" appears the dream, "then" the reality; and, strangely enough, this very feeling, I am told, is one of the signs of real old age, of our nearing the land that at one time we fancied so "very far off"—farther off, it seems to me, in middle age than in early childhood, when it is easier for us to believe in what we cannot see, when no clouds have come between us and the true ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... say that men act on the consciously reasoned-out conclusions thus indicated; but we mean that these conclusions are the unconsciously-formed products of their daily experience. From early childhood, the sayings and doings of all around them have generated the idea that wealth and respectability are two sides of the same thing. This idea, growing with their growth, and strengthening with their strength, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... West, the great painter, that at five years of age he was continually soiling the floor of his good and sensible mother with charcoal sketches of the faces of the different members of the family; and of Napoleon, that in early childhood his favorite amusement was to build forts and array his playmates into column, and charge these, and assault and enter them. Stevenson, the great engineer, spent all his idle time, when a boy, in attempts at constructing ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... moral agitation,[3103] he carries within him a peculiar germ: physically, he is a freak, morally a pretender, and one who covet all places of distinction. His father, who was a physician, intended, from his early childhood, that he should be a scholar; his mother, an idealist, had prepared him to become a philanthropist, while he himself always steered his course ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... combines a number of the most significant episodes in the life of the central figure; in other words, those events of his career from early childhood to the close of the book which have been most instrumental in building up his character and experience. The episodes are of every kind, serious, humorous, tender, awakening, disillusioning, and they are narrated without any padding whatever, each one beginning as abruptly as ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... I could remember. I don't seem to be able to recall much about my early childhood, before I was five or six years old, but these dreams are among my earliest recollections, and I would sometimes awake crying with fright. After I met Jack, and he began teaching me, my mind was so taken up with study, that the dreams became less frequent, and for the last two or three ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... pleasant air breathed sighingly over them, and they looked drooping and faded. I was visiting my friend Effie Morris, who resided in a pleasant country village, some twenty or thirty miles from my city home. We were both young, and had been school-girl friends from early childhood. The preceding winter had been our closing session at school, and we were about entering our little world as women. Effie was an only daughter of a widowed mother. Possessing comfortable means, they lived most pleasantly in their quiet romantic little ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... health as she sat before her granddaughter's comfortable fire. She spoke quietly, with little excitement, and readily recalled events of her early childhood. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... to eat or even see a variety of animals and fish, in consequence of which their flesh diet is extremely limited; often they live only on herbs and roots, though they may drink fresh blood. The heir to the throne of Loango is forbidden from infancy to eat pork; from early childhood he is interdicted the use of the cola fruit in company; at puberty he is taught by a priest not to partake of fowls except such as he has himself killed and cooked; and so the number of taboos goes on increasing with ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... parties were always prefaced with "I tell 'em," and to the listener's mind "they" always stood rebuked, but not convinced, in spiritual form it may be, but most intense reality; a little group as solemn as Miss Debby herself. Once the listener ventured to ask who "they" were, in her early childhood, but she was only answered by a frown. Miss Debby knew as well as any one the difference between figurative language and a lie. Sometimes they said what was right and proper, and were treated accordingly; but very seldom, and on this occasion it seemed that they had ventured ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Beacon-Street door-plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and bridegroom enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes, like the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile, —you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before you!—Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture.—As when, at some unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column springs into the air before the astonished passer-by,—silver-footed, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... cat of our recollection was a large, sleek, black and white animal, the pet and plaything of our very early childhood. Tom, as we called him, seemed much attached to us all, but when we moved from the house of his kittendom and attempted to keep him with us, we found that we had reckoned without our host; all our efforts were in vain; the cat returned to its ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... otherwise minded. A country circuit for Marty did not accord with his views at all. Marty was too good for a country church, he argued, mainly from his memories of the bare little one-room meetinghouse of his early childhood. In his periodical trips to the farm he had seen the old church grow older and more forlorn, as one family after another moved away, and the multiplying cars brought the town and its allurements almost to the front gate of ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... born in Connecticut, in the same town. We attended school together in our early childhood, and often played together. Both of our families were respectable—your father's quite so, although not so well off as to property as mine. He was a bright, promising boy, quick to learn, warm-hearted, and conscientious. I never knew him guilty ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... up and looked back at his early childhood—he was seven years old in the year in which his father was able to see the new St. Wilfred's an edifice complete except for consecration—it seemed to him that his education had centered in the prevention of his acquiring a Cockney accent. This was his mother's dread ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... love with one of Russian birth," went on the gipsy. Cedric frowned and held quiet. "There is one who hast loved thee from early childhood—a—a kinswoman—she would make thee a noble spouse and love thee well with a warm nature to match ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... V. of Scotland had died leaving a daughter just a week old. When Elizabeth ascended the English throne, the Northern country had for sixteen years been governed or misgoverned by regents and Councils of regency. From early childhood, the little queen had been brought up at the French court, under the more particular tutelage of her uncles, the Duke of Guise and his brothers. In 1558, at the age of fifteen, she was married to the Dauphin. Now (and for some time past) her mother, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... From his early childhood, Philip was remarkable for his genius, his beauty, his sweet and generous disposition, and the modesty and grace of his manners. Sir Fulke Greville—who was one of his schoolmates, knew him all his life, and so dearly loved and highly honored him that he directed it should be put on his ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... I have expected nothing else: but when the inevitable actually comes, it is always a sad and overwhelming stroke. To think that one who was so dear to us, whom we hung upon with the feelings of early childhood, and also in later years were bound to by respect and love, that such an object is gone from the world, that with all our striving we cannot bring it back,—to think of this is always something frightful. And when, like you, my dearest best Mother, one has shared with the lost Friend and Husband ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle |
