"Maternal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... children to my wife; I never doubted her maternal tenderness for them. I above all recommend to her to make them good christians, and honest people; to make them consider the grandeurs of this world (if they be condemned to possess them) only as dangerous ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... in her manner, as if she were humouring him by pretending to accept as a secret of vast importance some news which she had long known—that little air of patronage which even schoolgirls bestow, at times, upon white-haired men. It is part of the maternal instinct. But this vanished when she heard that she was to share the secret with two men, and she repeated, ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... by a long afternoon nap. It was now nightfall, and they were returning homewards, conversing in loud and angry tones on the humiliation of the morning, and threatening retribution against its cause, the gallant stranger. Narcisse, with the litigiousness of his maternal race, and prompted by his inkling of law, was for launching an action for assault and battery against their assailant's purse, whilst the others, pot-valiant, declared their anxiety to meet him in bodily conflict on another field; and thus discoursing in the deepening gloom, ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... on the matter, she began to relent. The very completeness of the revenge which she had in prospect robbed her of her satisfaction. The man was so dependent on her, so deeply indebted to her, must suffer so much by reason of her, that the maternal instinct, which is said to be developed even in half-grown girls, took him under its protection; and when that scene occurred in the public room of the Castle Inn and he stood forward to shield her (albeit in an arrogant, careless, half-insolent way that must ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... the kind fairy and slept the sleep of innocence, after having felt the maternal lips of her good protectress upon ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... wretchedness so harshly, those pitiless masters who after taking all the wealth of the world, would not even leave to the poor their dream of the realms beyond, their belief that a beneficent superior power took a maternal interest in them, and was ready to endow them with peace of soul and health of body. One day a whole band of poverty-stricken and ailing folks went to the Mayor, knelt down in his courtyard, and implored him with ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... was born at St. Albans, in Northern Vermont, on the 17th of February, 1824. He came of good New England stock, which emigrated from Massachusetts to the valley of Lake Champlain before the beginning of the last century. Both his paternal and maternal ancestors and relations were notable people, and took prominent parts in the troubles of a thinly-settled frontier, and especially in the French and Indian war, and in the Committee of Safety, as well as in the militia and volunteers during the ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... large, well-shod foot extended, this mother in Israel sat absorbed like a man in the daily paper, and wroth like a man at its contents. Occasionally she would emit an impatient protest in the deep, maternal tones, and the graceful daughter would turn her head and read over her shoulder in ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... future with more anxiety than generally enters into maternal hopes and fears. When but a year old, he had fallen from the arms of a neighbor who had caught him up from the floor in a fit of tipsy fondness. The child's back and hip were severely injured. He ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... godmothers and one godfather. The persons selected for godparents should be near relatives or friends of long and close standing, and should be members of the same church into which the child is baptized. The maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather usually act as sponsors for the first child, the maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother for the second. A person invited to act as godparent should not refuse ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... maternal uncle, i. 5; receives Nelson on board his ship the "Raisonnable," on entering the navy, 6; care for Nelson during his early years, 9-16; made Comptroller of the Navy, 15; procures Nelson's promotion ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of nightly dews, drops from the coursing clouds, trickle down to them, moistening the dryness, closing up the little hollows of the ground, drawing the particles of maternal earth more closely. Suddenly—as an insect that has been feigning death cautiously unrolls itself and starts into action—in each seed the great miracle of life begins. Each awakens as from a sleep, as from pretended death. It starts, it moves, it bursts its ashen woody shell, it takes ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... were devotedly fond of each other, but Mrs. Carling was the elder by twenty years, and in her love was an element of maternal solicitude to which her sister, while giving love for love in fullest measure, did not fully respond. The elder would have liked to share every thought, but she was neither so strong nor so clever as the girl to whom she had been almost as a mother, and who, though perfectly ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... of little sisters who were as nice as could be. They went about in white cotton gowns—amazingly clean, considering that they lived under a tree—tied at the waist with red scarfs; their black hair was smoothly gathered at the backs of their pretty heads, and they had a demure and quaintly maternal air; they looked at you with a tranquil, moon-like gaze, which seemed to say that their ideas, which were on the way, had tarried for the moment in some boon ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... have something to do with this, and so may the predisposition in the bitten animal to be affected by the poison. If it is connected with oestrum, the bitch will probably become a disgusting, as well as dangerous animal; if with parturition, there is a strange perversion of maternal affection—she is incessantly and violently licking her young, continually shifting them from place to place; and, in less than four-and-twenty hours, they will be destroyed by the reckless manner in which they are ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... expression. I thought that if I were an artist, and that my subject was the "Massacre of the Innocents," that the mother's face in the foreground should be Mrs. Morton's. "Rachel Weeping for her Children;" something of the pathetic maternal agony, as for a lost babe, had seemed to cross her face as she spoke of her little ones. I found out afterwards that, though she wore no mourning, Mrs. Morton had lost a beautiful infant about four months ago. It had not been more than six weeks old, but the mother's heart was still ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... exaggerated maternal instinct in her that moved her to foster and champion Hildreth and me ... an instinct that made her gather in every stray cat she found on the road ... she is the only person I have ever known who could break through the reserve of the cat's nature, and make it as fond and sentimental as a dog ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Ramsbotham—that the engagement had never been formal. So far as Mr. Peters was concerned, there was an end to Mistress Peggy's dream of an existence of everlasting breakfasts in bed. Leaving the Ramsbotham flat, she returned to the maternal roof, and there a course of hard work and plain living tended greatly to improve her figure and complexion; so that in course of time, the gods smiling again upon her, she married a foreman printer, and passes ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... was that each of the women used to sport and play with the son of her sister-wife, kissing him and straining him to her bosom, whilst each mother thought that the other's behaviour arose but from maternal affection. On this wise passion got the mastery of the two women's hearts and they became madly in love with the two youths, so that when the other's son came in to either of them, she would press him to her breast and long for him never to be parted from her; till, at last, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... again after dark. These ceremonies greatly fluttered those doves the young MacStingers, who were not only unable at such times to find any resting-place for the soles of their feet, but generally came in for a good deal of pecking from the maternal bird during the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... drew all its charm from its adaptability. It was a different face to each speaker: now kindling with irony, now gently maternal, now charged with abstract meditation—and few paused to reflect that, in each case, it was merely the mirror held up to some one else's view ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... say it, he wondered. No, for he lifted his face from his shielding hand and turned miserable eyes upon her, and her eyes met him clearly. Yet they were deeper, softer, moved by a sad compassion. There was something patiently maternal in them, as if she had found herself again before the old sad question of man's uncomprehended desires. She spoke, strangely he thought then, and afterward he wondered if she actually had said the ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... face all radiant to the Sun, Enamoured of the sight he looks upon; She to the end of what is now begun Downgazes, stooping, shadowed by the throne Made by a Maiden's arms, maternal grown; Than ivory most fair, than purest gold, More pure, more fair, and ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... (north and south entrances of the Palace of Education) - Gustave Gerlach Decorative panels above the doors outside of the building showing maternal instruction. ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... ball-room, and perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present vengeance. She was surprised and pained when one of the guests interrupted her, and, justifying the treatment she had received at Venice, declared himself her natural son. The lady instantly recognized him, and in the sudden revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an antidote. This he not only refused to do, but continued his dying reproaches, till his mother, losing her self-command, drew her poniard and plunged it into ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... for her suppressed passions in the clinging sympathy of her daughter, Marie Josephte dit La Corriveau, who worshipped all that was evil in her mother, and in spite of an occasional reluctance, springing from some maternal instinct, drew from her every secret of her life. She made herself mistress of the whole formula of poisoning as taught by her grandfather Exili, and of the arts of sorcery practised by ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... The nurse, before the baby was a year old, discovered in her the cleverness of the father and the grace and fascination of the mother. And it must be said that, if she did not excite passionate affection at first, she enlisted paternal and maternal pride in her career. It dawned upon both parents that a daughter might give less cause for anxiety than a son, and that in an heiress there were possibilities of an alliance that would give great social distinction. Considering, therefore, all that she represented, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... A.D. 650. Cuanan, maternal uncle and immediate successor of Mochuda (Lanigan). A.D. 698. Iarnla, surnamed Hierologus (Four Masters). In his time King Alfrid was a student in Lismore. A.D. 702. Colman, son of Finnbhar (Acta Sanctorum). During his reign the abbey of Lismore reached the zenith of its fame. A.D. ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda
... had been kind to her; to the poor and the sick of the parish; to her father, who was helpless without her; to the tailor across the way. In each case she had given more than she had got. A nature overflowing with impulsive affection, it must spend itself upon others. The maternal instinct was at the very core of her nature, and care for others was as much a habit as an instinct with her. She had love to give, and it must be given. It had been poured like the rain from heaven on the just and the unjust; on animals as on human beings, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... who are avaricious enough to sell their souls," they cried; "and the maternal Trent is one of them. The girl is only to blame for allowing herself to be ...
— "Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... pictures over an altar. The proficiency which I had acquired in his art during my residence in the convent had made me an enthusiastic amateur. I was struck, at the first glance, with the painting. It was the face of a Madonna. So innocent, so lovely, such a divine expression of maternal tenderness! I lost for the moment all recollection of myself in the enthusiasm of my art. I clasped my hands together, and uttered an ejaculation of delight. The painter perceived my emotion. He was flattered and gratified by it. My air and manner pleased him, and he ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... all those flattering colors, dear duchesse, and wrote only, 'She worshipped her children, and preferred friends to lovers,' the portrait would be far nearer to the truth. It is easy to be chaste if one has only known one passion in one's life, and that the maternal one!" ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... Breton. Then her whole past history was fully related, she had been fed on, and what illnesses she had had, and how many teeth she had got, and all the other delightful nothings so perennially interesting to the maternal heart. Hilda listened to the whole account with unfeigned attention, and begged leave to be allowed to dance Dot in her own strong arms, and tickled her fat cheek with her slender forefinger, and laughed with genuine ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... pass down the road is an anxious ruffled hen, her speckled breast astir with maternal troubles. She walks delicately, lifting her feet high and glancing furtively from side to side with comb low dressed. The sight of man, the heartless egg-collector, from whose haunts she has fled, wrings from her a startled cluck, and she ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... introduced a custom in Circassia, which appears so singular to others, is nevertheless a cause common to all nations, I mean maternal tenderness and interest. ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... make him innocent of the first great deception, the huge lie of making love to her as if he were a free man. The depths and extent of her misery could be measured by the strange sense of a bitter gladness invading the very recesses of her maternal instinct, and replacing what had been the heartfelt sorrow of six years. "It is a mercy I have no child!" she cried, and the cry seemed to ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... all," he began, in the leisurely tone of one who commences a long narrative. "My parents were honest, but poor. At the age of three years and four months, a maternal uncle, who, having been a proofreader of Abyssinian dialect stories for a ladies' magazine, was considered a literary prophet, foretold ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... fishermen's hovels along the Bay of Shoals, and Frigate Light yonder. . . . Then Austin built Silverside out of a much simpler, grand-paternal bungalow; then came Sanxon Orchil and erected Hitherwood House on the foundations of his maternal great-grandfather's cabin; and then the others came; the Minsters built gorgeous Brookminster—you can just make out their big summer palace—that white spot beyond Surf Point!—and then the Lawns came and built Southlawn; and, beyond, the Siowitha people arrived on scout, land-hungry and ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... peace to a great nation! The flags waved, women wept, and the wounded soldiers, as they rolled in on baggage cars, were hailed as the deliverers of a people. The new Confederacy! An emotion half romantic, half maternal filled Betty as she bent above an open wound—for it was in her blood to do battle to the death for a belief, to throw herself into a cause as into the arms of a lover. She was made of the stuff of soldiers, and come what might she would always take her stand ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... of giving expression to that undying ironic detachment, touched with a fine malice but full of tender understanding, which all women, to some degree or other, share, and which all men, to some degree or other, suffer from; in other words, the terrible and beautiful insight of the maternal instinct. The clear charm of her unequalled style—a style quite classical in its economy of material and its dignified reserve—is a charm frequently caught in the wit and fine malice of one's unmarried aunts; ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... reasons why women should be earnest in this cause. Their sex, though not so much addicted as ours to the use of intoxicating drinks, suffers more from the effects of the evil. To them it is the destruction of all domestic peace, the wreck of all conjugal and maternal hopes; it is ignorance, poverty, misery, for themselves and children. My own attention was first called to this reform by the sufferings of women. (Mr. May here related several touching anecdotes of most estimable women he had known, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... love for their tender off-spring keeps them firm to their duty; to these the next generation will owe much. They are the little band of true-hearted reformers, whose good example will be like leaven, spreading until its influence is felt throughout the wide circle of maternal responsibility." ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... hidden, by its oblique position, from the conviction that the features of a new-born infant are ill-adapted to please the eye; but that of the Virgin is warmly irradiated, and yet so disposed, that in bending with maternal fondness over her offspring, it exhibits exquisite beauty, without the harshness of deep shadows. The light strikes boldly on the lower part of her face, and is lost in a fainter glow on the eyes, while the forehead is thrown into shade. The ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... antiquity. The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of the family by the name of Higgins. This was in the eleventh century, when our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England. Why it is that our long line has ever since borne the maternal name (except when one of them now and then took a playful refuge in an alias to avert foolishness), instead of Higgins, is a mystery which none of us has ever felt much desire to stir. It is a kind of vague, pretty romance, and we leave it alone. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Bull.—The Maternal Management of Children in Health and Disease. By T. BULL, M.D., formerly Physician-Accoucheur to the Finsbury Midwifery Institution. ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... soul in thee increased! But, knowing this, in knowledge's despite I fret against the law severe that stains Thy spirit with eclipse; When—as a nymph's carven head sweet water drips, For others oozing so the cool delight Which cannot steep her stiffened mouth of stone - Thy nescient lips repeat maternal strains. Memnonian lips! Smitten with singing from thy mother's east, And murmurous with music not their own: Nay, the lips flexile, while the mind alone A passionless statue stands. Oh, pardon, innocent one! ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... II.—R. S. C., a white male, age 48 years, who is now serving a life sentence for murder. One brother and one sister died of tuberculosis. Another sister and two maternal aunts were insane. Father alcoholic. Patient has always been regarded as rather sickly. Had the usual diseases of childhood and has been subject all his lifetime to frequent headaches. His school career was very irregular in character and he never advanced beyond the elementary subjects. ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... succeed him in office, but in case of his death, the right of descent being in his mother, he would be succeeded, not by one of his male children, but by his brother; or failing in this then by the son of his sister, or by some direct, however remote, descendent of a maternal line. ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... clergyman's daughter whom he married a year later. I think Mrs. Payne knew that this affair was coming off, and offered me the tale as a combination of oral confession and Nunc Dimittis, watching the boy while she told it to me with a sort of hungry maternal satisfaction, as somebody whom she had not only brought into the world but for whose salvation she was responsible. No doubt she had put up a hard fight for him and had every reason to be satisfied, though Gabrielle shared the honours of the mother's triumph in her own defeat. We ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... was the name of my maternal grandmother. What could the woman know of my maternal grandmother? It did not occur to me, I believe, to wonder what occasion George Washington could find to concern himself about my dying or my living. There stood the uncanny Jerusha ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... much what he said, as the mere fact that he could say it, which sent a wave of happiness through my maternal old body. So I made for him with my Australian crawl-stroke, and kissed him on both sides of his stubbly old face, and rumpled him up, and went to bed with a touch of silver about the edges of the thunder-cloud still hanging away off somewhere on ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... broke loose at the age of twenty, forged his father's name, and fled to New York, married an actress, got into a gambling affray, and was stabbed. That was the end of him. The eldest daughter, born in England, had been brought up by her maternal grandmother, who was rich, and whose heiress she was to be. Mrs. Danton and her two youngest children resided at the Hall, while the Captain was mostly absent. After her death, a Canadian lady had taken charge of the house and Captain Danton's daughters. All this Grace knew, and ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... this ill-fated party, and son of an Indian officer returning from furlough. Being an infant, his helplessness excited the sympathies of an Indian woman, who snatched him from the arms of his murdered mother, and sheltered him within her own. Nor did her kindness stop here, the never-failing maternal solicitude of the sex, inducing her to protect ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... great personal discomfort. It rained hard, so that a small stream of water, which descended from the roof of the coach as I entered it, had insinuated itself between one of the flannel waistcoats, which formed so important an item in the maternal valediction, and my skin, whence, endeavouring to carry out what a logician would call the "law of its being," by finding its own level, it placed me in the undesirable position of an involuntary disciple of the cold-water cure ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... the seaboard cities after a preliminary canter at Newport, previous to doing California and some big hunting in the "Rockies;" but later he intended to return and spend a season in New York and Boston society. His name was, for the moment, on every one's lips, and there was much quiet maternal inquiry as to how long the old peer was likely to last; for the Honorable Ernest was said to be ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... with the custom of the country, the wife being deemed of higher social standing than the husband, the son took the maternal surname. Tucker was sent, at a tender age, to a school located in the family territory. Such was his rapid progress that in a few years he had acquired English sufficiently enough to read and write it about as well as the average child of his age in ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... to evolve in a winged joy, but falls a victim of man's cupidity. Likewise, Confucius would not drink milk from a cow until her calf was weaned, because to do so were taking an unfair advantage of the maternal instincts of the cow. It will thus be seen that Confucius had a very fair hold on the modern idea which we call "Monism," or "The One." He, too, said, "All is one." In his attitude toward all living things he was ever ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... had already enjoined the adoption of this practice. So too had Buffon. But Morelly's voice had no resonance, Buffon's reasons were purely physical, and children were still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more passionate moral entreaties awoke maternal conscience. "Do these tender mothers," he exclaimed, "who, when they have got rid of their infants, surrender themselves gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what sort of usage the child in the village is receiving, fastened in his ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... boy," she cautioned, with a maternal note in her voice which was very sweet to bachelor ears from such a maiden mouth, "you must not let Nature snap. You have a wonderful physique but you must go home ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... be induced by many causes due to the mother, father, and child. Among maternal causes may be mentioned any serious disease, especially fevers, when accompanied by a rash on the skin, such as smallpox, measles, scarlet fever. It is hard for a pregnant woman to go through one of these diseases, without having an abortion. Syphilis, tuberculosis, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... them, is not known. If she was required to act at all in the case, it must have been very hard for her, in such a question of life and death, to decide between her youngest son alive and the children of her first-born in his grave. Mothers can best judge to which side, in such an alternative, her maternal sympathies would naturally ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... apparently without rhyme or reason; their sacrament the perpetual union of the sexes. Between the succeeding generations there was but one bond, the natural bond of motherhood. It was the first tie realised by mankind, a tie not felt as a concrete relationship between two individuals, but as a general, maternal, natural force. The presiding divinities were the "mothers," the eternal, incorporeal deities, enthroned outside time and space, and therefore immortal givers of life and preservers of mankind. Before their ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... nuffin!" interrupted the girl, shaking her head with impressive official dignity. "It's done gone fo'bid by de doctor! Yo' 're to lie dar and shut yo'r eye, honey," she added, for the moment reverting unconsciously to the native maternal tenderness of her race, "and yo' 're not to bodder yo'se'f ef school keeps o' not. De medical man say distinctly, sah," she concluded, sternly recalling her duty again, ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... even from the pencil of maternal anxiety, is not overcharged with shade. A few words, which could not have been uttered by the Lady Bacon except as a prophetess, we may add in reference to the meeting of the famous Englishman and the notorious Spaniard. At that moment the public life of Francis Bacon ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... harmony in the flow of the verse is a prevailing defect in Mr. Lloyd's poetry, and often makes it appear prosaic, even where the thought is not so. This pathetic sonnet is one of a very interesting set, on the death of Priscilla Farmer, the author's maternal grandmother, included ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... journey. Some turn in the road, some new object suddenly perceived and recognized, reminded me of days gone by, and were associated with the lighthearted gaiety of boyhood. The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal Nature bade me weep no more. Then again the kindly influence ceased to act—I found myself fettered again to grief and indulging in all the misery of reflection. Then I spurred on my animal, striving so to forget the world, my fears, and more than all, myself—or, in a more desperate ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... mother. Belle would not have it. She refused to become a motherly, middle-aged person, and her boys were growing altogether too big and too masterful to look upon a golden-curled, pink-cheeked, honey-throated Amazon as other Black Rim sons looked upon their faded, too often shrewish maternal parent. She was just Belle. They knew no other like her, no one with whom they might compare her. We do not compare the sun and the moon with other suns and moons. Like Tom, they worshipped her in their hearts, and chummed with her even before ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... for these restrictions on her niece's liberty. Still more ingenious her explanations of the occasional exceptions she made now and then in favor of some well-to-do young farmer of the neighborhood, or some traveller in whom her alert maternal eye detected a possible suitor for Victorine's hand. Victorine herself was not so fastidious. She was young, handsome, overflowing with vitality, and with no more conscience or delicacy than her mother had had before her. If the whole ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... woman. Whatever the husband might feel, the wife cared nothing for frowns of dean, archdeacon, or prebendary. To her the outsides and insides of her husband and fourteen children were everything. In her bosom every other ambition had been swallowed up in that maternal ambition of seeing them and him and herself duly clad and properly fed. It had come to that with her that life had now no other purpose. She recked nothing of the imaginary rights of others. She had no patience with her husband when he declared to her that he could not accept the hospital unless ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Virginia, and Kentucky, that the finest specimens of coloured females are reared. There are no mothers who rear, and educate in the natural graces, finer daughters than the Ethiopian women, who have the least chance to give scope to their maternal affections. But what is generally the fate of such female slaves? When they are not raised for the express purpose of supplying the market of a class of economical Louisian and Mississippi gentlemen, who do not wish to incur the expense ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... young sun, in those fresh morning hours, had seemed to caress the long-deserted wintry earth with his kindling rays; and the black soil turned up by the harrow had exhaled a refreshing odour as of incense offered by nature's maternal heart. The daily increasing heat of the sun, the milder air, and the grateful receptivity of earth: all betokened the end of idle winter and the beginning of a new year of fruitfulness, the gospel of labour and of blessing. The ardent ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... not like an actual lion, it would be felt by Niccola Pisano to be imperfect. And instead of this decorative evangelical preacher of a lion, with staring eyes, and its paw on a gospel, he carves you a quite brutal and maternal lioness, with affectionate eyes, and ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... herself, As golden Venus or Diana fair, Forth from her chamber to her son's embrace, The chaste Penelope; with tears she threw Her arms around him, his bright-beaming eyes And forehead kiss'd, and with a murmur'd plaint Maternal, in wing'd accents thus began. 50 Thou hast return'd, light of my eyes! my son! My lov'd Telemachus! I had no hope To see thee more when once thou hadst embark'd For Pylus, privily, and with no consent From me obtain'd, news seeking of thy sire. But haste; unfold. ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... been some secret family agreement that in spite of conventionalities he should be John among them. The Marquis had latterly suggested that increasing years made this foolish; but the son himself attributed the change to step-maternal influences. But still he was John to his sister, and John to some half-dozen sympathising friends,—and among others to ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... first youthful impressions of her were formed. As regards her looks, the verdict which, in the following winter, was sent to Paris by Berlioz during his stay in Dresden, was so far correct that her somewhat 'maternal' stoutness was unsuited to youthful parts, especially in male attire, which, as in Rienzi, made too great a demand upon the imagination. Her voice, which in point of quality had never been an exceptionally good medium for song, often landed her in difficulties, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... occasion, though matchless specimens of eloquence in their way, must be consigned to merciless oblivion. Nor can I tell you at length how worthy Aunt Rachel, not without a delicate and affectionate allusion to the circumstances which had transferred Rose's maternal diamonds to the hands of Donald Bean Lean, stocked her casket with a set of jewels that a duchess might have envied. Moreover, the reader will have the goodness to imagine that Job Houghton and his dame were suitably ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... inheritance to the most sensitively constituted of his children, whose musical genius, the least sane of all gifts, put her in touch with the greater mysteries of the Universe? That nebulous memories moved like ghosts in her soul he did not doubt, nor that at such moments she was tormented with vague maternal pangs. He conquered his first impulse to confess himself to her; doubtless she needed more help than he. She was staring at him ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... or less extent. One brush had apparently not given entire satisfaction, for the plug had been removed, and the caterpillars, eight or ten in number, were scattered about the opening. But the dissatisfaction probably lay with one of these caterpillars rather than with the maternal wasp, who had apparently failed in the full dose of anaesthetic, for one of her victims which I observed was quite lively, and had probably forced out the soft plug, and in his squirming ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... but Schlorge sent the Japanese doll running back to tell Sara that she must not light them, as they would not be ripe till Christmas Eve. Sara had never seen a prettier place, but she was rather worried by a maternal anxiety about the dolls. For it was certainly not a very safe place for them. Of course the Brown Teddy-Bear and the Billiken were all right, though the latter might come to grief if he should fall on his head. The Japanese ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... patron of those who are never too poor to give to some one poorer; of those who have no scientific reasons for giving, no statistics, only compassion and pity; of those who want to aid not only the promising but the hopeless cases; of those whose charity is tolerant and maternal, patient with the helpless, prepared for disappointments; not looking for results, ever ready to begin again, so long as the paradox of suffering and inability ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... gathering in groups in the Agora, upon the steps of the temples and along the porticoes. At every street corner one might have encountered women leading by the hand little children, whose uneven walk ill suited the maternal anxiety and impatience. Maidens were hastening to the fountains, all with urns gracefully balanced upon their heads, or sustained by their white arms as with natural handles, so as to procure early ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... to-day as in ancient Egypt or Attica. In the same way the Ainos of Japan, who regard the bear as a kinsman, sacrifice a bear once a year. But, to propitiate the animal and his connections, they appoint him a "mother," an Aino girl, who looks after his comforts, and behaves in a way as maternal as possible. The bear is now a kinsman, (Greek text omitted), and cannot avenge himself within the kin. This, at least, seems to be the humour of it. In Lagarde's Reliquiae Juris Ecclesiastici Antiquissimae a similar Syrian ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... however, the maternal hope had arisen in the heart of Miriam; nor was the hope belied. To her, as to Mary of old, the mystic messengers had whispered, and He with whom are the issues of life had regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. That of which she so long fondly dreamed, and ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... political freedom and a most democratic state of society; and nowhere are young women surrendered so early or so completely to their own guidance. Long before an American girl arrives at the age of marriage, her emancipation from maternal control begins; she has scarcely ceased to be a child when she already thinks for herself, speaks with freedom, and acts on her own impulse. The great scene of the world is constantly open to her view; far from seeking concealment, it is every day disclosed to ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... cause and effect. He may even have known that the mother and grandmother of the cat had natural tails. But it has been found that short tail is a dominant character; therefore, until we know who was the father of the short-tailed kittens the accident to its mother and the normal condition of her maternal ancestry ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... to dwell in the face of the St. Cecilia; and the cup of maternal anguish to be filled to the brim, as in Guide's Murder of the Innocents, the mother clasps to her arms the terrified babe, and strives to flee ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... calm, and all her thoughts were for Lucille. The more a man is brought into contact with maternal love, even if it bear in no way upon his own life, the better he will be for it—for this is surely the ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... animals I shall be just, and shall depict their good qualities as well as their preying habits. How many people know that the very worst animal, the tiger, is a better husband and father than many men? Or that the ferocity of the tigress is prompted entirely by her maternal instinct—and that in every case of unusual ferocity yet recorded it was afterward found that there was a helpless cub somewhere near? Hence in subsequent books I shall enter more fully into the causes of animal instincts ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle - Book One • Prince Sarath Ghosh
... clinging round the mother's neck in a true childish abandon of affection. What a tender feeling these monk artists had for the spirit of maternity! Perhaps by being debarred from the contemplation of maternal love in its humanity, they more clearly comprehended its divinity. Look at the little round-backed nestling child in Fra Angelico's Madonna della Stella, imperfect as it is in form, the whole spirit of love is in it. He does not give only ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... added a doll's dress. She was one of the limp obliging kittens which make such capital playmates, and the two girls laughed a great deal now as they reminded each other of certain frolics that had taken place. Once Mrs. Beck had entertained the Maternal Meeting in her staid best parlor, and the Busy B's, as the captain sometimes called them, had dressed the kitten and encouraged her to enter the room at a most serious moment in the proceedings. Even Mrs. Beck laughed about it now, though she was very angry at the time. ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Nature! I arraign; Of thy caprice maternal I complain: The lion and the bull thy care have found, One shakes the forests, and one spurns the ground: Thou giv'st the ass his hide, the snail his shell, Th' envenom'd wasp, victorious, guards his cell; Thy minions, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... your circular, and possibly the whole thing may be a mere newspaper fabrication; but it is stated so circumstantially as to carry with it an air of truth, and I have been induced to copy a brief memoir of my maternal grandfather, Lieut.-Colonel Joseph Robinson, in his own handwriting, now in my possession, and to enclose it to you herewith, to be made use of as you think fit in your intended publication. The memoir would appear, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... ten years. Laidlaw applied for two ballads, one of them The Outlaw Murray, to Hogg, then shepherding at Ettrick House, at the head of Ettrick, above Thirlestane. Hogg replied on 20th July 1801. He could get but a few verses of The Outlaw from his maternal uncle, Will Laidlaw of Phawhope. He said that, from traditions known to him, he could make good songs, "but without Mr. Scott's permission this would be an imposition, neither could I undertake it without an order from him in his own handwriting . . . " {21a} Laidlaw went on trying to collect songs ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... disposition to spoil their sport. To spend a day and a night in the woods, to imagine themselves Vikings, and behave as they imagined Vikings would behave, was a prospect which no one could contemplate without the most delightful excitement. There, far away from sheriffs and pastors and maternal supervision, they might perhaps find the long-desired chance of ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of woman. This year, however, when she attempted to arrange for the annual convention, she found to her dismay that every one of the speakers whom she always depended upon was unable to be present because of maternal duties. Some were anticipating an event, others had very young infants, and the older women were kept at home by expected or recently arrived grandchildren. She was used to overcoming obstacles, but the conditions on this occasion were too much for her and, with feelings which can not ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... maternal exaggeration whatever in the compliments which the baroness was addressing to Clotilde. All Paris looked upon her with the same eyes as her mother. She had never been so attractive as now, and she had always been infinitely so. Her person, reposed in the peace of her mourning, ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... Security Act back in 1935, Congress has recognized the necessity to "make more adequate provision for aged persons . . . through maternal and child welfare . . . and public health." Those are the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Lyndon B. Johnson • Lyndon B. Johnson
... such a state of remorse about the fourpence, that I forgot the maternal joy and caresses, the tender paternal voice. I pull out the twenty-four shillings and eightpence with a ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... house was the resort of all the zealous clergy of the party; and his hospitality, as well as his liberalities to the silenced and deprived ministers, proved as chargeable as his former debaucheries. Though he had acquired a tolerable fortune by a maternal uncle, he found his affairs so injured by his expenses, that he was obliged to take a farm at St. Ives, and apply himself for some years to agriculture as a profession. But this expedient served rather to involve him in further ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... of Kunti!' The servants, surprised, submitted the whole matter to Duryodhana. And when Salya was exceedingly pleased and ready to grant even his life, Duryodhana, who had remained concealed, came forward and showed himself to his maternal uncle. And the king of the Madras saw him and understood that it was Duryodhana who had taken all the trouble to receive him. And Salya embraced Duryodhana and said, 'Accept something that you ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... beautiful image of self-devoting, heroic magnanimity than Niobe, as she bends her body forward, that, if possible, she may alone receive the destructive bolt? Pride and repugnance are melted down in the most ardent maternal love. The more than earthly dignity of the features are the less disfigured by pain, as from the quick repetition of the shocks, she appears, as in the fable, to have become insensible and motionless. Before this figure, twice ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... precious than water—for the mountain valley means water—and this in a country where water is much more precious than life. And some of the best of this land at the foot of Music Mountain was the maternal ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... this sketch was born in slavery near Monroe, Walton county, Georgia, August 14, 1858. In the early fifties his maternal grandfather, Overton Johnson, was set free, given some money and sent North. He went to Cincinnati and began a free man's life as a cook and steward in a hotel. In a short time, by strict economy, he had saved some money from his earnings. This, with the money brought ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... number of those who had become Protestants: having made his way to America with his wife, he had settled in this then remote region; but dreading persecution, he had not attempted to promulgate his opinions beyond his own family. My maternal grandfather, when he married Donna Teresina Serrano, had, through her instruction, become a Protestant. Thus, in the heart of South America, those principles were cherished which, as was fondly hoped, would spread around them when liberty should be ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... of her young contemporaries that the obvious road cannot be the one to follow. Lady Gore's perceptions, far more acute as regarded her daughter than her husband, and rendered more vivid still by the whole concentration of her maternal being in Rachel, had entirely realised, while she wondered at it, the complete lack in her child of the modern ferment that seethes in the female mind of our days. But she had finally come to see that if Rachel was entirely happy and contented with her life it was a result to rejoice ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell |
