"Half-century" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Legend proper, and to its most important and most interesting characteristics, to its working up, to that extraordinary development which in a bare half-century (and half a century, though a long time now, was a very short one seven hundred years ago) evolved almost a whole library of romance from the scanty faits et gestes of Arthur as given by Geoffrey,—then ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... junior member of the Play-goer's Club. Then, in the old blind German, there is a touch of TOM TAYLOR'S Helping Hands, and, as for all the rest of the characters, well, they can be found in the common stock-pot of the melodramatic authors of the last half-century, for, like SHAKSPEARE himself, these wicked lawyers and gamblers—the aiders and a-betters—are "not for an age" (would they were, and that age passed!) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... half-century the art of naval warfare had made great progress in Greece. The Greek war-galley, or trireme, a vessel propelled by three banks of oars, had always been furnished with a sharp-pointed prow, for the purpose of ramming an opponent's ship; but many years ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... inspecting numerous documents and registers and books, and when evening came he had a very complete acquaintance with the family nomenclature of Barthorpe, and he was prepared to bet odds against any one of the name of Braden having lived there during the past half-century. In all his searching he had not once come ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... the same story these sixty years, and none mistake his meaning now. When Washington, in the fulness of his glory, rode through our flower-strewn streets, this was the tongue that bade the Father of his Country welcome! Again the same voice was heard, when La Fayette came to gather in his half-century's harvest of gratitude. Meantime, vast changes have been going on below. His voice, which once floated over a little provincial seaport, is now reverberated between brick edifices, and strikes the ear amid the buzz and tumult of ...
— A Bell's Biography - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The coming half-century will be a time of peculiar strain, as mankind seeks rapidly to adjust moral ideals and social relationships and the general ordering of life to the new and continually unfolding material conditions. If these two great movements ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... Life of Johnson, as its author with just pride boasts on its title-page, 'exhibits a view of literature and literary men in Great Britain, for near half a century during which Johnson flourished.' Wide, indeed, is the gulf by which this half-century is separated from us. The reaction against the thought and style of the age over which Pope ruled in its prime, and Johnson in its decline,—this reaction, wise as it was in many ways and extravagant as it was perhaps in more, is very far from ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... tenfold the treasure in the hold might have purchased for him the sight of so much as a single bone of the youngest of those associates whom he idly dreamt of seeking and shipping and sailing in command of. Yet, imbecile as was his scheme, having regard to the half-century that had elapsed, I clearly witnessed the menace to me that it implied. His views were to be read as plainly as if he had delivered them. First and foremost he meant that I should help him to sail the schooner to an island and bury ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... Bagley at Cardenas, the braving of death by Hobson at Santiago, and the complete destruction of Cervera's fleet by Schley showed that Americans could fight as well in steel ships as in wooden ones. Nor can we doubt that the history of the next half-century will show that the new order at sea will breed a new race of American seamen able as in the past to prove themselves masters of ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... learn from fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture how to model the figure of the Redeemer and how to chisel the robe of the Virgin. This spontaneous mediaeval sculpture, aided by the antique, preceded by a full half-century the appearance of mediaeval painting; and it was from the study of the works of the Pisan sculptors, that Cimabue and Giotto learned to depart from the mummified monstrosities of the Miratic, Byzantine, and Roman style of Giunta and Berlinghieri. Thus, through the sculpture of the Pisans ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... only within the past half-century that the wonderful story of early Eastern civilization has been gradually pieced together by excavators and linguists, who have thrust open the door of the past and probed the hidden secrets of long ages. We now know more about "the land of Babel" than ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... was long ago. It is nearing the end of the century, and the little girl who thought it a great thing to see the half-century mark, bids fair to shake hands with the new one. There have been many changes, there have been sorrows and deaths, and such exquisite satisfying happiness that she could say ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... or Half-Brother, Franz Josias, who resides at Coburg. Dukes of Saalfeld-Coburg, such is their style, and in good part their possession; though, it is well known to this travelling party and the world, there has been a Lawsuit about Coburg this half-century and more; and though somewhere about 200 "CONCLUSA," [Michaelis, i. 524, 518; Busching, Erdbeschreibung, vi. 2464; OErtel, t. 74; Hubner, t. 166.] or Decrees of Aulic Council, have been given in favor of the Saalfelders, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... the aspect of a "deceased or expiring Society" fronts us everywhere, so that whoso runs may read. "What, for example," says he, "is the universally arrogated Virtue, almost the sole remaining Catholic Virtue, of these days? For some half-century, it has been the thing you name 'Independence.' Suspicion of 'Servility,' of reverence for Superiors, the very dog-leech is anxious to disavow. Fools! Were your Superiors worthy to govern, and you worthy to ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... finances of France. So feverishly eager were men to study problems of government that six thousand copies were sold the day it was published, and eighty thousand had to be printed before the demand for it was satisfied. A half-century earlier it would have ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... self-same thing, on the other side of their teens! The only adverse possibility that crossed his infant mind was that his Grannies were sorry, not glad; because really grown-up people were so queer, you never could be even with them. The laceration of a lost half-century was a thing that could not enter into the calculations of a septennarian. He had not tried Time, and Time had not tried him. He had odd misgivings, now and again, that there might be in this matter something outside his experience. But he did not indulge in useless speculation. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... hearts upon penniless Lutheran pastors, whose social status has thereby been entirely changed. Moreover, if during the past ten years more churches have been built, particularly in Berlin, than had been the case in the entire previous half-century, this is because every one has become aware that the most facile way of winning the good graces of the empress, and the favor of her consort is by building a church, or ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... But both of these were followed by yet another literature which rejected alike the New Science and the New Doubt, and stood by all that was included under the old beliefs. The voices of these three literatures filled the world: they were the characteristic notes of that half-century, heard sounding together: the Old Faith, the New Science, the New Doubt. And they met at a single point; they met at man's place in Nature, at the idea of God, and in that system of thought and creed ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... to John. He had thought so when he heard their talk, but now the clergyman's earnestness and some better understanding of the half-century's bitter feeling made him thoughtful. Rising to his feet, he said, "Uncle Jim does not agree with you, and Aunt Ann and her brother, Henry Grey, think that Mr. Buchanan will bring all our troubles to an end. Of course, sir, I don't know, but"—and his voice rose—"if ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... flowers; and their skins are so white, and their hair so black. The high wall, covered with green and Castilian roses, was purposely designed by Nature for them. Sometimes I have a passing regret that it is all doomed, and a half-century hence will have passed ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the blackest half-century civilization has had to record, this condition of industrial slavery continued with little amendment. Very slowly, however, the workers themselves, championed by certain aristocrats like the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury against professional ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... complicated, and his infirmities would have been too evident beneath the vault of the ancient Cathedral of Rheims. An interval of fifty years—from 1775 to 1825—separated the coronation of Louis XVI. from that of his brother Charles X. How many things had passed in that half-century, one of the most fruitful in vicissitudes and catastrophes, one of the strangest and most troubled of which history has preserved ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... from Heaven to come down and give her just the comfort and encouragement she wanted, she couldn't have imagined one so good as Miss Gibbons,—with those keen straight-looking eyes that had observed her fellow citizens of Centropolis for the last half-century or so, not in vain; with her courageous common sense, and with that dry, cool, astringent manner, which lay with a pleasant healing sting on the lacerations of ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... fighting for more than personal ends. She was fighting for more than her own occupation of the English throne. Consciously or unconsciously she was struggling to avert from England the rule of a Queen who would have undone the whole religious work of the past half-century, who would have swept England back into the tide of Catholicism, and who in doing this would have blighted and crippled its national energies at the very moment of their mightiest developement. It was the presence ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... it was the object of the Manchester School to encourage is abundantly displayed in the gigantic Friendly and other working-class Co-operative Societies which have so largely increased in England during the last half-century. Two of these Friendly Societies—the Manchester Unity and the Foresters—have each of them more than seven hundred thousand members on their roll. At the same time, it is equally certain that in many quarters a different, and, in my opinion, very dangerous, spirit prevails. In England ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... this branch of my subject,—George Jacobs, Sr., and his son George Jacobs, Jr. They each had given offence to some persons, and suffered that sort of notoriety which led to the selection of victims, although both were persons of respectability. The father owned and had lived for about a half-century on a farm in North Fields, on the banks of Endicott River, a little to the eastward of the bridge at the iron-foundery. He was a person of good estate and an estimable man; but it was his misfortune to have an impulsive ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... confidence in Tony's skill that Squire Bean trusted his father's violin to him, one that had been bought in Berlin seventy years before. It had been hanging on the attic wall for a half-century, so that the back was split in twain, the sound-post lost, the neck and the tailpiece cracked. The lad took it home, and studied it for two whole evenings before the open fire. The problem of restoring it was quite beyond his abilities. He finally took the savings of two summers' "blueberry ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and grind it to profitable meal for itself. Spiritually he was an old Soldier let for hire; an old Intriguer, Liar, Fighter, what you like. What we may call a human Soul standing like a hackney-coach, this half-century past, with head, tongue, heart, conscience, at the hest of a discerning public ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... grinning. "They've got to have a real story, Tommy. Big, blown up, what a great guy he was, defender of the peace, greatest, most influential man America has turned out since the half-century—you know what they lap up, the usual garbage, only on a slightly higher plane. They've got to think that he's really saved them, that he's turned over the reins to other hands just as trustworthy as his—you can give the president a big hand there—they've ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... Cape of Good Hope, and thence was borne on the strong and friendly current up to the equator, which she crossed on the 8th of June. Only fifty years since Santarem and Escobar, first of Europeans, had crept down that coast and crossed it. Into that glorious half-century what a world of suffering and achievement had been crowded! Dire necessity compelled the Victoria to stop at the Cape Verde Islands. Her people sought safety in deceiving the Portuguese with the story that they were returning from a voyage in ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... can now be found. From these regions it will soon vanish, and unless something is done to stop the hunting of elephants the total extinction of the animal in Africa may be expected within another half-century; for the foolish passion for slaughter which sends so-called sportsmen on his track, and the high price of ivory, are lessening its numbers day by day. A similar fate awaits the rhinoceros, once common even near the Cape, where he overturned one day the coach ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... of the Anglo-Saxon? He calls this a new land because he's lived here only about a half-century. Things did happen before you were born, my ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Vijayanagar in these days. We have already noticed that as early as 1375 A.D. Sultan Mujahid of Kulbarga had heard so much of the beauty of this capital that he desired to see it, and it had grown in importance and grandeur during the succeeding half-century. About the year 1420 or 1421 A.D. there visited Vijayanagar one Nicolo, an Italian, commonly called Nicolo Conti or Nicolo dei Conti, and if he was not the earliest European visitor, he was at least ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... diversions of 1758 had not very materially aided Frederic of Prussia, they had inflicted distinct humiliation and harassment upon France. This, added to defeat upon the Continent and in North America, had convinced the French Government, as it convinced Napoleon a half-century later, that a determined blow must be struck at England herself as the operative centre upon which rested, and from which proceeded, the most serious detriment to their cause and that of their allies. It was resolved, therefore, to attempt an invasion of ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... tropics is still very incomplete and far inferior to that of temperate regions; on the other hand palaeontological discoveries have put the problem in an entirely new light. Well might Darwin, writing to Heer in 1875, say: "Many as have been the wonderful discoveries in Geology during the last half-century, I think none have exceeded in interest your results with respect to the plants which formerly existed in the arctic regions." ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... the West Central district that have changed less within the last half-century than Nevill's Court, leading from Great New Street into Fetter Lane. Its north side still consists of the same quaint row of small low shops that stood there—doing perhaps a little brisker business—when George the Fourth was King; its southern side of the same three substantial houses each behind ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... dignity of classics. Foremost are the writings of Francis Parkman. Most of these, it is true, deal with the history of the American interior prior to 1763. But "Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV" (Frontenac edition, 1915), and "A Half-Century of Conflict" (2 vols., same ed.) furnish the necessary background; and "The Conspiracy of Pontiac" (2 vols., same ed.) is indispensable. Parkman's work closes with the Indian war following the Treaty of 1763. ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... call for constant restatement in terms of a system of more and more thoroughly thought-out postulates or first principles. This is perhaps why the department of human knowledge in which the last half-century has seen the most remarkable advances is just that in which unremitting scrutiny of principles has gone most closely hand-in-hand with the mastery of fresh masses of detail, pure mathematics, and again why the present state ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... small tenant could make nearly as much out of his land as the farmer of a thousand acres; but allowing for all this, 14s. 3d. per acre appeared a very low rate to the landlord of the farm of fifty-eight acres occupied for the last half-century by the Walsh family. I gather that the grandfather of D. Walsh held the farm from the grandfather of the present landlord; that the original occupant was succeeded by his son; that on the son's death his widow retained undisturbed possession until her ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... half-century of Australian history is all to do with the ocean. The British sailor laid the foundation of the Australian nation, and, in the beginning, more than any other class, the sailorman did the colonising—and ...
— The Beginning Of The Sea Story Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... And Mother Whose Half-Century Pilgrimage on the Main-Travelled Road of Life Has Brought Them Only Toil and Deprivation, This Book of Stories Is Dedicated By a Son to Whom Every Day Brings a Deepening Sense of His Parents' ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... in times gone by, but perhaps last week; it was more gossip than history. Probably the sharp, full years had been so short to him that the interval between twenty and seventy was no great matter; things looked as clear and his interest was as lively as a half-century ago. This trick of mind made a narrative of his vivid. With eyes on the fire, with his dominant voice absorbing the crisp sound of the crackling wood, ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... heroes, nevertheless; and, I suppose, une fois caporal, toujours caporal. But, if you prefer something nearer to our own time, figure to yourself Horace Walpole, and General Conway, some half-century since, consulting, in their correspondence, upon the particular shade of satin best suited to their complexions—whether pea-green, or white, were the ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... fought to protect themselves against being taxed by the king without the consent of those constitutional assemblies which he had sworn to maintain, and to save themselves and their children from being burned alive if they dared to read the Bible. Independence followed after nearly a half-century of fighting, but it would never have been obtained, or perhaps demanded, had those grievances ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... national characteristics, and have been continually recruited by considerable numbers of their fellow countrymen. Since the establishment of peace and order and security for life and property by the European administrations, and with the consequent development of trade during the last half-century, the influx of Chinese has been very rapid; until at the present time they form large communities in and about all the chief centres of trade. A certain number of Chinese traders continue to penetrate far into the interior, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... from Odessa—its starting point—throughout Tsarland, save in the extreme north and north-east. This faith can be traced directly to the influence of certain Lutherans who emigrated from Wuertemberg and settled in the fruitful "tchenoziom," or black earth lands, some half-century ago. The Stundist organization is much like that of the "Low Church" division of Protestantism, save that it has no ordained clergy, a body whom it regards as a somewhat expensive luxury, and replaces by elected elders, who lead the very simple services, at which any man or woman who feels ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... is especially owing to the clue which a community of descent affords in treading that mysterious labyrinth in which the connection of physical powers and intellectual forces manifests itself in a thousand different forms. The brilliant progress made within the last half-century, in Germany, in philosophical philology, has greatly facilitated our investigations into the national character of languages and the influence exercised by descent. But here, as in all domains of ideal speculation, the dangers of deception are closely linked ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... are parts of clean curves), a satiny smoothness and fruit-tint of skin,—solely West Indian.... Morally, of course, it is much more difficult to describe her; and whatever may safe1y be said refers rather to the fille-de-couleur of the past than of the present half-century. The race is now in a period of transition: public education and political changes are modifying the type, and it is impossible to guess the ultimate consequence, because it is impossible to safely predict what ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... of him, which must be divinely inspired since there is no human material for it, has been made popular in the last half-century by the author—a foreign gentleman, whose name for the moment escapes me—of a novel entitled Quo Vadis. Fond as he must have been of oysters, there is no evidence that Petronius ever visited England, but it should ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... Amazonian Valley, to connect them with facts of a like character on the continent of North America, and to show how remarkably they correspond with facts accomplished during the same period in other parts of the world. While the glacial epoch itself has been very extensively studied in the last half-century, little attention has been paid to the results connected with the breaking up of the geological winter and the final disappearance of the ice. I believe that the true explanation of the presence of a large part of the superficial ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... common in New York a half-century before they were in Boston. Madam Knights noted the fast racing in sleighs in New York when ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... science to limit their scope? Aerial battle-planes of colossal size and power are as certain to come in time, and in not a very long time, as the dreadnought of to-day was certain to follow the first armored ship of only a half-century ago. Never yet has man opened up a new avenue of war that he has not pursued it relentlessly to its final conclusion. It is certain that he will not fail to push aerial development with all the energy with which he has devoted himself to the ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... in this matter was a new one for her, but the governments of the world had tried it, and wept over it, and discarded it, every half-century since man was created. Any Government could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... photographs thrust into the mirror between frame and glass. One, an old daguerreotype, particularly caught her fancy. It was the portrait of a very beautiful girl, wearing the old-fashioned side curls and high comb of a half-century previous. The old mate noticed the attention she paid to it, and, as soon as he had done giving information to Condy, turned and nodded to Travis, and said quietly: ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... only the sands and the granites of earth, and left the heavens, pricked with their myriad stars, more awful in their darkness. How impossible it is for us to conceive the mental attitude of that king who, during some half-century, spent the lives of thousands and thousands of his slaves in the construction of this tomb, in the fond and foolish hope of prolonging to infinity the existence of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... of this half-century, conscientious research has so actively been prosecuted that we can now gain at least a bird's-eye view of the whole course of our literature. Some stretches still lie in shadow, and it is not astonishing that eminent scholars continue to maintain that "there ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... behaviour till well into the nineteenth century. Of the European pirates Kidd, the most ignoble of them all, is alone remembered, while the name of Angria is only recalled in connection with the destruction of Gheriah by Watson and Clive. The long half-century of amateur warfare waged by Bombay against the Angrian power is dismissed in a few words by our Indian historians, and the expeditions sent forth by Boone against Angrian strongholds are passed ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... In Bach's half-century of a studious musical life there is but little of stirring incident to record. The significance of his career was interior, not exterior. Twice married, and the father of twenty children, his income was ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... half-century the process of winning animals and plants to domestication, and of improving them after they had been thus won, has been in its nature a matter of haphazard. Here and there, as men have seen creatures which ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... met but once in the half-century after that morning's walk; the truth is they were once again close together, but Whittier was not conscious of it. This was while he was editing the Pennsylvania Freeman, at Philadelphia. Miss Bray ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... far superior in value to those written after him; a discouraging fact, though not difficult to explain, if we consider the great social changes which have been proceeding, the sterner subjects of thought which have been arising, during the last half-century. True song requires for its atmosphere a state rather of careless Arcadian prosperity, than of struggle and doubt, of earnest looking forward to an unknown future, and pardonable regret for a dying past; and ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... composed for ever. But the "Catholic Revival," initiated under the leadership of Newman, Pusey, and Keble, has proved to be no transient disturbance: and no figure has in relation to the Church history of the half-century the same portentous importance as that of John Henry Newman, whose powerful magnetism, as it attracted or repelled, drew men towards Romanism or drove them towards Rationalism, his logical art, made more impressive by the noble eloquence with ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... myself, but by a great many of those persons who are most interested in the improvement of medical study for a considerable number of years. I do not know whether anything will come of it this half-century or not; but the thing has to be done. It is not a speculative notion; it lies patent to everybody who is accustomed to teaching, and knows what the necessities of teaching are; and I should very much like to see the first step taken—people making up their minds that it ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... complacent satisfaction that by thus neutralizing a land which had for centuries been the cockpit of Europe, the Powers had laid the foundations of permanent peace. But the bond of international morality was loosened during the next half-century, and in the eighties even English newspapers argued in favour of a German right-of-way through Belgium for the purposes of war with France. It does not appear that the treaty was ever regarded as a serious obstacle by the German military staff; for neither treaties nor morality ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... its head" in its expressions. Writing in 1911, the son of the American Minister to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, jun., in 1861, a young law-student in Boston, stated: "I do not remember in the whole course of the half-century's retrospect ... any occurrence in which the American people were so completely swept off their feet, for the moment losing possession of their senses, as during the weeks which immediately followed the seizure of Mason and Slidell[436]." There were evident two principal causes ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... have fallen to Borrow during the half-century or more since his name first came upon many tongues Norwich, it must be admitted, has given very little of it. No one associated with your city, I repeat, but has heard of the Gurneys and the Martineaus, of the Stanleys and the Austins, whose life stories have made so large a part of your literary ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... dear sir! We ought to have another word. All values are continually being revised, and tested anew. Are they not? We have been restating moral values within the last half-century; it is the same with artistic ones. New canons of taste, new standards, are continually being evolved; there is a general widening and multiplying of notions. This, I think, ought to make us careful ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... still an undeveloped and unsettled country, and for the next half-century and more the greater part of the energy of the masses will be needed to develop its material resources. Any force that brings the rank and file of the people to have a greater love of industry is therefore especially valuable. This result industrial education is surely bringing ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... engaged public attention during the first half-century of our national history, there may be found many valuable speeches. These, however, are largely of a Constitutional character. It has been since the opening of our civil war that our financial discussions have assumed their greatest ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... since he mounted the throne, and the world's attention has been fastened without intermission on his words and conduct. The rise of the modern German Empire is the salient fact of the world's history for the last half-century, and accordingly only from this broader point of view will the Emperor's future biographer, or the historian of the future, be able to do him or his ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... outlying nations on to the parent-stock of music—which for some three hundred years had been in the exclusive control of Italy, Germany and France—has been a stimulating factor in the development of the last half-century. For the idiom of music was becoming somewhat stereotyped, and it has been noticeably revitalized by the incorporation of certain "exotic" traits, of which there run through all national music these three: (1) the use, in their folk-songs, of other forms of scale and ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... kind, such as he now projected, had ever yet been published. Sailors, indeed, had been introduced into fiction, notably by Smollett, but in no case had there been exhibited the handling and movements of vessels, and the details of naval operations. During the last half-century we have been so surfeited with the sea-story in every form, that most of us have forgotten the fact of its late origin, and that it is to Cooper that it owes its creation. That he created it was not due to any encouragement from others. He had ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... counter-reports, the facts, the incidents, the polemics, the discussions, the assertions, the denials, the storms, the steps forward, the steps backward, the days, the weeks, the months, the years, the quarter-century, the half-century! ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... old man in relating it, so that his birth may be safely placed at about 20 B.C.E. The first part of his life therefore was passed during the tranquil era in which Augustus and Tiberius were reorganizing the Roman Empire after a half-century of war; but he was fated to see more troublesome times for his people, when the emperor Gaius, for a miserable eight years, harassed the world with his mad escapades. In the riots which ensued upon the attempt to deprive the Jews of their religious freedom his brother the alabarch was ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... have over-passed the age of sensuous delights. Yet it must be remembered that he was in the fullest vigour of manhood, and had only then arrived at the middle point of a career which, in its untroubled serenity, was to endure for a full half-century more, less a single year. Three years later on, that is to say in the middle of August 1530, the death of his wife Cecilia, who had borne to him Pomponio, Orazio, and Lavinia, left him all disconsolate, and so embarrassed with the cares ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... satisfactorily. The people of the 19th century were not fools, and although I am well aware that this statement will be received with scorn where it attracts any attention whatever, yet who can say that the progress of the next half-century may not be as great as that of the one now ended, and that the people of the next century may not look upon us with the same contempt which we feel toward those who lived fifty ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... through the Deil's Hags, a considerable marshy hollow of the hill tops, full of springs, and crouching junipers, and pools where the black peat-water slumbered. There was no view from here. A man might have sat upon the Praying Weaver's Stone a half-century, and seen none but the Cauldstaneslap children twice in the twenty-four hours on their way to the school and back again, an occasional shepherd, the irruption of a clan of sheep, or the birds who haunted about ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a spot as much favoured by Divine Providence, in the way of abundance, as any other in highly-favoured America. Some eight or ten such events as the landing of a stranger had occurred within the last half-century, and this was the only instance in which either of them had cost the deacon a cent. But, so little was he accustomed, and so little was he disposed, to give, that even a threatened danger of that sort amounted, in his eyes, nearly ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... that the writer has put together is the record of a busy, successful and, on the whole, happy life, passed in the company of interesting people, about many of whom Madame LEHMANN has remembered some entertaining story. Chiefly, as is natural, the persons recorded are the musical folk of the last half-century, from JENNY LIND to Sir THOMAS BEECHAM; though in the allied Arts I was taken by a pleasing and new anecdote of ROBERT BROWNING reciting How they Brought the Good News into an Edison phonograph, and overcome by loss of memory halfway through the ordeal. One wonders if this rather ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... component monosylables being written with an ideograph which conveys its own meaning, the student has a term not only appropriate but also instructive. Hundreds of such words have been manufactured in Japan during the past half-century to equip men for the study of Western learning, and the same process, though on a very much smaller scale, had been going on continuously for many centuries, so that the Japanese language has come to embody a very large number of Chinese words, though they are not pronounced as the Chinese ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... it yourself. It will come in handy some day, when Tyrrel and you are getting white-haired and handsome, as everyone ought to get when they have passed their half-century and are facing the light of ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... missionaries, merchants, steamship agents, bankers and others. Generous allowance must be made for the prejudices of each class, but even then the forming of any conclusions is difficult. This is due largely to the fact that the Japanese a half-century ago were mediaeval in life and thought, and that the remarkable advances which they have made in material and intellectual affairs have been crowded into a little more than the ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... read every word of Sir Thomas Browne's writings and never discover that a sword had been unsheathed or a shot fired in England all the time he was living and writing there. It was the half-century of the terrible civil war for political and religious liberty: but Sir Thomas Browne would seem to have possessed all the political and religious liberty he needed. At any rate, he never took open part on either ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... happened to mention once that he had recently discovered a genuine Rembrandt—a quite undoubted Rembrandt, which had remained for years in the keeping of a certain obscure Dutch family. It had always been allowed to be a masterpiece of the painter, but it had seldom been seen for the last half-century save by a few intimate acquaintances. It was a portrait of one Maria Vanrenen of Haarlem, and he had bought it of her descendants at ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... sort—well, it's a lie, of course; but it's one without any harm, any seed of potential ill, in it. So the letter goes, maybe to take its place as the 150th of the sacred writings, and make poor Daffodilia, who has loved to count the growing score, happy with the completion of the half-century. ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... is apt to play tricks and to set back the hands of the clock, until one pictures oneself again in a short jacket and Eton collar, going up to school, with a pile of books hugged under the left arm, and the intervening half-century wiped out. But, as they would put it in Ireland, these lucky, fresh-faced youngsters of to-day have their futures in front of them, not behind them. Then it is that Howson's words, wedded to John Farmer's haunting refrain, come back to ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... gained terms which were remarkably favourable, and especially that we caused the English to consent to give up the Cape of Good Hope. We did not wish your people, monsieur, to have any foothold in South Africa, for history has taught us that the British foothold of one half-century is the British Empire of the next. It is not your army or your navy against which we have to guard, but it is your terrible younger son and your man in search of a career. When we French have a possession across the seas, we ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... their hearts there was a strange and peculiar attachment to "old Marster" and "old Missus," and to their children, which they found it hard to think of breaking off. With these they had spent in some cases nearly a half-century, and it was no light thing to think of parting. Gradually, one by one, stealthily at first, the older slaves began to wander from the slave quarters back to the "big house" to have a whispered conversation with their former owners as to ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... that she continued to address her, as she had done for so many years, as a young person compared to herself; indeed I have no doubt but that the old lady, following up her association of former days, and forgetting the half-century that had intervened, did consider her as a mere child. The old lady was very chatty and very polite, and as our conversation naturally turned on Lord de Versely, of whom I spoke in terms of admiration and gratitude, I had soon established myself in her ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... away across the lawn, Martha, with scrutiny of the heart, observed the sadness of the lines graven by secret woe for half a century in her sister's face. For nearly fifty years had she watched those lines. She steeled all the melting softness of the Hawaiian of her to break the half-century ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... must be: for consider how few years since it was your grandmother who was the belle, by whose side the handsome, young men longed to sit and pass expressive mottoes. Your grandmother was the Aurelia of a half-century ago, although you cannot fancy her young. She is indissolubly associated in your mind with caps and dark dresses. You can believe Mary Queen of Scots, or Nell Gwyn or Cleopatra, to have been young and blooming, although they belong to old and dead centuries, but not your grandmother. Think ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... A third volume of poems from his pen, entitled "Domestic Verses," was published in 1843. In the early part of 1851 he delivered, at the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, a course of six lectures on the "Poetical Literature of the Past Half-century," which, afterwards published in an elegant volume by the Messrs Blackwood, commanded a large share of public attention. In a state of somewhat impaired health, he proceeded to Dumfries on the 1st day of July 1851, hoping to derive benefit from a change of scene and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the house had an immensely large rambling loft at top, I made no other discoveries. It was moderately well furnished, but sparely. Some of the furniture—say, a third—was as old as the house; the rest was of various periods within the last half-century. I was referred to a corn-chandler in the market-place of the county town to treat for the house. I went that day, and I ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... the boxes as the Quartier St. Antoine looked upon the Faubourg St. Germain. The boxes, with the innocent ignorance of the oeil-de-boeuf, propose to maintain the old order, to stand by Bellini and Donizetti and the last half-century. It is touching and interesting. Vive l'opera italienne! Vivent les loges! So Marie Antoinette appeared in the balcony of the banqueting hall at Versailles, and so the garde du roi sprang to its feet with gallant enthusiasm, rattling its sabres and pledging the Queen. It ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... one to inquire of, although I have talked many times with both generations; but more than fifty years have gone by." The Ciguayos, he adds, were called so because they wore their hair long as women do in Castile. This passage shows that Las Casas was writing this part of his history a half-century after he went first to Espanola, which ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... unassailable. Gladstone led the Government and Lloyd George was his nominal follower, but on individual matters the young M. P. opposed his chief. It was rather like a fox-terrier standing up to a lion. Gladstone had an incomparable prestige, the result of a continuous half-century of work for his country, including four periods as Prime Minister. Probably three-quarters of the six hundred and seventy members of the House of Commons, many of them old politicians, would have been nervous about tackling Gladstone, who, despite his eighty years, was still a ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... yet no Bishop in India; and thus many, the very best of his catechists, served for many years, at Palamcotta, the first Christian minister produced by modern India. On the whole, Swartz could look back on the half-century of his mission with great joy and thankfulness; he counted his spiritual children by hundreds; and the influence he had exerted upon the whole Government had saved multitudes of peasants from oppression and starvation, and had raised the whole tone of the administration. He was ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... For a half-century we have done nothing but repeat this word, and one would say that those mouths which pronounce it belong to the heads which are ignorant of its meaning, or rather that it has no meaning; for, if one says: 'We are free!' ten ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... often be employed with entire confidence. I have seen fillings forty-one years old (made in 1809) and still perfect. Several molars had four or five plugs in them, which had been inserted at different periods during the last half-century. I prefer strips cut from six sheets laid upon each other. If the foil is well connected, the cut edges will adhere firmly; if they do not, the foil is not fit for use." (Dr. B. T. Whitney, Dental Register ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... to the music of our time, our mission is timeless. Each generation of American's must define what it means to be an American. On behalf of our nation, I salute my predecessor, President Bush, for his half-century of service to America...and I thank the millions of men and women whose steadfastness and sacrifice triumphed over depression, fascism ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... there was a host of nobles, great and small. Among them were Engelbert of Nassau[3] and the representative of the House of Orange-Chalons, whose titles were destined to be united in one person within the next half-century. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... tell different tales, varying to the whole extent of the diversity in their respective judgments and moralizings. We can easily illustrate this assertion from the pages before us. Though Dr. Palfrey stops more than a half-century short of the date to which Mr. Arnold carries us, the former indicates exactly how and where he will be at issue with the latter, even to the end of the story common to both of them. So strong and clear is Dr. Palfrey's avowal of fealty to the honorable and unsullied fame of the founders ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... that half-century has passed by, and the great republic goes on its career of greatness, and no eye can discern the ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... Bocas, or the colors of sea and shore at sunrise from the height of the Gran Piedra; but, as though they were still twenty years old and revolution were as young as they, the decaying fabric, which had never been solid, fell on their heads and drew them with it into an ocean of mischief. In the half-century between 1850 and 1900, empires were always falling on one's head, and, of all lessons, these constant political convulsions taught least. Since the time of Rameses, revolutions have raised more doubts than they solved, but they have sometimes the merit of changing one's ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... For a half-century following the abortive efforts of Cartier and Roberval, the French authorities had made no serious or successful attempt to plant a colony in the New World. That is not surprising, for there were troubles in ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... in closing its half-century, gives the following of Mrs. E. J. Nicholson, its chief owner and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the requisite amount has yet been said of athletic exercises as a prescription for this community. There was a time when they were not even practised generally among American boys, if we may trust the foreign travellers of a half-century ago, and they are but just being raised into respectability among American men. Motley says of one of his Flemish heroes, that "he would as soon have foregone his daily tennis as his religious exercises,"—as if ball-playing were then the necessary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... was a silvery gray, but there was a lot of it, and her complexion was as rosy as Nancy's own. She must have passed the half-century mark some time before, but the principal of Pinewood Hall betrayed few marks of the ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... half-century these souvenirs float up again, fresh and bright as ever, to the surface of memory, under this starry sky, whose face has in no wise changed since then, and whose serene and immutable lights will doubtless see many other schoolboys such as I was slowly turn into grey-headed servants, ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... lieutenant; and myself. I will not give the full story of our work, and of the constant battle we had to fight with obstinate habit and dread of responsibility. All those early attempts of ours at transforming our navy seem almost childish, looked at from the distance of the half-century which has since elapsed. And indeed, though my recollection of them is clear enough, I have no means of verifying it, all my notes and reports, and all my correspondence relating to the undertakings in question, having passed out of my hands, in ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... all the other many byways of progress the results of the last half-century of effort on our sand-dune peninsula are not lost. Earthquakes cannot destroy them; fire cannot burn them. San Francisco grew from the Yerba Buena hamlet in sixty years. In a new and untried field city-building then was ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... in the world.' 'Nothing else?' added the inquirer. 'Yes,' replied the Indian in an anxious tone, 'a little more whisky.' The same insatiable craving is shown in poor Isaac K——, the half-witted boy, whose droll sayings of a half-century ago are still remembered about Boston. 'Father,' he one day exclaimed, 'I wish every body was dead but you and me.' 'Why so, my son?' 'Why, then, father, you and I would go out and buy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
