"Callow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leave of each other in our own tongue. As the English quit Rome, the swallows arrive, and may be seen in great muster flitting up and down the streets, looking at the affiches of vacancies before fixing on a lodging. Unlike us, these callow tourists—though many of them on their first visit to Rome—are no sooner within the walls, than they find, without assistance, their way to the Forum, and proceed to build and twitter in that very Temple of Concord where Juvenal's storks of old made their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... marked, with ravenous eyes, Where wrapped in down the callow songsters lay; Then rushing, rudely seized the glittering prize. And bore it in his ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... standing by the window forced himself quite deliberately to look the plain facts in the face. He compelled himself to envisage this beautiful girl with her tragic eyes for just what his reason knew her to be—an adventuress, a decoy, a lure to a callow, impressionable, foolish lad, the tool of that arch-villain Stewart and of the lesser villain her father. It was like standing by and watching something lovely and pitiful vilely befouled. It turned ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... outer courts of Neptune's state: 860 Whence could be seen, direct, a golden gate, To which the leaders sped; but not half raught Ere it burst open swift as fairy thought, And made those dazzled thousands veil their eyes Like callow eagles at the first sunrise. Soon with an eagle nativeness their gaze Ripe from hue-golden swoons took all the blaze, And then, behold! large Neptune on his throne Of emerald deep: yet not exalt alone; At his right hand stood winged Love, and on 870 His left ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... unwashed faces in a rapid succession; an 'aiery of children,' embryo actors, artists, poets, or philosophers. Like unfledged birds, they are hatched, nursed, and fed by hand: this gives room for a vast deal of management, meddling, care, and condescending solicitude; but the instant the callow brood are fledged, they are driven from the nest, and forced to shift for themselves in the wide world. One sterling production decides the question between them and their patrons, and from that time they become the property of the public. Thus ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... dainty gesture of the hand signifying "Spare me your callow enthusiasms, good friend.") Yes, I know, I know; you go to cathedrals, and exclaim; and you drag through league-long picture-galleries and exclaim; and you stand here, and there, and yonder, upon historic ground, and continue to exclaim; and you are permeated ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... only to some question of title. The notary soon arranged whatever there was to arrange; and, after some charmingly spoken words of farewell from the gentle lady, we took our departure. Again the mummified negro hobbled before us, to open the gate,—followed by all his callow rabble of chickens. As we resumed our places in the carriage we could still hear the chippering of the creatures, pursuing after ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... gambling of California Street. Every one is mad. Servants, lawyers, hod carriers, merchants, old maids, widows, mechanics, sly wives, thieving clerks, and the "demi-monde," all throng to the portals of the "Big Board." It is a money-mania. Beauty, old age, callow boyhood, fading manhood, all chase the bubble ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... told me that, the glory of Covent Garden Ball had departed. It may be so. Yet the floor, with its strange conglomeration of music-hall artists, callow university men, shady horse-dealers, and raucous military infants, had an atmosphere of more than meretricious gaiety. The close of an old year and the birth of a new one ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... edified her a pedestal and perform impossible rites in celebration of her altitude and distinction. It does not suffice that with never a smile we assure her that she is the superior sex—a whopper by the repetition whereof certain callow youth among us have incurred the divine vengeance of belief. It does not satisfy her that she is indubitably gifted with pulchritude and an unquestionable genius for its embellishing; that Nature has endowed her with a prodigious knack at accroachment, whereby the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... you this has been a very long day. For all of you it has been a very trying day. You were all informed previously as to what we had in mind. However, since you are young and callow, and were thoroughly convinced of your own omniscience and omnipotence, it is natural enough that you derived little or no benefit from that information. You are now facing ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... Sarah, but Sarai—my Princess!" His voice was hoarse and faltering. This strange new sense of romance that, like a callow-bird, had been stirring in his breast ever since he had heard of her quest of him, spread its wings and soared heavenwards. She had been impure—but her impurity swathed her in mystic seductiveness. The world's law bound her no more than him—she was free and elemental, a spirit to match ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... had not done for some time. He was rewarded by a rapt attention, a humble and profound admiration that would have flattered a demi-god. And in truth he was a demi-god to this girl, with her experience of elderly old-fashioned men and an occasional callow youth encountered on a verandah ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... blushing. He felt like a boy reading his first attempts at original poetry to an established critic. What would this master cracksman, this polished wielder of the oxy-acetylene blow-pipe, this expert in toxicology, microscopy and physics think of his callow outpourings! ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... somewhat distantly; and with feelings which it would be hard to describe, Ben recognized the tall, rather callow youth as the Rutherford who stoned him several years before, when he was floating down the river on a log, and to whom Ben in turn had given a most ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis
... the grass is growing the steed is starving; and in the meantime, how will the callow chick Grace stand against the ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... deplore this exaggerated tyranny, by reason of its evil effect upon his moral nature, we cannot but feel glad that it existed, to afford a piquant contrast to the life awaiting him. Had he passed through the callow dissipations of Eton and Oxford, like other young men of his age, he would assuredly have lacked much of that splendid, pent vigour with which he rushed headlong into London life. He was so young and so ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... that callow, yellow thing Regret that April morn— Alas! how bitterly he rued The day that he ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... as parlour magic. He found the three other members of the little house-party—to wit: Mrs. Somerby-Miles, Lieutenant Forshay, and Mr. Robert Murdock—respectively, a silly, flirtatious, little gadfly of a widow; a callow, love-struck, lap-dog, young army officer, with a budding moustache and a full-blown idea of his own importance; and a dour Scotchman of middle age, with a passion for chess, a glowering scorn of frivolities, and a deep and abiding conviction that Scotland ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... and fossils—the lake dwellers among the mists of melting glaciers; the primaeval horses playing on the still manless shores; the great saurians plunging in the waves of long-dried seas; the jungles which are now our coal beds; and see! the beginning of organic life, the first callow vegetation on the stagnant waters in the dawn-light of the world. The place is but a mean boarded and glazed vestibule; full of the sickly fumes of chemicals; and the people who haunt it are only future apothecaries. But the compositions are as spacious and solemn, the colours as tender and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... an ingenuous lad, with the callow simplicity of a theological college still untouched, and had arrived on the preceding Monday at the Free Kirk manse with four cartloads of furniture and a maiden aunt. For three days he roamed from room to room in the excitement of householding, and made suggestions which were received ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... jade right for being so callow. How long she's been hanging upon the fellow! Such a promenading! To fair and dance parading! Everywhere as first she must shine, He was treating her always with tarts and wine; She began to think herself something fine, ...
— Faust • Goethe
... Trusty, Francis Goosequill, William Meanwell, Edward Callow, Esqrs., standing in a Row, fell all four at the same time, by an Ogle of the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... dragon shot, of dire portent; From Jove himself the dreadful sign was sent. Straight to the tree his sanguine spires he roll'd, And curl'd around in many a winding fold; The topmost branch a mother-bird possess'd; Eight callow infants fill'd the mossy nest; Herself the ninth; the serpent, as he hung, Stretch'd his black jaws and crush'd the crying young; While hovering near, with miserable moan, The drooping mother wail'd her children gone. The mother last, as round the nest she flew, Seized by the beating wing, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... did the breast some primrose-coloured down. Miss Fosbrook had to part with some favourite cockney notions of the beauty of infant birds, and on the other hand to gain a vivid idea of what is meant by "callow young." ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shall put Bishop Mant's "Months" in our pocket. The good Bishop—who must have been an indefatigable bird-nester in his boyhood—though we answer for him that he never stole but one egg out of four, and left undisturbed the callow young—treats of those beauteous and wondrous structures in a style that might make Professor Rennie jealous, who has written like a Vitruvius on the architecture of birds. He expatiates with uncontrolled delight on the unwearied activity of the architects, who, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... hair, which, apparently not in full keeping with his years, was lightly sprinkled with gray. Yet his carriage was assuredly not that of middle age, and indeed, the total of his personality, neither young nor old, neither callow nor acerb, neither lightly unreserved nor too gravely severe, offered certain problems not capable of instant solution. A hurried observer might have guessed his age within ten years but might have been wrong upon either side, and might ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... on board a destroyer that I came to know him really well, and here his work was onerous and responsible. He had his mate, a callow youth who was usually sea-sick in bad weather, and at sea they took 4 hours' turn and turn about on the bridge, each keeping 12 hours' watch out of the twenty-four. But the elder man always seemed to be ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... to woodpeckers. She fits them out for life before they leave the seclusion of the nursery. There is no callow, immature period in the face of the world, no "green" age for the gibes or superior airs of elders. A woodpecker out of the nest is a woodpecker in the dress and with the bearing of his fathers,—dignified, serene, and ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... more so when, on inquiry from a bystander, I understood that the performance was taken from Mr TERRISS'S Adelphi Theatre, which I had heard was conspicuous for excellence in fierce combats, blood-curdling duels, and scenes in court. And I narrated to him how I too, when a callow and unfledged hobbardyhoy, had engaged in theatrical entertainments, and played such parts in native dramas as heroic giant-killers and tiger slayers, in which I was an "au fait" and "facile princeps," also in select scenes from SHAKSPEARE'S ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... know," was the categorical answer. "Rawdon brought the parson out from Omaha, and the Osborns gave her away. Of Lowndes I've seen nothing since the night you staked him at Laramie, and what I've heard of him you refused to listen to. Of that callow specimen of the effete and ultra-refined Back Bay District you've long since had my opinion. He's too good and gentle for this Western world of ours, Bob, and he and his shuddering kinsfolk suffer too much ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... needed to do anything but open their soft beaks for the choicest little grubs to be dropped into them. It is utterly absurd (and I am afraid the members of parliament in question are quite aware they are talking nonsense) to argue from the contented squawks of a brood of these callow creatures, that full grown swallows and larks have no need of wings, and are always happiest when their pinions ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... were pickets far out-lying, and a double line of skirmishers deployed in extended order, and a mounted reserve, and men standing to horse—a command of near a hundred, a pudding of pompous, incompetent, callow bosh, with Augustus by his howitzer, scientifically raising and lowering it to bear on the lone white tepee that shone in the plain. Four races were assembled to look on—the mess Chinaman, two black laundresses, all the whites in the place (on horse and ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... an air of proprietorship as if he were a child, and returned it with a smile very radiant and sufficient at close range. She then addressed herself to her own meal. The young dogs under the table ceased to beg, and gambolled and gnawed and tugged at her stout little shoes, the sound of their callow mirthful growls rising occasionally above the talk. Sometimes she rose again to wait on the table, when they came leaping out after her, jumping and catching at her skirts, now and then casting themselves on ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... berries still. "No need for looking, Yellowbill; Young Frank was there an hour ago, Half frozen, waiting in the snow; His callow beard was white with rime,— 'Tchuck,—'tis ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... honey fed, Chirping warbler, bear'st away, Thou the busy buzzing bee, To thy callow brood a prey? Warbler, thou a warbler seize? Winged, one with lovely wings? Guest thyself, by Summer brought, Yellow guest whom Summer brings? Wilt not quickly let it drop? 'Tis not fair, indeed 'tis wrong, That the ceaseless warbler should Die by mouth of ceaseless ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... of our land, Behold us prostrate at thy altars here, And mark our ages; some are callow boys, Others are priests laden with years, as I Am priest of Zeus; others are chosen youths. The rest, with suppliant emblems in their hands, Sit in the mart, or at the temples twain Of Pallas' or Ismenus' prescient ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... quiet humour of her own in spite of her demure looks, laughed at the dejection and martyrdom of Sir Harry; and taking the eagerly-proffered arm of a callow lieutenant, ostentatiously and hopelessly in love with her, went away to play her part of deputy hostess. She moved from group to group, and everywhere received smiles and congratulations, for she was a general favourite, and, with the exception of Mrs Pansey, everyone ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... of green, straight at the callow boy. But Poins had sprung too, back and to the left, and his oiled sword was from its scabbard and warring ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... by a single magic incantation divert our ideals to the higher life? Were there such a man, with what tears, with what affection, would not the grateful sons of Russia repay him! Yet age succeeds to age, and our callow youth still lies wrapped in shameful sloth, or strives and struggles to no purpose. God has not yet given us the man able to ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... whose conservative formalism is even dangerous to his originality, because they try to melt him along with all the other students and pour him into their one mold. It is distressing to think of all the sums now devoted to inducing callow, overdriven sophomores to compose forced essays and doggerel, by luring them on with the glitter of cash prizes. One shudders to think of all the fellowship money which is now being used to finance reluctant young dry-as-dusts while ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... out of its fixed abode in Goshen, and trained it for mature national life by its varied desert experiences. As one of the prophets puts the same idea, 'I taught Ephraim to go,' where the figure of the parent bird training its callow fledglings for flight is exchanged for that of the nurse teaching a child to walk. While, then, the text primarily refers to the experience of the infant nation in the forty years' wanderings, it carries large truths about us all; and sets forth the true meaning and importance ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... disloyalty in the thought: it was the lad's nature to give and crave affection. Only—I was different. I had never really cared about a girl before, and my life had been singularly loveless. I had fought a lonely battle always. Once before, in college, we had both laid ourselves and our callow devotions at the feet of the same girl. Her name was Dorothy—I had forgotten the rest—but I remembered the sequel. In a spirit of quixotic youth I had relinquished my claim in favor of Richey and had gone cheerfully on my way, elevated by my heroic sacrifice to a somber, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... spark of sympathy for Harry—a callow, egotistical dealer in currants. He ought to have blown out his brains a year ago. He has behaved in a most unconscionable manner. How does he expect me to break the news to Carlotta? His selfishness is appalling. There he lies, comfortably dead in the South Western Hotel, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... satisfied. What do we want to satisfy us? It is something almost awful to think of the multiplicity, and the variety, and the imperativeness of the raging desires which every human soul carries about within it. The heart is like a nest of callow fledglings, every one of them a great, wide open, gaping beak, that ever needs to have food put into it. Heart, mind, will, appetites, tastes, inclinations, weaknesses, bodily wants—the whole crowd ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... rarely a debate of importance in the House of Lords during which some one of the Chesterton family does not contribute his morsel of pompous imbecility, or unfold his budget of obsolete and exploded prejudices, or add his mite of curious misinformation. That such painful exhibitions of callow and contracted bigotry should so frequently be made in a body claiming for itself the finest culture and the highest civilization in Christendom is certainly a most mortifying circumstance, and serves to show that narrow views and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to extend, as it did in Rome, during the adult as during the callow years. Especially did public opinion insist on children marrying according to the wishes of their parents. Among the nobility child-marriage was common, a mere form, of course, not at once followed by cohabitation. A betrothal was a very solemn thing, amounting to a definite contract. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... to some peaceful brandy-shop retires; Where in full gills his anxious thoughts he drowns, And quaffs away the care that waits on crowns. The princess next her painted charms displays, Where every look the pencil's art betrays; The callow squire at distance feeds his eyes, And silently for paint and washes dies: 80 But if the youth behind the scenes retreat, He sees the blended colours melt with heat, And all the trickling beauty run in sweat. The borrow'd visage he admires no more, And nauseates every ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... brightly. "He ain't learned yet," said he, slanting his elbows at Billy and sliding a match over his rump. "But beer, now—I never seen anything in it." He and Towhead soon left Billy and his callow profanities behind, and engaged in a town conversation that silenced him, and set him listening with all his admiring young might. Nor did Mr. McLean join in the talk, but sat embarrassed by this knowledge, which seemed about as ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... for the work—that must be the ideal of the Church, that man and no other, whatever be the consequence in the way of offending well-to-do supporters whose dream it has been that son of theirs shall "wag his head in a pu'pit," whatever be the disappointment caused to the uninspired ambitions of callow youth or the conceit of later years. The pulpit is not for sale! The honour of standing there is not to be dispensed as a reward or allowed as a compliment. Wealth has no rights and poverty no disabilities ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... this place Of antique Asian grace Amid our callow race In Illinois?" Said Clown and Angel fair: "By laughter and by prayer, By casting off ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... omnibus with Cherry, who was too miserable and bewildered to cry now; not that she was afraid of either the Sister or the Sisterhood, but only because she had never left home in her life, and felt exactly like a callow nestling shoved out on the ground with a ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... high stakes. Soon promoted to the berth of mate, he was granted cargo space for his own adventures in merchandise and a share of the profits. In these days the youth of twenty-one is likely to be a college undergraduate, rated too callow and unfit to be intrusted with the smallest business responsibilities and tolerantly regarded as unable to take care of himself. It provokes both a smile and a glow of pride, therefore, to recall those seasoned ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... juniors," laughed Nora, "and proud of it. Our green and callow days are over, and we have entered into the realm of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... School. At the same time I set assiduously to work to learn drawing. My first master in this line was M. Barbier, the father of Jules Barbier, the poet and librettist, who, with Emile Augier, was a class-mate of my young brothers. I did watercolours too, under an Englishman, William Callow, and oils in Gudin's studio. But my real master, who taught me to draw, and led and guided me, and gave me my taste for things artistic, was Ary Scheffer, with whom I remained on terms of the closest ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... o'er him, and he lay beneath, Hush'd as the babe upon its mother's breast, Droop'd as the willow when no winds can breathe, Lull'd like the depth of ocean when at rest, Fair as the crowning rose of the whole wreath, Soft as the callow cygnet in its nest; In short, he was a very pretty fellow, Although his woes ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... pure. While yet a youngster in a jacket, I can remember falling desperately in love with a young lady several years my senior,—after the fashion of youngsters in jackets. Could I have fibbed in these days? Could I have betrayed a comrade? Could I have stolen eggs or callow young from the nest? Could I have stood quietly by and seen the weak or the maimed bullied? Nay, verily! In these absurd days she lighted up the whole world for me. To sit in the same room with her was like the happiness of perpetual holiday; when she ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... let it harm me, I'm not afraid, your riverence. [He gets up, a little reassured. He is a callow, flaxen polled, smoothfaced, downy chinned lad, fully grown but not yet fully filled out, with blue eyes and an instinctively acquired air of helplessness and silliness, indicating, not his real character, but ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... them from the path of his swift and victorious despair, the Emperor at last is at home,—where are the great dignitaries and the lieutenant-generals of the empire? Where is Maria Louisa, the Empress Eagle, with her little callow king of Rome? Is she going to defend her nest and her eaglet? Not she. Empress-queen, lieutenant-general, and court dignitaries, are off on the wings of all the winds—profligati sunt, they are away with the money-bags, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the lower animals of this our earth; is it not thus by nature's law with them? The lioness will perish to preserve that very whelp, whom she will rend a year or two hence, meeting the young lion in the forest; the hen, so careful of her callow brood, will peck at them, and buffet them away, directly they are fully fledged; the cow forgets how much she once loved yonder well-grown heifer; and the terrier-bitch fights for a bit of gristle with her own two-year-old, whom she used to nurse so tenderly, and famished her own bowels ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... earth has that got to do with it?" said Vane frowning. "I'm not a child or a callow boy. Do you suppose at my age I don't know my own mind? Why, my dear girl. . . ." Her eyes met his, and the words died ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... dropping into densest shade, now climbing out upon a bare spur of rock or lap of smooth lawn; the musical rain of a fountain in the green depths below; the hamlet and neighboring villas so lost to sight that the very birds might well doubt where to pierce the leafy canopy to find home, wife and callow nestlings; beyond, and round all, the half ring of quiet-colored, placid sea—the emerald sea, rough with white caps; the blue sea, sparkling in sunshine; the moonlit sea, silver-gleaming, but melancholy, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... the shelter he had provided for her for good, had been terrible indeed. It was said he had threatened her life in a moment of passion. It was said she had dared him to his face. It was also said that he, the great "gunman," Pap, had groveled at her feet like any callow school-youth. These things were open gossip, and each repetition of the tales in circulation gained in elaboration of detail, till all sorts of wild ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... the outward signs of so vigorous a manhood. Tall, well-formed, muscular as his faultless clothes half revealed, half hid, his bronzed face bearing the clear eyes and steady lips of a man much out of doors, this thoughtful Englishman was indeed a man to catch and hold attention. No callow youth, was he, but in the prime of life—strong, clean, distinguished in appearance, with hair slightly silvered at the temples; a man who had lived fully, women would have said, but who was now a bit weary of ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... on sounding pinions to the WEST, When Tyrant-Power had built his eagle nest; While from his eyry shriek'd the famish'd brood, Clenched their sharp claws, and champ'd their beaks for blood, 365 Immortal FRANKLIN watch'd the callow crew, And stabb'd the struggling Vampires, ere they flew. —The patriot-flame with quick contagion ran, Hill lighted hill, and man electrised man; Her heroes slain awhile COLUMBIA mourn'd, 370 And crown'd with laurels ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... great misfortunes of Roman literature that the works of its chief writers are used as textbooks for schools, a misfortune shared to some extent by the Greek. Yet Homer and Xenophon, Vergil and Cicero, did not write for children or callow youth. They ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... to the instruction of others, leaving none for his own purposes. He would take callow youths to his chambers and teach them ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... although it is getting to be what it never was, it must always remain what it now is. It might be called a city, if it were not alternately populous and uninhabited; and it would be a wide-spread village, if it were not a collection of hospitals for decayed or callow politicians. It is the hybernating-place of fashion, of intelligence, of vice,—a resort without the attractions of waters either mineral or salt, where there is no bathing and no springs, but drinking in abundance and gambling in any quantity. Defenceless, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... of twenty-two, convalescing in country lodgings after an illness that seemed to have taken the marrow out of my bones. Hilaire was in Japan, and I—a callow fledgling from the nest—was very sick and sorry for myself. There were some people living in rather a large house at the other end of the village who took notice of me. They were the only ones, and I have thought since that my acquaintance with them really did for me ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... evening, and they were all out admiring the waves. Ulsters and sailor hats were appropriate enough then, but the genders were not easy to distinguish, especially as the elder girl wears her hair short—no improvement to a keen face which needs softening. She is much too like a callow undergraduate altogether, and her sister follows suit, though perhaps with more refinement of feature—indeed she looks delicate, and was soon called in. They are in slight mourning, and appear in gray serges. They left a strap of books on the sofa, of somewhat ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wore their peculiar, pathetic expression, a patient, sourish smile which seemed to say: "Oh, no! don't mistake me, I know you are not coming up to me. I can hardly expect that!" And Francie would plead with one of her lovers, or with some callow youth: "Now, to please me, do let me introduce you to Miss Pink; such a nice girl, really!" and she would bring him up, and say: "Miss Pink—Mr. Gathercole. Can you spare him a dance?" Then Miss Pink, smiling her forced smile, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... brooded somewhat, yet rather as a boy whose melancholy is callow and easily fades. But during that evening in Boone's cabin, he had changed to a man, for it was then he came to know the meaning of possession, and in the same moment he learned the meaning of loss. A dull and indefinable resentment thereafter grew on him. But against whom? Against ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... what inward pangs of laughter or despair he may have felt as he sat behind the old desk in Chase Hall and watched us file in, year after year! Callow, juvenile, ignorant, and cocksure—grotesquely confident of our own manly fulness of worldly savoir—an absurd rabble of youths, miserable flint-heads indeed for such a steel! We were the most unpromising of all material for the scholar's eye; comfortable, untroubled ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... her rocky hold forsakes, Rous'd, in her fright her sounding wings she shakes; The cavern rings with clattering:—out she flies, And leaves her callow care, and cleaves the skies: At first she flutters:—but at length she springs To smoother flight, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... leaves that to callow youth And callous age; plain picturing of the truth Seems cynical,—to folly. Friend, the true cynic is the shallow mime Who paints humanity devoid of crime, And life ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... quietly, "her ideas run in—that direction? In which case, Dr. Ransford, you'll have trouble. For Mrs. Folliot, mother of yonder callow youth, who's the apple of her eye, is one of the inquisitive ladies of whom I've just told you, and if her son unites himself with anybody, she'll want to know exactly who that anybody is. You'd far better have supported me as an aspirant! However—I suppose ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... rather with the hope of shouldering a shovel and descending into the canal with other workmen, that I might some day solemnly raise my right hand and boast, "I helped dig IT." But that was in the callow days before I had arrived and learned the awful gulf that separates the sacred white American from the rest of the Canal Zone world. Besides, had I not always wanted to be a policeman and twirl a club and stalk with heavy, law-compelling tread ever since I had first stared speechless upon one of ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... Ibsen; and the making of a woman first in a sensual and afterward transferring her into an educational mould with a view to obtaining an instrument to thunder out a given theme could not be else than abhorrent to one whose art, however callow, was at least objective. In the Doll's House Ibsen had renounced all objectivity. It does not seem to me that further apologies are necessary for my predecessor's remark to Dr. Aveling after the reading that he was engaged in moulding a woman in ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... on the place he had touched her. She had never before experienced such a reaction. Never before had a man's hand, even on her bare flesh, produced such thrill and excitement. Desperately, her common sense struggled with this new thing. She dismissed with annoyance the callow, schoolgirl thought that this was the way love finally came—in the door, unannounced, to take over a woman's heart and soul and ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... six years before. The girl had come out of school to take upon her slim young shoulders the management of her father's house. Moreover, in that aged town where, aside from a few score new professors and their callow young assistants, everybody's grandparents had played dolls and tin soldiers together, Dr. Keltridge's absent-minded fashion of failing to provide his daughter with a feminine chaperon had caused no comment whatsoever. Everybody that one met out at dinner knew all about ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... moreover, yet no longer callow; comely, yet with a strong male comeliness; he had a pleasantly modulated voice, yet one that they had heard swell into a compelling note of command; he had the most joyous, careless laugh in all the world—such a ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... suspiciously and looked at it askance. It is to be doubted if ever before he had seen a picture, unless perchance in the primary reading-book of his callow days at the public school, spasmodically opened at intervals at the "church house" in the Cove. He continued to gravely gaze at the sketch, held sideways and almost reversed, for ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... how, in the fire of his callow youth and fine flower of his lustie springal days, he had been stung with murderous frenzie at view of a certaine picture of Apelles, the which in those times was showed in a temple. And the said picture did present Alexander the Great ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... anything else that men hold dear. Heavens! to think of being held in such bondage! I could stand it with more patience if I were in prison sharing the hard lines of the fellows. But to be here; to be hand in glove with these boasting, audacious coxcombs, and forced to listen to their callow banter of us and our army, it makes me feel like a sneak and a traitor, and I'm glad that I see ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... been called out of my bed, and waked for the purpose, in the coldest winter nights—and this not once, but night after night—in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the power to hinder.—The same execrable tyranny drove the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... of the world sometimes came upon the glove in his pocket, and laughed at it, as such men do when they recall their callow youth. He took walks with Grizel without her knowing that she accompanied him; or rather, he let her come, she was so eager. In his imagination (for bright were the dreams of Thomas!) he saw her looking longingly after him, just as the dog looks; and then, not being really ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... near to that of his son, was erected "to record his worth both in his public and private character, and as a mark of personal esteem—p. 1. F.H. and W.C. p.c." I am told that these initials stand for F. Hustle, and the Rev. William Callow, and that the latter was the author of the following lines inscribed on the monument, which ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... fords the shallow lake, looking well for his land-range, to escape the hole where Baker was drowned; and coming on the breeding-ground of the countless birds, his pony's hoof with a reckless smash goes crunching through a dozen eggs or callow young. He fairly puts his pony to her mettle to escape the cloud of angry birds which, arising in countless numbers, dent his weather-beaten tarpaulin with their sharp bills, and snap his pony's ears, and confuse him with their sharp, shrill cries. Ten ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... musician!" The fact being that the man had read everything, but was setting a trap for the vanity of these egregious persons. The newspapers, the managers and the artists before the public are to blame for this callow, shallow attempt at culture. We read that Rosenthal is a second Heine in conversation. That he spills epigrams at his meals and dribbles proverbs at the piano. He has committed all of Heine to memory and in the greenroom reads Sanscrit. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... already some understanding which mocked the conventionality of her words. Aynesworth left the house, and lit a cigarette upon the pavement outside with a little sigh of relief. He felt somehow humiliated. Did she fancy, he wondered, that he was a callow boy to dance to any tune of her piping—that he had never before seen a beautiful woman who wanted ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... him? Hast thou enjoyed felicity unbroken and passed thy days without a shock, and now, upon a slight cloud of sadness, dost thou prepare to quit thy life, only to save thy anguish? If thou bear trifles so ill, how shalt thou endure the heavier frowns of fortune? Callow is the man who has never tasted of the cup of sorrow; and no man who has not suffered hardships is temperate in enjoying ease. Wilt thou, who shouldst have been a pillar of courage, show a sign of a palsied spirit? Born of a brave sire, wilt thou display utter impotence? ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... none whose temples whiten this the world. Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along; I shed in hell o'er my pale people peace; On earth I, caring for the creatures, guard Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek, And every feathered mother's callow brood, And all that love green haunts and loneliness. Of men, the chaste adore me, hanging crowns 10 Of poppies red to blackness, bell and stem, Upon my image at Athenai here; And this dead Youth, Asclepios bends above, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... your favor," laughed the monarch. "I ever prefer sober manhood to callow youth about me. The one is a prop, stanch, tried; the other a reed that bends this way and that, or breaks when ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... ambitious modern scientific investigator. In the second—the ancient Egyptians (we are told) invented incubator-stoves for hatching eggs; what would be thought of Egyptians who should neglect to fill the beaks of the callow fledglings? Yet this is precisely what France is doing. She does her utmost to produce artists by the artificial heat of competitive examination; but, the sculptor, painter, engraver, or musician once turned out by this mechanical process, she no more troubles herself about them and their fate ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... at that," returned the musician; "for with the callow poets of our day the way is for every one to write as he pleases and pilfer where he chooses, whether it be germane to the matter or not, and now-a-days there is no piece of silliness they can sing or write that is not ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Coat' among the slums, he did no good to himself. He had not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life of his adopted friends. When with refined judgment he wanted a figure for a novel, he went back to the Bar he scorned in his callow days and then drew in Weir ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... should have been stored up for the purposes of the hard struggle for existence in practical life, have been washed out of them by precocious mental debauchery—by book gluttony and lesson bibbing. Their faculties are worn out by the strain put upon their callow brains, and they are demoralised by worthless childish triumphs before the real work of life begins. I have no compassion for sloth, but youth has more need for intellectual rest than age; and the cheerfulness, the tenacity of purpose, the power of work which make many a successful man what ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... was overpowered by her tears and lamentations, and the clamors of her callow brood. The corporal was sent up to the Alhambra under a guard, in his gallows garb, like a hooded friar; but with head erect and a face of iron. The Escribano was demanded in exchange, according to the cartel. The once bustling and self-sufficient man of the law was drawn forth from his dungeon, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... meditative air, as of a man who discusses the most indifferent subject possible. "I hope he may. It would be a pity for such a place to fall into such hands. She would make it a phalanstery, a nest for Dorcas societies and callow curates." ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... my acquaintance remarked: "Is there anything so grand in a man as force? In my estimation those firemen and the chief who so splendidly controlled them are as far superior to the dancing youth, we meet at parties and hops, as meat is better than foam." Put that into your pipe, you callow striplings, who aim to be lady-killers! It is not your tennis suits, nor your small feet, nor your ability to dance and lead the german that makes a woman's heart kindle at your approach. It is your response to an emergency, your muscle in a tilt ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... The callow birdlet waits for two or three, But to the eyes of those already fledged, In vain the net is ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to disturb callow youth, ads for transparencies, truedup dice and bustpads, proprietary articles and why wear a truss with testimonial from ruptured gentleman. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... "Although no one ever asked my hand in holy matrimony except a callow youth whom I tutored in algebra last summer. He had failed in his June examination and had to pass in September or be forever labeled a dunce by his fond family. Now you see why I can understand the psychology of saying 'no' to a proposal. This stripling, who was at least five years my junior, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... great reports of thy skill and prowess in France, both from Mackworth and from others. It will pleasure me greatly to have thee in my household; more especially," he added, "as it will get thee, callow as thou art, out of my Lord Fox's clutches. Our faction cannot do without the Earl of Mackworth's cunning wits, Sir Myles; ne'theless I would not like to put all my fate and fortune into his hands without bond. I hope that thou dost not rest ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... verdant, emerald, virid, virescent; immature, unripe; raw, untrained, callow, unsophisticated, awkward, inexperienced, unskilled, undisciplined, gullible; unseasoned; fresh, undecayed. Antonyms: sear, parched, seasoned, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... uncertain stage in which its vagaries astonished no one so much as its owner, but he joined in the singing. "Let all the people praise Thee" was a command not to be lightly set aside for worldly considerations of harmony and fitness, and so Laban sang, his callow and ill-adjusted soul divided between fears that the people would hear him and that ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... an arm in a manner implying that she had a right to refuse it. Till to-night she had never received masculine attentions beyond those which might be contained in such homely remarks as 'Elfride, give me your hand;' 'Elfride, take hold of my arm,' from her father. Her callow heart made an epoch of the incident; she considered her array of feelings, for and against. Collectively they were for taking this offered arm; the single one of pique determined her ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... well and wisely. Though the post of duty to which the callow lieutenantling will be ordered must, of course, be Fort Jumping Off Point, at the extreme end of the habitable globe. Well, my dear, I must bid you good night, for, see, it is on the stroke of eleven o'clock, and I am rather tired from my journey, for, you must know, we rushed it through ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... And flight is destined for the callow wing, And the high appetite implies the food, And souls most reach the level whence they spring; O Life of very life! set free our powers, Hasten the travail of the ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... unmarried sister. For Miss Kate, from her earliest youth, had been distinguished by that matronly sedateness of voice and step, and completeness of figure, which indicates some members of the gallinaceous tribe from their callow infancy. ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... wofully below his required standard. She was tall and stately—Junoesque some people called her—but in her conversation she was decidedly flippant. She was interested in all the small things of life, but for the great ones she had no inclination. She preferred a dance with a callow youth to a chat with a man of learning. She worshipped artificial in-door life, but had no sympathy with nature. The country she abominated, and her ideas of rest consisted solely in a change of locality, which was why she went to Newport every summer, there to indulge in further routs and ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... Chirping, in the cold and rain, Their impatient sweet complaining, Sing out from their hearts again; Bid them set themselves to mating, Cooing love in softest words, Crowd their nests, all cold and empty, Full of little callow birds. ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... these last regarded him at least as one who neglected his opportunities, but his great laugh at their callow jests and their advice to him was so frank and indifferent a thing that they found it singularly baffling. 'Twas indeed as if a man of ripe years and wisdom had laughed at them with good-nature, because he knew they could not understand the ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... added, to a very different tune. Her beauty came as surprise to him as having much more than fulfilled its early promise. He found it impressive beyond that of any one of the many ladies, mature or callow, with whom it was his habit largely to flirt. So far he could congratulate himself on having successfully withstood the wiles of matrimony—but by how near a shave, at times by how narrow a squeak! If that fine parental fraud, the Archdeacon, had but known!—Tom, undeterred ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... in his callow days, before he had learned the value of a good digestion. To a young and fervid youth, love's young dream is, no doubt, very charming, lovers, as a rule, having a small appetite; but to a man who has seen the world, and ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... "O callow innocence!" exclaimed the other. "Is it possible you do not know, or do not suspect, the intrigue in which you move? I find it in my heart to pity you! We are both women after all—poor girl, poor girl!—and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... World! whose heritage Was the vast prairie and the boundless sky; Whose callow thoughts with wings untrammeled sought Free scope for growth denied to Ease and Power, Naught couldst thou know of place or precedent, For Freedom's ichor with thy mother's milk Coursing thy veins, would ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... Prince Charming had never appeared, unless—Nora laughed aloud at the thought—he had disguised himself with a cleverness defying detection. With Reginald Hornby, a callow youth, the son of Miss Wickham's dearest friend, who occasionally made the briefest of duty visits; Mr. Wynne, the family solicitor, an elderly bachelor; and the doctor's assistant, a young person by the name of Gard, Nora's list ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... trade are the company who rents offices, the cigar man, the lunch man, and the telegraph operators, and the commission men who get one-eighth of a cent a bushel either way the market goes. Some of these commission men get the speculation bug and go broke, and yet there are callow youths and business men and clerks and other outsiders who believe they are smart enough to speculate on the Board of Trade. That belief helps ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... All the shifting and changing which Cervantes made in these embarrassed years are within a small half-circle, whose centre is his grave and the cell of his child. He fluttered about that little convent like a gaunt old eagle about the cage that guards his callow young. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... a bird of about the size of a robin, flew down from a tree beneath which we were passing, and after circling several times around Olla's head, alighted on her finger, which she held out for it to perch upon. It was a young wood-pigeon, which she had found in the grove, when a callow half-fledged thing, the old bird having been captured or killed by some juvenile depredators. Taking pity on its orphan state, Olla had adopted and made a pet of it: it was now perfectly tame, and would ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... son was worse, for he asked questions without number and when at last I was reduced to silence, lectured me about shooting. Yes, this callow youth who was at Sandhurst, instructed me, Allan Quatermain, how to kill elephants, he who had never seen an elephant except when he fed it with buns at the Zoo. At last Mr. Smith, who to Scroope's great amusement had taken the end of the table and assumed ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard |
