"Middle age" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... here?" said the chief of the party, a man richly dressed, and who, though bordering upon middle age, had only the more accustomed himself to the excesses of youth; as he spoke, he snatched the trembling Irene from the grasp of his followers. "Ho, there! the torches! Oh che bella faccia! what blushes—what eyes!—nay, look not ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Having, therefore, discarded these notions, her fancy roved in the realms of the beautiful and fantastic, until it settled down upon a costume which, bespangled and with its garland of rushes, she declared to be that of a "mermaid of middle age." Nobody was in a condition to contradict her, inasmuch as nobody recollected ever having seen a "middle-aged" mermaid before. She floated, as a matter of fact, in a cloud of pink and sea-green laces. The capacious bosom this cloud concealed from view rolled and heaved quite realistically, ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... Empire; and three years later he was exploring on the opposite side of Africa, at Dahomey, Benin and the Gold Coast, regions which have also entered among the imperial "questions" of the day. Before middle age Burton had compressed into his life, as Lord Derby said, "more of study, more of hardship, and more of successful enterprise and adventure, than would have sufficed to fill up the existence of half a dozen ordinary men." The City ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... circuit bearing some relation to progress made before a throne, though the relationship was rather strained. His approving eyes filled her with terror; for, much as she had reveled in Indian romances (on paper) in her youth, she had no desire to take any active part in them in her middle age. ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... suddenly a little bustle in the market, and people moved aside to let a new-comer pass down the narrow space between the pens opposite to where the boys had placed themselves. It was a broad comely gentleman of middle age, dressed in riding-boots, and cords, and a faded green coat. He had a riding-whip in his hand, with which he touched the brim of his hat in acknowledgment of the greetings round him; his dog followed close ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... invitation, I found my friend Sir John terribly altered. It was not only that he was ill and physically weak, but he had entirely lost the manner of youth, which, though indefinable, is yet so appreciable, and draws so sharp a distinction between the first period of life and middle age. But the most striking feature of his illness was the extraordinary pallor of his complexion, which made his face resemble a subtle counterfeit of white wax rather than that of a living man. He welcomed me undemonstratively, but with evident ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... and died at Hardwick Dec. 4, 1679. When comparatively a young man he was secretary to Francis Bacon. He spent many years abroad, met Galileo, and corresponded with Descartes. But he did not begin to produce until in advanced middle age. "Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil," appeared in 1651. His special impulse to the construction of a science of politics came from the Great Rebellion, his detestation of the principles ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... artists are apt themselves to fall in love with their own inventions, not to see that they are mechanical inventions because they themselves have discovered them. Michelangelo in his "Last Judgment" is very professional; Titian was professional through all his middle age; Tintoret was professional whenever he was bored with his work, which happened often; Shakespeare, whenever he was lazy, which was not seldom. Beethoven, we now begin to see, could be very earnestly professional; ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... notice, that Mr. Guyst, the inventor, is a man past the middle age. He had seen books, and, I have been told, had an English spelling-book in his house; but he could not read a word in any language, nor speak the English language at all. His alphabet consists of eighty-six characters, each ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... goodly person, tall, and singularly well-featured, and all his youth well-favoured, of a sweet aspect, but high-foreheaded, which (as I should take it) was of no discommendation; but towards his latter, and which with old men was but a middle age, he grew high-coloured, so that the Queen had much of her father, for, expecting some of her kindred, and some few that had handsome wits in crooked bodies, she always took personage in the way of election, ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... the house door stood the two, Freneli behind Uli. The pastor, somewhat short, of middle age, but already venerable in appearance and with shrewd features that could be either very sharp or very pleasant, raised the light above his head, peered out with head bowed slightly forward, and cried at last, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... animal from which they were made gave a grotesque and savage appearance to the wearers. Light fitting buckskin leggings, fringed on the outer side, encased their legs, and a pair of deerskin mittens dangled from the ends of a string which was slung around the neck. One of the men was past middle age, the other a ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... scarcely more than entered upon that decade which carries one to the full blossom of manhood which we term the beginning: of middle age, and yet a brief sojourn at the capital of the nation had made him old. His hair was already turning gray when the late session of Congress began its sittings; it grew grayer still, and rapidly, after the memorable day that saw Laura proclaimed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the door from the main portion of the house opened, and there entered a woman hardly yet past middle age, who had once been undoubtedly handsome, but on whose worn and faded face was the look of patient weariness which so often is the result of a youth spent in helping a husband to overcome the stumpy stubbornness ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... time life was made too easy for him. He knew now that he could write, but he had no desire to write for a living. Probably he felt that such a course would be in some way not quite suitable for a man of fashion. At all events, ten years passed, and middle age was at hand before the promising author began to fulfill his promise. Not till 1819 appeared his next literary venture, conceived in a more serious spirit, and launched with many misgivings as the first performance of the professional ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... Phoebe, whose blushing face was beaming with pleasure, when the door was suddenly thrown open and a happy-looking buxom woman of advanced middle age appeared. ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... down to its central, motive idea. That which becomes the dominant aim and the grand end of life, always determines the character of life; and I have known young men, even before they have approached middle age, to become mean and miserly to such a degree as to disappoint and disgust their friends, simply in consequence of a few years' absorption in business. Business is not life, nor is it life's end. It is simply a means of life; and all true living lies outside of it. Ministry ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... it a real guess, Mr. Winters, for I read it, as James did the story. The answer is—Man. In his babyhood, the morning of life, he crawls or walks on 'all fours'; in youth and middle age he goes upright on two feet; and at evening, old age, he supplements them by a staff ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... into a brownish ivory, full of charm. The eyes looked steadily out from their deep hollows; the mouth, austere and finely cut, the characteristic hands, and the unconscious dignity of movement—these personal traits made of Elsmere's wife, even in late middle age, a striking and ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that some persons retain every indication of youth, both of mind and body, long after their contemporaries have reached and passed middle age. It is coming more and more to be admitted that age is relative, and that what we know as the relative is the effect of mental operations. Mental operations ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... gathered group of human dwellings should be a lovely thing, not a frightful one, on the face of the earth. Not many weeks ago an English clergyman,[198] a master of this University, a man not given to sentiment, but of middle age, and great practical sense, told me, by accident, and wholly without reference to the subject now before us, that he never could enter London from his country parsonage but with closed eyes, lest the sight of the blocks of houses which the railroad intersected in the suburbs should unfit him, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... growth—the primal end of a man's being, who is that he may return to the Father, gathering his truth as he goes. Yet by the simple instincts of a soul undebased by self-indulgence or low pursuits, he was drawn ever toward things lofty and good; and life went calmly on, bearing Godfrey Wardour toward middle age, unruffled either by ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... credit to success, and accepting inexperience as an excuse in part for mistake and failure. But in doubtful cases, one is likely to get credit for more years than he is fairly entitled to—a deception we are ready to believe not unpalatable sometimes to active men of early or middle age, though proverbially annoying to spinsters. There is, too, an inherent tendency among scholars toward antiquarianism, which always induces them to take the earliest possible year. In the present instance, at any rate, most authorities favor the first date, fixing his birth ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... man and welcomed them to the camp. The Indians were beyond middle age and the dark face of each was seamed with wrinkles. Nothing in Moosetooth's yellow regular teeth warranted his name, however. This might better have been applied to La Biche, whose several missing teeth ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... of his youth he labours and garners, and lays out and garners yet again. In early middle age he finds himself a wealthy man. The chief business of life, the getting of money, is practically done; his enterprise is firmly established, and will continue to grow with ever less need of husbandry. It is time for him to think about the secondary business ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... a medicine by the application of his intelligence for effecting a cure, even so men, for the accomplishment of their acts, use their intelligence, aided by their own wisdom. What they do is again disapproved by others. A man, in youth, is affected by one kind of understanding. In middle age, the same does not prevail with him, and in the period of decay, a different kind of understanding becomes agreeable to him. When fallen into terrible distress or when visited by great prosperity, the understanding ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... daughters—she would not have had time to occupy herself so intensely with the affairs of any one. As it was, however, this one girl was her life of life; she threw into her interests the hopes of youth and the experience of middle age. As Lucia grew up, she had watched with anxiety, with hope, and with fear, for the coming of that inevitable time when, either for good or evil, she must love. It had been her fancy that, if Lucia loved Maurice, all would be well; if she loved ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... corners of his eyes, one might fancy he is looking out for the Capitol and the White House in the distance still. "He is growing old while he is young," as Mrs Nasmyth says, "Yankees have a knack of doing—standing still at middle age and never changing more." But despite the wrinkles, the squire's face is a pleasant one to see, and he has a way of turning back a paragraph or two to read the choice bits to Celestia, which proves that he is not altogether absorbed in law or ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... Catton, who alone could control her son in his rages and whom she had dismissed for her bad conduct. She entered the place and they entered with her, although she saw them not. Bess sat down, and presently a man whom she seemed to know drew out of the throng and spoke to her. He was a tall man of middle age, with heavy eyes. Looking into his heart, they saw that it was stained with evil. The soul within him lay asleep, wrapped round with the webs of sin. ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... a handsome, well-dressed man, past middle age, who had listened with absorbed attention to all that had been said, and who now seemed strangely agitated. In a moment he ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... laurustinus hedge, and looked over into the gay little garden. As we looked, we became conscious of what appeared like a heap or bundle of clothing near one of the beds, which, on lifting itself up, proved to be a tall slender lady of middle age, who, with her dress tucked neatly round her, a big print hood on her head, and a trowel in her hand, was busily administering such tender little attentions as mothers will lavish on their children, and garden lovers on their flowers. She was not alone in the ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... with a protracted and contemptuous stare, which, though failing to disconcert the object, put her in possession of the facts that he had mild blue eyes, that the remnants of his hair were red, that he was slightly above middle height and below middle age, and that there was little about his face and still less his figure to distinguish him from a multitude of men of the average type. Indeed, one could not even conjecture his nationality, for his type was one to be seen in all branches of the Indo-European race. If from a package ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... That ruddy golden hair, once Owen's pride, was mingled with many a silvery thread, and folded smoothly on a forehead paler, older, but calmer than once it had been. Sorrow and desertion had cut deeply, and worn down the fair comeliness of heathful middle age; but something of compensation there was in the less anxious eye, from which had passed a certain restless, strained expression; and if the face were more habitually sad, it was more peaceful. She did not love less those whom she 'had seen,' but He whom she 'had not ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... looking man beyond middle age with large eyes that showed signs of dissipation. He had a small dark tuft beneath his lower lip and thin, ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... you, Hot Lavender: Mints: Savory: Marjoram; The Marigold that goes to bed with the sun, And with him rises, weeping: these are the flowers Of middle summer, and I think they are given To men of middle age." ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... object of his gaze was gradually attaining the verge of youth, and approaching to what is called in females the middle age, which is impolitely held to begin a few years earlier with their more fragile sex than with men. Many people would have been of opinion, that the Laird would have done better to have transferred his glances ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... was of middle age, with hair already gray and face deeply furrowed. In ragged garments, resting his bandaged feet, he sat propped in the sitting-room. The warm air blowing from rich harvest fields came in at open door and windows. Attentive before him, Ephraim and ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... again make so great a sacrifice for the younger generation," he says in a letter, "I am amazed to note how insignificant, how almost nil is the effect produced, in comparison to the cost, in vitality to me. Or perhaps it is I who am in error. Perhaps one must have reached middle age, or the Indian Summer of life, must have seen much, heard much, felt and produced much and been much in solitude to receive in reading what I gave ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... pineapples and fruits, bent down and prematurely aged by toil and hardship. Many of the young girls among the negroes are pretty, with their soft eyes and skin like velvet, their merry laugh and graceful figures. But in a very few years all this disappears, and by middle age they are bent, and wrinkled, and old. All loads are carried by women, with the exception only of hammocks, which ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... leaning on the rail. One, a hefty man of middle age with a striped shirt and glasses, said politely, "Do ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... M. de Lesseps is very striking. Though long past middle age, he has a fresh and even youthful appearance. Both face and figure are well preserved; his slightly curling gray hair sets off in pleasing contrast his bronzed yet clear complexion, his bright eye, and genial smile. He is somewhat over the medium stature, possessed ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... Stella had gone out to India. Arthur Hazlewood, the owner and Harold's nephew, had been lost with his yacht in a gale of wind off the coast of Portugal. Arthur was a bachelor and thus Harold Hazlewood came quite unexpectedly into the position of a country squire when he was already well on in middle age. He was a widower and a man of a noticeable aspect. At the first glance you knew that he was not as other men; at the second you suspected that he took a pride in his dissimilarity. He was long, rather shambling in his gait, with a mild blue eye and fair thin hair now growing grey. But length ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... interest. But upon her face were lines which showed that, at some time, she had looked long and deeply into the hollow eyes of trouble, possibly despair. Even the smile now curving her well-turned lips lacked the joyousness of youth, though in years she seemed well on the sunny side of early middle age. She was evidently in no hurry this morning, and finding her possible landlady so ready to talk, bent an attentive ear that was most flattering to the ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... warring cities of Berne and Fribourg, and truce between Berne and the country of Gruyere. At last, where fire and sword, where the power of rival cities and proud knights allied, had failed, the love and high influence of these noble ladies of the middle age most wonderfully succeeded. Memorable for its beneficent and permanent effects, the treaty was unique for its high and unselfish spirit of conciliation, and the final words of exhortation which stilled the waters tossed by two centuries of storm ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... delights; and in such forms alone, as they grow and change, can it find an expression which is not also a bondage. You will say this is chimerical. But look at history! Consider the great achievements of the Middle Age! Were they not the result of just such a movement as I describe? It was men voluntarily associating in communes and grouping themselves in guilds that built the towers and churches and adorned them with the glories of art that dazzles us still in Italy and France. The history of the growth of ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... invention and pioneering of the thing was claimed by another, for himself and a third writer, that is to say, by Edmond de Goncourt for himself and his brother Jules. The elder of the Goncourts—the younger died in early middle age, and knowledge of him is in a way indirect, though we have some letters—might be said to have, like Restif, a manie de paternite, though his children were of a different class. He thought he invented Naturalism; he thought ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... glamor of childhood, the glories of the Civil War, the period of prairie conquest which were the chief claims to interest in the first volume of my chronicle can not be restated in these pages. The action of this book moves forward into the light of manhood, into the region of middle age. Furthermore, its theme is more personal. Its scenes are less epic. It is a study of individuals and their relationships rather than of settlements and migrations. In short, "A Daughter of the Middle Border" is the complement of "A Son of the Middle Border," a continuation, not ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... in the year 1822 I made his acquaintance in Dublin. He was in the full ripeness of middle age,—then, as ever, "the poet of all circles, and the idol of his own." As his visits to his native city were few and far between, the power to see him, and especially to hear him, was a boon of magnitude. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... back quickly, and Mr. King saw a pleasant-faced gentleman of middle age, whose keen gray eyes seemed to note everything with lightning-like rapidity—"business ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... middle of the sixteenth century, there resided one Francisco Alvarez in the city of Logrono, the chief town of Rioja, a province which borders on Aragon. He was a man above the middle age, sober, reserved, and in general absorbed in thought; he lived near the great church, and obtained a livelihood by selling printed books and manuscripts in a small shop. He was a very learned man, and was continually reading in the ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... grateful for the memories of some who were with us last year, thirsting for knowledge, whom we are permitted to think of now as before the throne of God, drinking from the 'living fountains of water.' One was Oliver, a man in the middle age of life, a bricklayer by trade, and a lay-preacher in the Baptist church. A part of two years he had been in school. His progress was slow, and he could read but indifferently in the Third Reader. His parting words to us at the close of last year were, 'I ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... correspondence was soon carried to Richelieu. The vigilance of that minister was here further roused by jealousy. He, too, either from vanity or politics, had ventured to pay his addresses to the queen. But a priest, past middle age, of a severe character, and occupied in the most extensive plans of ambition or vengeance, was but an unequal match, in that contest, for a young courtier, entirely disposed to gayety and gallantry. The cardinal's disappointment strongly inclined him to counterwork the amorous projects ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... came only to a blue yarn zone above his heavy cowhide shoes. Samson writes that he "fetched a sneeze and wiped his big nose with a red handkerchief" as he stood surveying them in silence, while Dr. John Allen, who had sat on the door-step reading a paper—a kindly faced man of middle age with a short white beard ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... the cheerless blaze of the drawing-room chandelier—Mrs. Peniston never lit the lamps unless there was "company"—Lily seemed to watch her own figure retreating down vistas of neutral-tinted dulness to a middle age like Grace Stepney's. When she ceased to amuse Judy Trenor and her friends she would have to fall back on amusing Mrs. Peniston; whichever way she looked she saw only a future of servitude to ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... all motley crews, passed us during the day, and we had a good many wounded Turks to attend to. I dressed one I was much interested in—a short, swarthy chap of middle age, who was brought in by some Fusiliers. This man had jumped on the parapet of his trench, where he coolly stood upright and shot five Fusiliers dead before they managed to bowl him over, but a shattered left arm left him helpless. ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... mean, not now, lest I should forget my manners listening to you. Look," and he pointed to a dark-browed, fierce-eyed man of middle age who passed up the hall as though he did not see us, "there goes my cousin, Amenmeses. You ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... to say something of Charlotte's worth, and Edward's long-standing attachment to her; but the latter hastily interrupted him. "We committed ourselves to a foolish thing, that I see all too clearly. Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires. Woe to him who, either by circumstances ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... point being a grim and middle-aged determination, rather than "youth and beauty." Not that the thirty calendar years of that lady would necessarily have conducted her across the indefinite boundaries of the uncertain region known as "middle age," but the second Mrs. Allan was born middle-aged, and the almanac had nothing ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... that no one would molest me at Perret's, which was a large meeting-room, where we found a score of men, all young or at least not more than on the threshold of middle age, and all richly dressed, though none so extravagantly as ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... lust burn on in me Still unconsumed? Can flagellation, fasting, Nor fervent prayer itself, not cleanse my soul From its fond doting on her comeliness? Oh! heaven! is there no way for me to jump My middle age and plunge this burning heart Into the icy flood of cold decay? None? O, wretched state of luxury! This hot desire grows even in its death And from its ashes doth arise ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... twenty years of age. This is true not only of menial labor, but also in regard to labor involving more or less responsibility. In the post offices, for instance, the great majority of the clerks are mere boys. In the stores one rarely sees a man past middle age conducting the business or acting as clerk. Why are the young so prominent? Partly because of the custom of "abdication." As "family abdication" is frequent, it has a perceptible effect on the general character of the nation, and accounts in part for rash business ventures and other ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... dreamed of. Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between the obscurity of John Wyclif's earlier life and the fulness and vividness of our knowledge of him during the twenty years which preceded its close. Born in the earlier part of the fourteenth century, he had already passed middle age when he was appointed to the mastership of Balliol College in the University of Oxford and recognized as first among the schoolmen of his day. Of all the scholastic doctors those of England had been throughout the keenest and ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... afraid there is some ground to expect it, without looking for its foreshadowing exclusively to the Apocalypse. Niebuhr, who did not draw his opinions from prophecy, rejoiced that his career was coming to a close, for he thought we were on the eve of a darker middle age. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... prosecute the painter's art in middle age, he rose with remarkable rapidity to eminence, was the great painter of Lombardy in his day, rivalling Squarcione, Mantegna's teacher in his school, which numbered two hundred scholars, and becoming the founder of the early ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... by his voice, was an Englishman, of more than middle age; the other, a woman, who also spoke English, but with ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... little woman in black, well past middle age. Her face and dress spoke of years of economy, even of privation, but her manner was plainly that of a woman of gentle breeding and former luxury. She was precisely of the type of decayed gentlewoman that one meets often in the city, ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... them. The face of the large Indian seemed like some other face that had had a place in his memory. It was not unlikely that he had known this warrior during his captivity, when half a thousand braves had been to him as brothers. The Indian was apparently of middle age, and had lines of dignity and authority in his face that made it hard to accept him as a subdued resident at the Mission. But Menard knew that no sign of doubt or suspicion must appear in his face, so he waited for the priest. The Indians ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... the warning was still doubtful, when a sudden commotion in the crowd about them drew the attention of all to a short, thick-set man of middle age, in the light panoply of a mounted legionary. Cries went ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... view of his case. He had now, he told himself, reached an age when such a state of mind gave cause neither for astonishment nor alarm. How often had it not fallen to him, in his role of medical adviser, to reassure a patient on this score. The arrival of middle age brought about a certain lowness of spirits in even the most robust: along with a more or less marked bodily languor went an uneasy sense of coming loss: the time was at hand to bid farewell to much that had hitherto made life agreeable; and for most this ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... constantly prevalent in most large cities, more often in the spring and fall, and is often epidemic, attacking ninety per cent of young persons who have not previously had the disease. It is more common in males, affecting children and youths, but rarely infants or those past middle age. One attack usually protects ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... and has published a variety of curious particulars respecting her, drawn in a measure from documents preserved in the royal archives, as well as from old-time chronicles and dissertations, Latin and German middle age doggerel, and the records of jurists, historians and theologists. Several persons are designated in the early history of the family of Hohenzollern as that unquiet soul who for some three hundred years has performed the functions of ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... knot of men came through dressed in the dark blue coats, with trimmings of gold oak-leaves, which marked the marshals of the Empire. They were, all but one, men who had hardly reached their middle age, and who, in any other army, might have been considered fortunate if they had gained the command of a regiment; but the continuous wars and the open system by which rules of seniority yielded to merit had opened up a rapid career to a successful soldier. Each carried his curved cocked hat under ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... woman turned round from the table, where she was fitting patches to a pair of pauper trousers. Her face was sweet, her voice low, and, though she was of middle age, every one agreed that "Miss Coffin was a real pooty woman, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... of Alvarado, Castro, and Estenega, the members of the Junta were men of middle age, and represented the talent of California,—Jimeno, Gonzales, Arguello, Requena, Del Valle. Their dark, bearded faces, upturned to the stars, made a striking set of profiles, but the effect was marred by the silk handkerchiefs they had tied ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... afternoon sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... of ease and peace comes to him in his middle age, let him not forget the warning of the latter ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... so intently, my son?" asked the gentleman who sat at his side. He was a man of perhaps middle age, and he wore spectacles, which gave ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... where resides the Sheik of all the Beni Amers, Ahmed, surrounded by his wives, children, and people. He is a man of middle age, conspicuous among his cunning followers by a shrewd and crafty look. He was friendly to us, and presented us with a few sheep and cows. His camp covered several acres of ground, the whole enclosed by a strong fence; the wigwams are built in a circle a few feet from ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... goodwill from Our Lady, to mould these little rogues to the service, to make them so unlike others, and endow them in the middle of the nineteenth century with the fire of chastity and primitive fervour of the middle age." ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... both in prisons and asylums, lascivious people are fond of onions (La Puberta, p. 297), and it may perhaps be worth while to recall the observation of Serieux that in a woman in whom the sexual instinct only awoke in middle age there was a horror of leeks. In some countries, and especially in Belgium, celery is popularly looked upon as a sexual stimulant. Various condiments, again, have the same reputation, perhaps because they are hot and because sexual desire is regarded, rightly enough, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... strangely alike in appearance, nearly the same age, the age where gray hairs finally outnumber black, or baldness takes over. The age when the expanding waistline has begun to sag tiredly, when robust middle age begins the slow ...
— Homesick • Lyn Venable
... at this ending. "How absurd!" he says. "They are still in the early twenties. The world is all before them, and they have time to fall into all sorts of troubles which the romanticist has not thought of. Middle age is just as dangerous a period as youth, and matrimony has its pitfalls. Let me take up the story and tell you how they didn't live happily ever afterwards, but, on the contrary, had a ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... I know you mean most generously and kindly, but papa is so anxious and fearful! He tries to keep up before others, but I know how he feels, and it's terrible. He is past middle age, and business success means very much to him. How can I do anything to harm him? I know so little about business and its perils, while papa thinks there may be terrible dangers ahead for every one. You might have the good-will to ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... with well-turned limbs; his countenance was remarkably intelligent, his eye hazel but full and strong, his front was smooth and unwrinkled, and but for some grey hairs, which appeared silvering his brown and curly locks, he might have been supposed to have hardly reached the middle age; his nose was aquiline, the expression of the lower part of his countenance remarkably sweet, and when he spoke to our guide, which he did with uncommon fluency in the Neapolitan dialect, I thought I had never heard a more agreeable ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... Until middle age he showed no marked mystical tendency, although we know that from the time he was an undergraduate he was a "diligent reader" of mystical books, and that he had studied, among others, Dionysius the Areopagite, Ruysbroek, ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... on they saw approaching a buggy similar to their own, driven by a man of middle age. It turned out to be an acquaintance of the landlord's, and ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... rudely irrupted himself was a man of middle age, wearing a coarse pea-jacket and blue jersey of a seaman, his peaked hat covered with dust, as Bones perceived later, when the sound of scurrying ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... writers, his main object was to contemplate death and prepare himself for it. In his youth he had evinced some levity of character, and had been noted for his devotion to games and to the chase; in his middle age he laid aside these pursuits, and, applying himself actively to business, was a good administrator, as well as a brave soldier. But at last it seemed to him that the only life worth living was the contemplative, and that the happiness ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... building bearing the sign, "Hamilton and Company, Dry Goods, Groceries, Boots and Shoes and Notions." There was a narrow platform at the front of the building and upon this platform were several men, mostly of middle age or older. Mary-'Gusta noticed that most of these men were smoking. If she had been older she might have noticed that each man either sat upon the platform steps or leaned against the posts supporting its roof. Not one was depending solely upon ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... foregoing incidents, a man who had dwelt in far countries, and viewed many cities, arrived at Roy-Town, a roadside hamlet on the old western turnpike road, not five miles from Froom-Everard, and put up at the Buck's Head, an isolated inn at that spot. He was still barely of middle age, but it could be seen that a haze of grey was settling upon the locks of his hair, and that his face had lost colour and curve, as if by exposure to bleaching climates and strange atmospheres, or from ailments incidental ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... world. Light, hope, and freedom pierced with vitalizing ray the clouds and the miasma that hung so thick over the prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay and death. Kindled with new life, the nations gave birth to a progeny of heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,—a monastic cell, an inquisitorial dungeon, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... gaze of a Venus man of middle age. A small, slim graceful man, with sleek black hair. His pointed face, accentuated by the pointed beard, was pallid. He wore a white and purple robe; upon his breast was a huge platinum ornament, a device like a star and ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... plain which extends between Halberger's house and the deserted tolderia of the Tovas, a horseman is seen proceeding in the direction of the latter. He is a man about middle age, of hale, active appearance, in no way past his prime. Of medium size, or rather above it, his figure though robust is well proportioned, with strong sinewy arms and limbs lithe as a panther's, while his countenance, notwithstanding the somewhat embrowned ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... mine, with their opium-pipes and little wooden vials of opium before them, all three engaged in rolling and heating in their opium-lamps treacly pellets of opium. Then they had their daily smoke of opium. "They were ruining themselves body and soul." Two of the men were past middle age; the third was a strapping young fellow of twenty-five. They may have only recently acquired the habit, I had no means of asking them; but those who know Western China will tell you that it is almost certain that the two elder men had used the opium-pipe as a stimulant since they were as ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... the Wars of the Roses, had been replaced by the rich and stately architecture of the Tudors. Altogether, the house, like the time, was in a transitionary state, and represented faithfully enough the passage of the old middle age into the new life which had just burst into blossom throughout Europe, never, let us pray, to see its autumn ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... books—shelves upon shelves of books; and among their books a dozen men sat reading in total silence. Some held thin, unbound pages of enormous size—Arthur Miles was unacquainted with newspapers—open before them; all were of middle age or over; and none of them showed surprise at the new-comers. The old chemist nodded to one or two, who barely returned his nod and forthwith resumed ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and middle age of Mrs Blair had been more free from trial than is the common lot; but the last few years had been years of great vicissitude. She was now a widow and childless; for though it might be that her youngest son was still alive, she did not know ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... above middle age, with thin lemon-colored hair, a curling mustache, a tufted chin of the same hue, and a high craggy face, all running to a great hook of the nose, like the beak of an eagle. His skin was tanned a brown-red by much exposure to ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of infallibility is itself the greatest witness of the steady progress of reaction in the Roman Church. That action, theoretically at least, does away with even that measure of popular constitution in the Church to which the end of the Middle Age had held fast without wavering, which the mightiest of popes had not been able to abolish and the council of Trent had not dared earnestly to debate. Whether the decree of 1870 is viewed in the light of the Syllabus of Errors of 1864, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... had grown gray. That is, there were more or less becoming threads of silver in her maiden tresses, and the dignity of middle age had added inches to her waist and a few interesting lines to her forehead. There was no new Sir Galahad on the horizon even of her day-dreams, and her mother was in failing health. Mrs. Willis continued now to fail for five years—years which taxed her daughter's strength, though ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... Paulton's Square and Danvers Street must both be partly on its site. The gardens were laid out in the Italian style, and attracted much notice. Sir John Danvers was knighted by James I. After he had been left a widower twice and was past middle age, he began to take an active part in the affairs of his time. He several times protested against Stuart exactions, and during the Civil War took the side of the Parliament. He was one of those who signed Charles I.'s death-warrant. He married a third time at Chelsea, and died there in ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... considered an incumbrance to the camp. The old and infirm, therefore, are often willingly deserted, that they may the more quickly die. The village is always under the surveillance of men who are past the middle age, and who no longer can act out the stirring deeds of the warrior. Their experience renders them capable of giving good advice, and attending to the less active affairs of the nation. They hold the power of restraining the rashness and indiscretion of the younger men, therefore they are selected ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... remarkable feature of the room was the man who sat at the desk. He was a man solidly built and, by his voice, of middle age. His face the new-comer could not see and for excellent reason. It was hidden behind a veil of fine silk net which had been adjusted over the head like a loose bag ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... adolescent.[2] The pressure of private concerns, of one's narrowing interest in one's own career, one's own family, and small circle of friends, the restriction of one's sympathies by fixed habits and circumscribed experience, all tend to dampen by middle age the ardor of the man who as an undergraduate at eighteen set out to make the world "a better place to live in." But more effective in dampening enthusiasm is the disillusion and weariness that set in after a period of exuberant and romantic benevolence to ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... tradition. It makes a definite break in the history of our literature, and a number of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared since its close. As to the literature of the war itself, it was largely the work of writers who had already reached or passed middle age. All of the more important authors described in the last three chapters survived the Rebellion, except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth years of the war, respectively. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... group of companions whom he gathered round him, officials high and low, foreign Ambassadors and Cabinet Ministers and younger under-secretaries who were popularly known as the "Tennis Cabinet." There were fifty or more of them, and that so many should have kept their athletic vigor into middle age, and even beyond it, spoke well for the physique of the men of official Washington at ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... would do when profaneness was in fashion, but now a deceitful profession. Take heed, professor, that thou dost not throw away thy old darling sin for a new one. Men's tempers alter. Youth is for pride and wantonness; middle age for cunning and craft; old age for the world and covetousness. Take heed, therefore, of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... it. Well—she was the kind of girl who always goes around with a couple of Airedales, and in woollen stockings, low shoes and mannish shirts, and shell-rimmed glasses, and you felt she wore Ferris waists. Her hair was that ashen blonde with no glint of gold in it. You knew it would become grey in middle age with no definite period of transition. She never buttoned her heavy welted gloves but wore them back over her hand, like a cuff, very English. You felt there must be a riding crop concealed about her somewhere. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... now reaching middle age who discover themselves to be lamenting the past in one respect if in none other, that there are no books written now for children comparable with those of thirty years ago. I say written FOR children ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... principle of authority on the democratic basis of the equality of the brethren, though claiming a higher degree of perfection than could be realized in the great secular church. For the rude and undisciplined world of the Middle Age, the Benedictine rule furnished a wholesome course of training and a constant stimulus to the obedience, self-control, order, and industry which were indispensable to the regeneration and healthy growth ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... would have had to work hard after you were old; and would have been always afraid of having to be shut up in a kind of prison along with other old men, half-starved and without amusement. And as for me, I am twenty years old. In those days my middle age would be beginning now, and in a few years I should be pinched, thin, and haggard, beset with troubles and miseries, so that no one could have guessed that I was ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... Review marks the close of a task which was confided to me no less than fifteen years ago—grande mortalis cevi spatium, a long span of one's mortal days. Fifteen years are enough to bring a man from youth to middle age, to test the working value of convictions, to measure the advance of principles and beliefs, and, alas! to cut off many early associates and to extinguish many lights. It is hardly possible that a Review should have been conducted for so considerable a time without ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Russell Lowell The Quest Ellen Mackey Hutchinson Cortissoz My Birth-Day Thomas Moore Sonnet on His having Arrived to the Age of Twenty-Three John Milton On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year George Gordon Byron Growing Gray Austin Dobson The One White Hair Walter Savage Landor Ballade of Middle Age Andrew Lang Middle Age Rudolph Chambers Lehmann To Critics Walter Learned The Rainbow William Wordsworth Leavetaking William Watson Equinoctial Adeline D. T. Whitney "Before the Beginning of Years" Algernon Charles Swinburne Man Henry Vaughan The Pulley George Herbert Ode on the Intimations ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... for acknowledgment of his long-tried services had arrived. For years he had lived a life of labor, research, and patient investigation. Among the deeds, parchments, and dusty green tables of the chancery, his youth had faded to middle age, and of its early hopes had retained but one single earthly ambition: it was that of taking a place among learned men, and becoming an authority of some weight in the judicial world. His pamphlets ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... middle age from India, who offered to do his "bit," refused a post at home in keeping with his physical limitations. His eyes were all right, he said, when he nominated himself as a balloon observer, and he never suffered from sea-sickness which sausage balloons most wickedly ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... among the Onondagas a chief of high rank, whose name, variously written—Hiawatha, Hayenwatha, Ayonhwahtha, Taoungwatha—is rendered, "he who seeks the wampum belt." He had made himself greatly esteemed by his wisdom and his benevolence. He was now past middle age. Though many of his friends and relatives had perished by the machinations of Atotarho, he himself had been spared. The qualities which gained him general respect had, perhaps, not been without influence even on that ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... them with calm and a swinging stick. The man waved his hand at them and they turned tail. But he had no further interest in Harry. He stood to watch the struggles of his horses and his men. He was of some height, and, though past middle age, bore himself with singular grace and vigour. He had still a rarely handsome face—too handsome, by far, for Harry's taste. The features were of an impossible, absurd perfection. There was something superhuman or fatuous, at least something ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... whether in the form of an organised kingdom, as the Vandals attempted in Africa; or of a mere band of brigands, as did the Goths in Asia Minor, under Gainas; or of a praetorian guard, as did the Varangens of the middle age; or as religious invaders, as did the Crusaders, ended only in the corruption and disappearance of the colonists. That extraordinary reform in morals, which, according to Salvian and his contemporaries, the Vandal conquerors worked in North Africa, availed ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament, and repent that others are gone to a harbour of rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle age, and even that is very imperfect. And for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thus addressed was a man of about the middle age, very grotesquely attired, and with a periwig preposterously long. His countenance (which, in its features, was rather comely) was stamped with an odd mixture of liveliness, impudence, and a coarse ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by the social horizon of her family circle; she is only the chatelaine. Her domain is princely, but no hope clings in her breast of aught beside a faded middle age. Her beauty hides itself under the simple robe of the Californian matron. Visitors are rare in this lovely wilderness. The annual rodeo will bring the vaqueros together. Some travelling officials may reach the San Joaquin. The one bright possibility ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... quivered as if a father had been struck by his son. Carmichael looked thin and nervous in the pulpit, and it came to me that if new views are to be preached to old-fashioned people it ought not to be by lads who are always heady and intolerant, but by a stout man of middle age, with a rich voice and a good-natured manner. Had Carmichael rasped and girded much longer, one would have believed in the inspiration of the vowel points, and I left the church with a low heart, for this was a woeful change from ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... the barouche. It was a road, too, he never liked to take, because of a certain steam tram which ran along it and made the horses uncomfortable when they met it face to face. And there his mistress was unsympathetic towards him. She had been a brilliant and daring horsewoman in her youth and middle age. ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... most active, but, at the same time, of the least suspected, of these subtle agents, was a certain Basilio Lopez, cloth-merchant in the city of Pampeluna. He was a man past the middle age, well to do in the world, married and with a family, and certainly, to all appearance, the last person to make or meddle in political intrigues of any kind, especially in such as might, by any possibility, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... back her heavy veil with a quick gesture. She was past middle age, and her hair was beginning to silver, but her full, proud figure and clear olive skin retained traces of the beauty peculiar to the Basque province. But, once you had seen her eyes, and comprehended the great sadness that was revealed in their deep shadows ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... more than a century. As one man fell he handed the sword to another; to an infant hand trained amid feuds and anarchy, but always clasping, as soon as it had force enough, the royal weapon with royal courage and meaning. None of the Jameses lived beyond the earliest chapter of middle age; all of them succeeded in early youth, most of them in childhood; and, with but that uncertain exception of James III, every one of them was actuated by a noble patriotism, and did his devoir manfully for the improvement and ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... waiting expectant, who loiter about among the sugar-barrels of the grocery department, there presently appears—with a new tinkle of the little bell—a stout, ruddy man, just past middle age, in broad-brimmed white beaver and sober homespun suit, who is met with a deferential "Good day, Squire," from one and another, as he falls successively into short parley with them. A self-possessed, cheery man, who has strong opinions, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... of his death—and the writing so strong and clear. No sign of weakness or illness even! She read on with frantic eagerness; it was not a very long letter, but when Anne had read the two or three somewhat hurriedly written pages, her face had changed as if from careworn, pallid middle age, back to fresh, sunny youth. She fell on her knees in fervent, unspoken thanksgiving. She kissed the letter—the dear, beautiful letter, as if it ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... upon them to sanction the journey of the princesses. But in the first days of April all the hopes of success which had been founded on his cooperation and support were suddenly extinguished by his death. Though he had hardly entered upon middle age, a constant course of excess had made him an old man before his time. In the latter part of March he was attacked by an illness which his physicians soon pronounced mortal, and on the 2d of April he died. He had borne the approach of death with firmness, professing to ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... good thing for us as we get along into middle age," another old friend told her. He was building a magnificent house on Pacific Heights, but had recently married a second time, and was even then on his way to the steamer to welcome home his two daughters just ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... was a boy, I was fondest of AEschylus; in youth and middle age I preferred Euripides; now in my declining years I admire Sophocles. I can now at length see that Sophocles is the most perfect. Yet he never rises to the sublime simplicity of AEschylus—simplicity of design, I mean—nor diffuses himself in ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... this 'pleasant medicine,' we hear, pleased the child, and he drank a great deal of it daily. Though at the time it seemed to suit him, yet there is little doubt it planted the seeds of the disease which was to carry him off before middle age. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... ornamentation nothing can be more untidy or more unprepossessing than the appearance of the Oraon. The ornaments are nearly all discarded, hair utterly neglected, and for raiment any rags are used. This applies both to males and females of middle age. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... man was coming in, a Mexican of the peon class. He moved up the walk toward her with a slight limp. As he drew closer, she observed negligently that he was of early middle age, ragged, and of course dirty. Age and lack of soap had so dyed his serape that the ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... the great life motif of her existence;" that the sentiment of the ideal life is none other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it. Matthew Arnold saw George Sand in his enthusiastic youth when she was in the serenity and dignity of middle age at Nohant. ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... was a man of middle age, with a figure somewhat rounded by the adipose curves of a comfortable life, and an air of fastidiousness which was, however, occasionally at variance with what seemed to be his original condition. He greeted Cissy with a certain nervous overconsciousness of his duties as host and teacher, and then ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Judge, an English aristocrat and lady, a Seattle lawyer, sober, thoughtful and of middle age, who had been introduced to me by a friend upon sailing, and who kindly kept me in sight when we changed steamers or trains on the trip without specially appearing to do so; a nice old gentleman going to search for the body ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... his bold visage middle age Had slightly pressed his signet sage, Yet had not quenched the open truth, And fiery vehemence of youth; Forward and frolic glee was there, The will to do, the soul to dare, The sparkling glance, soon blown to fire Of hasty love or headlong ire. The Lady of the Lake, ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... fifty of the inhabitants came and cut the strings that fastened the left side of my head, which gave me the liberty of turning it to the right, and of observing the person and gesture of him that was to speak. He appeared to be of a middle age, and taller than any of the other three who attended him, whereof one was a page that held up his train, and seemed to be somewhat longer than my middle finger; the other two stood one on each side to support him. He acted every part of an orator, ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... fists as he stood there. It was a message from a world every memory of which had been deliberately crushed, a world, indeed, in which he had seemed no longer to hold any place. Scarcely yet of middle age, well-preserved, upright, with neat figure dressed in the conventional tweeds and gaiters of an English country gentleman, he not only had loved his life, but he looked the part. He was Peter Ruff, Esquire, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of an hour he had sounded and sifted the case to the uttermost, and descended with the husband once more to the drawing-room. In front of the fireplace were standing two gentlemen, the one a very typical, clean-shaven, general practitioner, the other a striking-looking man of middle age, with pale blue eyes and ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... nothing was so enjoyable as to see a man in a fury of rage[144]; Lombroso mentions a woman who was mostly frigid, but experienced sexual feelings when she heard anyone swearing; and a medical friend tells me of a lady considerably past middle age who experienced sexual erethism after listening to a heated argument between her husband and a friend on religious topics. The case has also been recorded of a masochistic man who found sexual satisfaction ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... one person only who really interested him. This was a man, somewhat over middle age, of singularly noble and distinguished bearing. His brow was furrowed with lines, but they spoke of cares of the past. Benevolence had settled on his face. It was as if, after a weary struggle, the sun had broken through the ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... Summer & fall, & the Snows dureing the, winter Seasons, in this open countrey where the eye has no rest. I have observed amongst those, as well in all other tribes which I have passed on these waters who live on fish maney of different Sectes who have lost their teeth about middle age, Some have their teeth worn to the gums, perticelar those of the upper jaws, and the tribes generally have bad teeth the cause of it I cannot account sand attachd. to the roots &c the method they have of useing the dri'd Salmon, which is mearly worming it and eating the rine ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... reason mentioned before. Humorists, for they were of all descriptions; and, not having been brought together in early life (which has a tendency to assimilate the members of corporate bodies to each other), but, for the most part, placed in this house in ripe or middle age, they necessarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a common stock. Hence they formed a sort of Noah's ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Domestic retainers ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Lord Byron, on the point of embarking for Missolonghi, and in his last letter to Moore, "if any thing in the way of fever, fatigue, famine, or otherwise, should cut short the middle age of a brother warbler, like Garcilasso de la Vega, I pray you remember me ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... enough in their white surgeons' smocks. All seemed to be of middle age, with dark hair turning gray at the fringe. One was considerably more muscular than the other two. One leaned to overweight. The third was quite thin. Yet Mel felt himself bristling like a dog in the dark of ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... middle age, wrapped at all times in dirty rags (not to be called clothing), obese, grimy, with dishevelled black hair, and hands so scarred, so deformed by labour and neglect, as to be scarcely human. She had the darkest and fiercest ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... from a wound on his left breast. I didn't even know at the moment the man was my father; though slowly, afterward, by the concurrent testimony of others, I learnt to call him so. But his relationship wasn't part of the Picture to me. There, he was only in my eyes a man—a man well past middle age, with a long white beard, now dabbled with the thick blood that kept gurgling so hatefully from the red spot in his waistcoat. He lay on his back, half-curled round toward one arm, exactly as he fell. And the revolver ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen |
