"Swaddling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aught I know, may, like Mr. Pitt, be half ripe before others are in blossom; but at Twickenham, I am sure, I could find dates and pomegranates on the quickset hedges, as soon as a cherry in swaddling-clothes on my walls. The very leaves on the horse-chestnuts are little snotty-nosed things, that cry and are afraid of the north-wind, and cling to the bough as if old poker was coming to take them away. For my part, I have seen nothing like spring but a chimney-sweeper's garland; and yet I have ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... span wide. It was resorted to by the childless husband or the barren wife. There are those among them who imagine that in some way or other their children come from the Makadistati; and marks of contusion on an infant, arising from tight swaddling or other causes, are gravely attributed to kicks received from his former comrades when he was ejected from ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... stringy, slimy sentences are of that consistency that they naturally flow and run together. They read as if written for military men, for men of business, there is such a despatch in them. Compared with these, the grave thinkers and philosophers seem not to have got their swaddling-clothes off; they are slower than a Roman army in its march, the rear camping to-night where the van camped last night. The wise Jamblichus eddies and gleams ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... away from the majestic influence of that store the original feeling of Port Elizabeth being rather a dreary place comes back upon me; but we drive all about—to the Park, which may be said to be in its swaddling-clothes as a park, and to the Botanic Gardens, where the culture of foreign and colonial flowers and shrubs is carried on under the chronic difficulties of too much sun and wind and too little water. Everywhere there is building going on—very modest building, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... man went back to his chair. "You remember, as well as I, that we considered the problem of change—and laughed at it. I repeat, we're no longer in swaddling clothes." ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... around. The women were already up, only the children were still sleeping. The moonshining woman with bulging eyes was carefully removing her coat from under them. The rioter was drying near the oven some rags which served for swaddling cloths, while the child, in the hands of the blue-eyed Theodosia, was crying at the top of its lungs, the woman lulling it in a gentle voice. The consumptive, seizing her breast, coughed violently, and, sighing ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... heart felt, and something his soul perceived; his pale and vacant face was illumined; and at the close of the reading he rose up. The coarse wrappings of his body fell away; and the muffling ignorance, the swaddling dulness, wherein that divine infant, the bright immortal spirit, was confined, seemed also to fall off. He lifted up his hands, spreading them as if dispensing blessings; and his countenance had a vague, smiling wonder in it, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... young man of twenty-four, who was presented as the pivot about whom the plot would revolve. Now we are led, protesting, up to a grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him through twenty years of intimate minutiae. In extreme cases we have been obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so often English), from ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... engineering has fairly leaped into prominence and apparently into full growth, but it still wears some of its swaddling-bands. Some of the garments which it borrowed from sister forms of construction in its short infancy still cling to it, and, while these were, perhaps, the best makeshifts under the circumstances, they fit badly ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... 1st, 1772, I presented myself to Cardinal Braneaforte, the Pope's legate, whom I had known twenty years before at Paris, when he had been sent by Benedict XVI. with the holy swaddling clothes for the newly-born Duke of Burgundy. We had met at the Lodge of Freemasons, for the members of the sacred college were by no means afraid of their own anathemas. We had also some very pleasant little ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... her shelter in the rock, unmindful of the rain still falling, and before the eavesdroppers realized it, she was speeding down the hill, the long braids dangling over her shoulders, and her perpetual white dress soon climbing like a veritable swaddling ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... upon the altar with its wings spread out over the child—it was a little girl, quite newly born—to protect it. They guessed that it was the eagle that had brought the child, but, of course, they could not tell whose it was. It was wrapped in swaddling-clothes, and these Potipherah's wife kept carefully by her; for she thought the time might come when they might be recognised by the parents of the little child; and indeed, years afterwards, this proved to be ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James
... Boy's widow, were wrapped in black calico swaddling garments, and looked more stiff ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... shall a child be formed in accordance, not with the vicious code of an artificial society, but in harmony with nature? Rousseau traces the course of Emile's development from birth to adult years. Unconstrained by swaddling-bands, suckled by his mother, the child enjoys the freedom of nature, and at five years old passes into the care of his father or his tutor. During the earlier years his education is to be negative: let him be preserved from all that is false or artificial, and enter ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... become strong, and rich, and powerful. I should prefer an intimate association with it now, in its early days and apparent struggles, to becoming its advocate and acquaintance, its fair- weather friend, in its high and palmy days. I would rather be able to say I knew it in its swaddling-clothes, than in maturer age. Its two elder brothers have grown old and died: their chests were weak—about their cradles nurses shook their heads, and gossips groaned; but the present institution shot up, amidst the ruin of those ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... motionless, while Peter's eyes never stirred from the table before them. There, carved in the fair white wood, rested the divine Babe, as on that blessed Christmas night when his Mother "wrapped him up in swaddling-clothes and laid him in a manger." The lovely little head nestled on its rough pillow as though on Mary's bosom; the tiny limbs were relaxed in sleep; the whole figure breathed at once the dignity of the Godhead and the pathetic helplessness of babyhood. Instinctively one loved, and pitied, and ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... and in swaddling-clothes Far better he than bearded Winceslaus His son, who feeds in luxury ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... another as they witness His fast falling tears. Can His repairing thus to the tomb be anything more than to pay a mournful tribute to an honoured friendship, and behold the silent home of the loved dead? Nay; He is about, as the Lord of Life, to wrench away the swaddling-bands of corruption, to vindicate His name and prerogative as the "Abolisher of death"—to have the first-fruits of that vast triumph which, ages before the birth of time, He had anticipated with longing earnestness—"I will ransom them from the ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... exposed to the sun, or carried quickly into the shade certain white balls which Piccolissima took at first for grains of wheat, because they had the form and size; but she was satisfied at last that these were the children of the ants in swaddling clothes. Piccolissima was so anxious to comprehend the mysterious talk, and the pantomime of all this innumerable crowd, that she became yet more attentive. The nurses caressed with their antennae in a peculiar way those eggs which were beginning to show life, and ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... land The dreaded infant's hand; The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn; Nor all the gods beside Longer dare abide, Nor Typhon huge ending in snaky twine: Our Babe, to shew his Godhead true, Can in his swaddling bands control ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... a fusillade of jeers from soldiers, grooms, and house-men, across the court, through the hall, and up the stairs to Marcel's chamber. Never was I gladder of anything in my life than to doff those swaddling petticoats. Two minutes, and I was a man again. I found it in my heart to pity the poor things who must wear the trappings their ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... cumbersome pieces of furnishing, my lady lay in a gloomy, canopied bed, with her new-born child at her side, but not looking at or touching it, seeming rather to have withdrawn herself from the pillow on which it lay in its swaddling-clothes. ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... on my feet with steady hand, Among the crowding marvels on her face, Bidding me rise, and run a strong man's race; Swathed mo in circumstance's swaddling band; Fed me with her own self; then bade me stand MYself entire,—while she was but a place Hewn for my dwelling from the midst of space, A something better than HER sea or land. Nay, Earth! thou bearest me upon thy back, Like a rough nurse, and I can almost ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... much like those one is accustomed to see in London. But among the poor, and even some of the bourgeois class, the old insane customs prevail, and it is not surprising to hear that the death-rate among infants is extraordinarily high. From its birth the poor child is tightly wrapped in swaddling clothes, confining all its limbs, so that it presents the appearance of a mummy, swathed in coarse yellow flannel, only its head appearing. So stiffly are they rolled up that I have seen an infant only a few weeks ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... consumption ever since dat time when he went to The Forge an' got baptized in his wife's night shift—him not being able to get a robe! Andy took a mighty stiff chill that-er-day an' it war like a finger pintin' the way to his grave. Andy war thirty when he waddled into de Branch in dem swaddling clothes, an' he's over ninety now. I expect he can hol' on till you've tended to ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... aside the swaddling-bands of your imperfections, conform your lives to the highest ideals of uprightness and truth. Exercise your voice, your articulation and your gestures. If need be, like Demosthenes, place pebbles in your mouth; repair like that great orator to the sea-shore, brave the fury of the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... our way against Indian savages, and did we not conquer the French in our mother's behalf? And then to be set down as ignorant children, forsooth, and told what we must do and from what we must refrain. The colonies have outgrown swaddling-clothes!" ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... trial of their constitution. It was thought that epileptic or diseased children shrank from the wine and fell into convulsions, while healthy ones were hardened and strengthened by it. A certain supervision was exercised over the nurses, making them bring up the children without swaddling clothes, so as to make their movements free and unconfined, and also to make them easily satisfied, not nice as to food, not afraid in the dark, not frightened at being alone, not peevish and fretful. For this reason, many foreigners used to obtain Lacedaemonian nurses for ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... biding his time, with all the nonchalance of an old campaigner. "How did you sleep, cap?" asked a well-meaning elderly gentleman. "Well, thank you," was the dignified response; "as I always do on a sleeping-car." Always does? Great horrors! Hardly out of his swaddling-clothes, and yet he always sleeps well in a sleeper! Was he born on the wheels? was he cradled in a Pullman? He has always been in motion, probably; he was started at thirty miles an hour, no doubt, this marvelous boy of our new era. He was not born in a house at ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... are pure white, a little over an eighth of an inch in length, and semicircular in vertical outline. The natural presumption is the idea of maternity, the mother hopper guarding her bundles of white eggs, or her infant hoppers, perhaps, snugly tucked up in their downy swaddling-clothes. But a closer examination completely dispels this illusion. Instead of the supposed fluffy cotton, we now discover the white substance to be of firm though somewhat sticky consistency, its surface, moreover, beautifully ridged from base to summit ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... this? The truth is, our poor friend has only been "taking his turn," arranging "in fancy" the diaper of the royal nursery. That he should have selected a copy of the Athenaeum as a type of the swaddling cloth bespeaks in our mind the presence of great judgment. It is madness with very ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... my study to untie all the ties; and, by Jove, I have succeeded. Look at me here. I have got rid of the trammels pretty well,—haven't I?—have unshackled myself, and thrown off the paddings, and the wrappings, and the swaddling clothes. I have got rid of the conventionalities, and can look Nature straight in the face. I don't even want the Daily ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... not in sooth thy story That which beautiful fiction, Than truth more worthy of credence, Chanted hath of Maia's offspring! This so shapely and potent, yet Scarcely-born delicate nursling, Straight have his gossiping nurses Folded in purest swaddling fleece, Fastened in costly swathings, With their irrational notions. Potent and shapely, ne'ertheless, Draws the rogue his flexible limbs, Body firm yet elastic, Craftily forth; the purple shell, Him so grievously binding, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... believe, therefore, that this very child, as afore is testified, is both God and man; the Christ of the living God. 'And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds—keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... hears them begin to snore, steals a sheep, and hastens home. His wife is alarmed, because in that day the theft of a sheep was punishable by death. She finally concludes that the best plan will be to wrap the animal in swaddling clothes and put it in the cradle. If the shepherds come to search the house, she will pretend that she has a child; and, if they approach the cradle, she will caution them against touching it for fear of waking the child and causing him to fill the house with his cries. She speedily hurries ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... is more than welcome. If a girl, tufts of wool are hung before the door of the happy home; if a boy, there is set out an olive branch. Five days after the birth, the nurse takes the baby, wrapped almost to suffocation in swaddling bands, to the family hearth in the "andron," around which she runs several times, followed doubtless, in merry, frolicking procession, by most of the rest of the family. The child is now under the care of the family gods. There is considerable eating and drinking. Exposure now is no longer possible. ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... bishop they tell us, that after declaring he was poor, and what expenses he had been at, as Paul's church could bear witness, shortly after hanged four of his servants for having robbed him of a considerable sum. Of another, who cut down all the woods at Hampstead, till the towns-women "fell a swaddling of his men," and so saved Hampstead by their resolution. But when Martin would give a proof that the Bishop of London was one of the bishops of the devil, in his "Pistle to the terrible priests," he tells ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... VI. was a mild-natured and honest youth who did not live long enough to impress himself upon a strenuous period, or upon interests with which his character little fitted him to deal. The last of the name had reigned, therefore, before the Kingdom of England got out of its national and religious swaddling clothes; before the reign of Henry VIII. had freed it from connection with Rome, or that of Elizabeth had founded the maritime and commercial empire which, in time, was to create the mighty realm over which the ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... strong the curse he spake: "Thus perish all of Pleisthenes begot!" For that lies this man here; and all the plot Is mine, most righteously. For me, the third, When butchering my two brethren, Atreus spared And cast me with my broken sire that day, A little thing in swaddling clothes, away To exile; where I grew, and at the last Justice hath brought me home! Yea though outcast In a far land, mine arm hath reached this king; My brain, my hate, wrought all the counselling; And all is well. I have seen mine enemy ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... in actual wars we have as yet done but little in comparison with our possibilities and capabilities. In the revolutionary war, Sir, we were crude and unformed—we were infants, Sir, and our efforts were infantile. The swaddling bands of the colonial system had all along restrained the free play of the national muscle; and throughout the war there was not time for full development. Still, Sir, from that point of view, as an infant nation, we did remarkable well—re-markable. In 1812 we did ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... servants, but the wife had to superintend all the domestic operations, among which was included the care of the children, though old Cato thought it was necessary for him to look after the washing and swaddling of his children in person, and to teach them what he thought they ought to know. The position of the woman was entirely subordinate to the husband, though in the house she was mistress. She belonged to the household and not to the community, and was to be called to account ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... of swaddling children? From an unnatural custom. Since the time when mothers, despising their first duty, no longer wish to nurse their own children at the breast, it has been necessary to intrust the little ones to hired women. These, finding themselves in this ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret (Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so, You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot?) Not a poor glimmering Crucifixion, Where in the foreground kneels the donor? If such remain, as is my conviction, The hoarding it does you but ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Whom from his mother I received and nursed . . . And then the shrill cries rousing me o' nights, And many and unprofitable toils For me who bore them. For one needs must rear The heedless infant like an animal, (How can it else be?) as his humor serve For while a child is yet in swaddling clothes, It speaketh not, if either hunger comes, Or passing thirst, or lower calls of need; And children's stomach works its own content. And I, though I foresaw this, call to mind, How I was cheated, washing swaddling clothes, And nurse and laundress did the selfsame work. I then with these my ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... was, was beginning to fill me with a sense of the most extreme discomfort. His sentences, in some strange, indescribable way, seemed, as they came from his lips, to warp my limbs; to enwrap themselves about me; to confine me, tighter and tighter, within, as it were, swaddling clothes; to make me more and more helpless. I was already conscious that whatever mad freak he chose to set me on, I should have no option but to ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... persons who recall the old Square and other parts of early New York, bring forcibly to us the realisation of the speed with which this country of ours has evolved itself. In one man's lifetime, New York has grown from a small town just out of its Colonial swaddling clothes to the greatest city in the world. These reminiscences, then, are but memories of yesterday or the day before. We do not have to take them from history books but from the diaries of men and women who are still wide-eyed with wonder at the changes which ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... child that is newly born, if it have not other comforts to keep it warm than it had in its mother's womb, it dies. It must have something got for its succour; so Christ had swaddling clothes prepared for him; so those that are born again, they must have some promise of Christ to keep them alive. Those that are in a carnal state, they warm themselves with other things; but those that are born again, ...
— Miscellaneous Pieces • John Bunyan
... and the lagoons of Mississippi, adventurous Americans entered the Texan territory at Nacogdoches. They went through the land, buying horses and lending their ready rifles and stout hearts to every effort of that constantly increasing body of Texans, who, even in their swaddling bands, had begun ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... their skinny fingers fumbling on the rosary, and their mute lips moving in prayer. The younger women have great listless eyes and large limbs used to labor. Some of them carry babies trussed up in tight swaddling-clothes. One kneels beside a dark-browed shepherd, on whose shoulder falls his shaggy hair; and little children play about, half hushed, half heedless of the place, among old men whose life has dwindled down into a ceaseless round of prayers. We wonder why this chapel, alone in the empty ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... when he was born, Had not so much for outward ease; By Him such dressings were not worn, Nor such like swaddling-clothes as these. Sweet baby, then forbear to weep; Be still, ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... shed a radiance over the lovely babe and bending mother, who, in the most graceful attitude, lightly holds up the drapery which half conceals her sleeping infant from the bystanders. He lies in richly embroidered swaddling clothes, and his person, as well as that of his virgin mother, is ornamented with diamonds and other precious stones; for which purpose, we are informed, the princesses and ladies of high rank lend their jewels. Groups of cattle ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... frozen into despair, blighted hope, faith victorious even in death, have thrilled the hearts of thousands hard by the place where you stand, and which in a few hours will be ten feet under water. Here you can see the long line of a ship's ribs swaddling down into the sands, and there is the stump of the mast to which the seamen clung last year till the lifeboat snatched ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... God you never may! That's where the shoe pinches, Rollins. It is what he reminds me of—not so much what he is, I suppose—that I get rabid about. He is for all the world like a man we had in the old regiment when you were in swaddling-clothes; and I never look at Mamie Gray's sad, white face that it doesn't bring back a girl I knew just then whose heart was broken by just such a shallow, selfish, adorable scoun—No, I won't use that word in speaking of Jerrold; ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... having been thus provided as a basis, every attention was devoted to its appropriate training. The infants were encouraged from the beginning in the free use of their limbs, unhampered by swaddling-clothes, and were accustomed to endure without fear darkness and solitude, and to cure themselves of peevishness and crying. At the age of seven the boys were taken away from the charge of their parents, and put under the superintendence of a public official. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... spares it, according to Monsieur Plato, a man of some authority, but who, not being a Christian, was wrong. But, there! these preparatory digressions are the idle digressions and fastidious commentaries which certain unbelievers compel a man to wind about a tale, swaddling clothes about an infant when it should run about stark naked. May the great devil give them a clyster with his red-hot three-pronged fork. I am going on with my story now without ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... you know there were seven million pounds in them?" asked Carl sharply. "You were in your swaddling clothes then." ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... and prince of the seven madnesses, comes ashore. An incredible company followed. But with him came his wife Gisele and their little child Demetrios, thus named for the old Count of Arnaye: and it was this boy that, they say, when yet in swaddling-bands, was appointed to be the slayer of his own father, ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... overhead Of their vast pinions spread, Hailing thee brother; How chaos rolled back from the wonder, And the First Morn knelt down to thy visage of thunder! Thou didst draw to thy side Thy young Auroral bride, And lift her veil of night and mystery; Tellus with baby hands Shook off her swaddling-bands, And from the unswath-ed vapours laughed ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... He lay asleep swathed in his swaddling clothes like a mummy in its wrappings, a motionless, mysterious being, but he seemed to his mother beautiful—more beautiful than anything she had seen in those vague visions of happiness she had indulged in at the convent, which were never to be realized. She kissed ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... from men to men, Brother of Suns And all the Glorious Ones That circle skies, He flashed to these The night that brought the birth, The vision of the place And raised his awful face To all their glittering crowds, And cried from where It lay —A tiny ball of fire and clay In swaddling clothes of ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Dieu was the asylum for foundlings, whither they were brought not only from Paris, but from distant towns, and whence they were sent out to be nursed in the country. They were brought to Paris done up tightly in their swaddling clothes, little crying bundles, packed three at a time into wadded boxes, carried on men's backs. The habit of dressing children loosely, recommended by Rousseau, had not yet reached the poor; as the habit of having babies nursed ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... For on the night when they were buried, she Restored the embalmers' ruining, and shook The light out of the funeral lamps, to be A mimic day within that deathy nook; And she unwound the woven imagery 605 Of second childhood's swaddling bands, and took The coffin, its last cradle, from its niche, And threw it with ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... possession of Rhea."(1) Rhea, being about to become the mother of Zeus, took counsel with Uranus and Gaea. By their advice she went to Crete, where Zeus was born, and, in place of the child, she presented to Cronus a huge stone swathed in swaddling bands. This he swallowed, and was easy in his mind. Zeus grew up, and by some means, suggested by Gaea, compelled Zeus to disgorge all his offspring. "And he vomited out the stone first, as he had swallowed ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... faster or farther than he could carry Germany, especially the nobility, with him. He was, in a very real sense, a child of his time, a product of medieval Europe, and he never succeeded in liberating himself from the tight swaddling-bands in which his youth was wrapped. He could not comprehend, as we shall see, the bold spirits who were dedicated to the task of reinterpreting Christianity in terms of the new age; he loved the old, in ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... love, no houseless beggar's child enters life more obscurely than the Son of God. The very tokens by which the shepherds were taught to recognise Him were not the majesty but the extreme meanness of his condition: "This shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger." In fact, the Lord of heaven was to be recognised by his humiliation, as its heirs are by their humility. Yet, as we have seen a black and lowering cloud have its edges touched with living gold by the sun behind it, so all the darkest scenes of our Lord's life ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... from their own home to Bethlehem to pay the taxes exacted at Rome. The town was full of people on the same errand, and "there was no room for them in the inn." So it came about that the new-born babe was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger used ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... faith, it was not difficult,—such open, palpable, undisguised rascals never were heard of. I thought I knew a thing or two myself, when I landed; but, Lord love you! I was a babe, I was an infant in swaddling clothes, compared with them; and they humbugged me,—ay, me!—till I began to suspect that I was only walking in ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... exist, and that after, which cannot be without the concurrence of another thing. And of this priority is our present discourse. Besides, birds build nests before they lay their eggs; and women provide cradles, swaddling cloths and the like; yet who says that the nest is before the egg, or the swaddling cloths before the infant. For the earth (as Plato says doth not imitate a woman, but a woman, and so likewise all other females, the earth.) Moreover, it ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... child of three or four years old and in her arms carried another, in swaddling-clothes, ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... we Might go from Earth to Heav'n with Thee: And though Thou found'st no welcome here, Thou didst provide us mansions there. A stable was Thy Court, and when Men turn'd to beasts, beasts would be men: They were Thy courtiers; others none; And their poor manger was Thy throne. No swaddling silks Thy limbs did fold, Though Thou couldst turn Thy rays to gold. No rockers waited on Thy birth, No cradles stirr'd, nor songs of mirth; But her chaste lap and sacred breast, Which lodg'd Thee first, did give ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... walked and spoke. Linus, Orpheus, Homer, have taught me harmony and rhythm. I do not look about me with Love's bandage blindfolding my eyes. I judge of all things coolly. The passions of youth never influence my admiration, and when I am as withered, decrepit, wrinkled, as Tithonus in his swaddling bands, my opinion will be still the same. But I forgive your incredulity and want of sympathy. In order to understand me fully, it is necessary that you should see Nyssia in the radiant brilliancy of her shining whiteness, ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... the lie to all the world's experience! There never was a great nation yet nursed on pap, and swathed in silk. Storms broke around its rude cradle instead. The tempests rocked the stalwart child. The dragons came to strangle the baby Hercules in his swaddling clothes. The magnificent commerce, the increasing manufactures, the teeming soil, the wealth fast accumulating, they would never have made us, after all, a great people. They would have eaten the manhood ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in the rear, some musicians, costumed as Brahmins, with spectacles on their noses, the better to decipher their score, fingered their brass instruments with a weary air, rocking them like infants in swaddling clothes. Actors in the garb of Indians, with painted cheeks, and legs encased in chocolate-colored bandages, were yawning, weary and flabby, and stretching themselves while awaiting the time for them to present ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... be kept. And, lastly, in the south wall, opposite to the said Oratory, erected a glorious tabernacle, which contained the image of the said blessed Virgin, sitting as it were in childbed; as also of our Saviour, in swaddling clothes, lying between the ox and the ass, and St. Joseph at her feet; above which was another image of her, standing with the child in her arms. And on the beam, thwarting from the upper end of ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... when he was assassinated, fifty pitched battles, had taken by assault above a thousand towns, and slain near 1,200,000 men; I suppose exclusive of those who fell on his own side in slaying them. Are not you and I, Jack, innocent men, and babes in swaddling-clothes, compared to Caesar, and to his predecessor in heroism, Alexander, dubbed, for murders and ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... school-books, and other belongings had not been handed down to younger brothers and sisters, and eventually to destruction. It had been an easy matter to preserve them, and, consequently, the collection was large and curious, including samples of the wardrobe appertaining to every epoch, from the swaddling-clothes of the infant to a black gown of ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... foul jerkin? By'r lay'kin, those were days! Well, well, to meet thee thus! Though, believe it or not, as thou wilt, I had such a pricking i' my thumbs but an hour gone that I was of a mind to roar you like any babe with a pin in his swaddling-bands. Thou wast my beau-peer i' those times; and we are kin by profession, moreover. How be Mistress Turnip and thy eight lads? Ha! ha! Dost remember how old Anthony Butter—him who was gardener at Amhurste Castle, ye mind—dost thou remember in what spite he held thee ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... fact that it is being done. Here and there we find superintendents, principals, and teachers who are shuddering away from the question-and-answer method both in the recitation and in the examination. They have outgrown the swaddling-clothes and have risen to the estate of broad-minded, intelligent manhood and womanhood. They have enlarged their concept of education and have become too generous in their impulses to subject either ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... a few savings, "living on the herbage, and on a few goats which devour everything." Often again, these, by order of Parliament, are killed by the game-keepers. A woman, with two children in swaddling clothes, having no milk, "and without an inch of ground," whose two goats, her sole resource, had thus been slain, and another, with one goat slain in the same way, and who begs along with her boy, present themselves at the gate of the chateau; one receives twelve livres, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... And now, at this last word of Israel, though so sadly spoken, and so solemn in its note of suffering, she broke into a trill of laughter, and said lightly, "Ah! I thought your love of the poor was young. Not yet cut its teeth, poor thing! A babe in swaddling clothes, eh? When was ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... clipped and pared and pinched myself all round,—very ineffectually, as I fear,—to fit myself for this thing. You have lived as free as air. You have disdained,—and though I may have grumbled I have still been proud to see you disdain,—to wrap yourself in the swaddling bandages of Court life. You have ridiculed all those who have been near her Majesty ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... but a babe in swaddling-clothes compared to yourself, sir; but such as my poor opinions are, you are welcome to them. In the first place, then, sir, I have lived long enough on this water to know that every man is a lover of liberty in his own person, and that he has a ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... thy great part rehearse; Ever the slave of every proud desire; Come now a little down where sports thy sire; Choose thy small better from thy abounding worse; Prove thou thy lordship who hadst dust for nurse, And for thy swaddling ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... the wind-wreath, find thee lone? Put on meek age's hood? Feel but the frost within the dawn? Wrap courage in a swaddling mood? His bare throat flings All-powered nay; The world, his vast, unfingered lyre, Stirs in her thousand strings; Lit with redemptive flame Burns miracle desire, And dedicated day Is long ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... Kronos. His other name was Saturn; and as Time devours his offspring, so Saturn was said to have had the bad habit of eating up his children as fast as they were born, till at last his wife Rhea contrived to give him a stone in swaddling clothes, and while he was biting this hard morsel, Jupiter was saved from him, and afterwards two other sons, Neptune (Poseidon) and Pluto (Hades), who became lords of the ocean and of the world of the spirits of the dead; for on the sea and on death Time's tooth has no power. However, ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are told (Luke 2:7) that the Blessed Virgin herself "wrapped up in swaddling clothes" the Child whom she had brought forth, "and laid Him in a manger." Consequently the narrative of this book, which is apocryphal, is untrue. Wherefore Jerome says (Adv. Helvid. iv): "No midwife was there, no officious women interfered. She was both mother and midwife. 'With swaddling clothes,' ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... Abias) to the lean and slippered pantaloon, who needs a stick to help him rise from his seat (over the window inscribed Salmon, Boaz, Obeth); there is the happy mother sleeping with her infant wrapped in swaddling-clothes (Salmon, Boaz, Obeth); and the old man playing with the children, (Eleazr, Matthew); the student attentively poring over his book regardless of the female figure, possibly Inspiration, speaking to him from the other side of the window (Naason). These figures, the Ancestors ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... of saving truth are wrapped the swaddling-clothes of human language. Neither the condition of the human understanding, nor the nature of human speech, which is the vehicle of thought, admits of more than a fragmentary and partial presentation of ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... interrupted himself to order whiskies and soda of a metropolitan Bashi-Bazouk who happened to pass along the gallery; and to go stumbling over to his pockets, in his swaddling towels, for cigarettes and matches. And the rest of ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... was caring for none of these things. Her hands were busy with the swaddling clothes. Her thoughts only for that wicker cradle which swung betwixt the pillars, where Hermippus's house looked ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... present her to the noble family you were trying to enter? Damn it, you'd wish her six feet under ground, in a leaden night-gown. Come, breakfast with me, and let us talk of something else. I am a parvenu, my dear fellow, and I know it. I don't choose that my swaddling-clothes shall be seen. My son will be more fortunate than I; he will be a great lord. The scamp will wish me dead; I expect it,—or he won't be ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... by others she revives but slowly, He, who with kindly visage comforts him, Sway'd in that country, where the water springs, That Moldaw's river to the Elbe, and Elbe Rolls to the ocean: Ottocar his name: Who in his swaddling clothes was of more worth Than Winceslaus his son, a bearded man, Pamper'd with rank luxuriousness and ease. And that one with the nose depress, who close In counsel seems with him of gentle look, Flying expir'd, with'ring the lily's ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... so the command of a prince who was in the cradle, or who was raving, would justly incur the penalties of rebellion. Stupidity, perverseness, and superstition, such was the reasoning of the Primate, had made James as unfit to rule his dominions as any child in swaddling clothes, or as any maniac who was grinning and chattering in the straw of Bedlam. That course must therefore be taken which had been taken when Henry the Sixth was an infant, and again when he became lethargic. James could not be King ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was given to the creature in this stage, because long ago people thought the way in which insects are thus enclosed was somewhat like the way in which the babies used to be wrapped round in bandages or "swaddling clothes": it is also called a "chrysalis," because sometimes dotted with gold or pearly spots. But the wonder of it is that inside that narrow shell lies an insect quite unlike the caterpillar which lay down to rest; a creature with legs and wings beautifully folded, all ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... survive in me today? No. He is a stranger to me; I feel that I can love him without selfishness and weep for him without unmanliness. He is dead and gone, and has taken away with him my innocent simplicities and my boundless hopes. We all of us die in swaddling clothes. Little Marguerite, that delightful image of unfolding life, how many times has she not died and what profound depths of irrevocable memories, what a grave of dead thoughts and emotions has not already been delved within her, though she is but five ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France
... touched his lips with their mustaches, and flourished about four hands like wings. He was terrified, and wanted to cross him self, but he tried in vain to stir his arm; his right arm seemed pinned to his side. He strove to move his left—alas! he found that the spirits had wrapt him tight as a babe in swaddling bands. He was terrified still more frightfully; immediately he closed his eyes and lay without breathing; he grew cold and was ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... in which art has appeared at the beginning cannot here be discussed; nor how the Chinese and Hindu may have leapt into a perfection which has stood still for thousands of years, protected alike from expansion as from destruction, by the swaddling bands of codified custom; while Greek art rose like the sun, shone over the civilized world, and set—never again to see another epoch of glory. These subjects must be left for the study of the anthropological philosopher, who is working for the assistance ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during the period of gestation it stands more clearly forward from these swaddling mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at length that most faultless, but also, alas! that incommunicable product of the human mind, a perfected design. On the approach to execution all is changed. The artist must now step down, don his working ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... winter now doth lye In swaddling Clouts, like new born Infancy Bound up with frosts, and furr'd with hail & snows, And like an Infant, still it taller grows; December is my first, and now the Sun To th' Southward Tropick, his swift ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... and blaspheme," he said, "all the gods in heaven, but the Babe that lay in Mary's lap, the Babe that lay in swaddling clothes." ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... wheels; reduce to subjection, reduce to slavery; enthrall, inthrall[obs3], bethrall[obs3]; enslave, lead captive; take into custody &c. (restrain) 751; rule &c. 737; drive into a corner, hold at the sword's point; keep under; hold in bondage, hold in leading strings, hold in swaddling clothes. Adj. subject, dependent, subordinate; feudal, feudatory; in subjection to, under control; in leading strings, in harness; subjected, enslaved &c. v.; constrained &c. 751; downtrodden; overborne, overwhelmed; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... a chest of drawers, and unwrapping it from swaddling-clothes, she withdrew what at best had been a sorry sort of fiddle. Cracked of back and solitary of string it was as if her trembling arms, raising it above her head, would make of themselves and her swaying body ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... in his swaddling clothes — so says the "Breviarium Romanum" —gave promise of extraordinary virtue and holiness; for, though he sucked freely on other days, on Wednesdays and Fridays he applied to the breast only once, and that not ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... certain privileges of parks and fish-ponds; I wonder how you that are a man that knows the world, can talk with that simple fellow. He has been my bubble these twenty years, and to my certain knowledge, understands no more of his own affairs than a child in swaddling clothes. I know he has got a sort of a pragmatical silly jade of a wife, that pretends to take him out of my hands; but you and she both will find yourselves mistaken; I'll find those that shall manage her; ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot |
