"Boyhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... deeper tonings of "years that bring the philosophic mind," as to argue that they were wrought into the structure of the play not long before it came from the press. The part of the Athenian lovers certainly has a good deal that, viewed by itself, would scarce do credit even to such a boyhood as Shakespeare's must have been. On the other hand, there is a large philosophy in Theseus' discourse of "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," a manly judgment in his reasons for preferring the "tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe," ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... wrong, marchesa; Count Nobili is much beloved in Lucca. Fra Pacifico has known him from boyhood. He praises him greatly. ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... Mormons, when I return home? That we may live in peace, live as friends, and trade with one another? Or shall we look for you to come prowling around our weak settlements, like wolves in the night? I hope we may live in peace in time to come. I have now gray hairs on my head, and from my boyhood I have been on the frontiers doing all I could to preserve peace between white men and Indians. I despise this killing, this shedding of blood. I hope you will stop this and come and visit and trade with our ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... Society.'(124) 'With a father who had made an enormous fortune, with little principle, out of a public office—for Lord Holland owed the bulk of his wealth to his appointment of paymaster to the forces,—and who spoiled him, in his boyhood, Charles James Fox had begun life AS A FOP OF THE FIRST WATER, and squandered L50,000 in debt before he became of age. Afterwards he indulged recklessly and extravagantly in every course of licentiousness which ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... sank back into his chair. For a little while there was silence, heavy and painful. Wanda's eyes grew misty. Not once since that day in the spring had she been disloyal to Red Reckless, whom she had known in his boyhood, who had fought her early battles for her, who had been the plumed knight of her early girlhood. She told herself now that he had not come back because he could not bear to return yet to the place where he and his brother had spent so many happy days together, that if he was living wildly now, scurrying ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... cried the hour at night They do, for that matter, yet. The railroad came to town and the march of improvement struck it, after I had gone away. Century-old institutions were ruthlessly upset. The police force, which in my boyhood consisted of a man and a half—that is, one with a wooden leg—was increased and uniformed, and the night watchmen's chant was stopped. But there are limits to everything. The town that had been waked every hour of the night since the early Middle Ages to be ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... gloomy cockpit for the gay saloon, the ship's allowance for sumptuous fare, the tyranny of his messmates and the harshness of his superiors for adulation and respect. Was he happier? No. In this world, whether in boyhood or riper years, the happiest state of existence is when under control. Although contrary to received opinion, this is a fact; but I cannot now stop to demonstrate ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... communication of them. His own glorious career was then finished, and his life's work lay open to the mature reflection of his declining years, when he thus acknowledged his obligations to the heroes of his boyhood. "Isaac Hull," he said, "was as good a seaman as ever sailed a ship. If I have done the country any service afloat, it is in no small degree owing to the ambition and enthusiasm he created in me, when I was a youngster, by his fair fight with ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... something less than a month. And after that? Well, he would of course spend Christmas at Lidford; and he fancied how the holly and mistletoe, the church-decorations and carol-singing, and all the stereotyped genialities of the season,—things that had seemed trite and dreary to him since the days of his boyhood,—would have a new significance and beauty for him when he and Marian kept the sacred festival together. And then how quickly would begin the new year, the year whose spring-tide would see them man and wife! Perhaps there is no period ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... and cold, winter and summer, alternated with their wonted regularity for fifteen years in the wild regions of the Far North. During this space of time the hero of our tale sprouted from babyhood to boyhood, passed through the usual amount of accidents, ailments, and vicissitudes incidental to those periods of life, and finally entered upon that ambiguous condition that ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... I was scarce beyond thirty years of age. Even so, I found myself already old; and like any true philosopher, I resolved to make myself young. As hitherto I had had no boyhood, I determined to achieve a boyhood for myself. Studying myself, I discovered that I had rarely smiled; so I resolved to find somewhat to make me smile. The great realm of knowledge, widest and sweetest of all empires ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... boy was a prince of the wilderness. He had but very little work to do during the period of his boyhood. His principal occupation was the practice of a few simple arts in warfare and the chase. Aside from this, he was master of ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... after Lancelot and Roland and all the rest had been laid in their graves, a baby belonging to the family of Quixada was born in that part of Spain called La Mancha. We are not told anything of his boyhood, or even of his manhood till he reached the age of fifty, but we know that he was poor; that he lived with a housekeeper and a niece to take care of him, and that he passed all his days in company with these old books until the courts and forests which were ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... some which were then given to the world for the first time, so that they represent work belonging to three eras in the poet's life, poems written before he had completed his twenty-second year and belonging for the most part to his boyhood, poems written in his early manhood, and poems written between his thirty-first and ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... to the fact that, at one time in his boyhood, he had spelled the name of the Deity with a ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... with a large wart on her face, observed, in a drawling tone, "That she had not read Byron—at least, since her girlhood—and then only a few passages; but that the impression on her mind was, that his writings were of a highly objectionable character." "I also read a little of him in my boyhood," said a gentleman about sixty, but who evidently, from his dress and demeanour, wished to appear about thirty, "but I highly disapproved of him; for, notwithstanding he was a nobleman, he is frequently very coarse, and very fond of raising emotion. ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... utterance of the most intense bitterness and satire.' Then, unconsciously assuming the character, Mr. Lincoln repeated, also from memory, Richard's soliloquy, rendering it with a degree of force and power that made it seem like a new creation to me. Though familiar with the passage from boyhood, I can truly say that never till that moment had I fully appreciated its spirit. I could not refrain from laying down my palette and brushes, and applauding heartily upon his conclusion, saying, at the same time, half in earnest, that I was not sure but that he had made ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... a little apart from the rest and was gazing with rapturous awe at this object of his boyhood adoration. ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... need not, like the fruits on sticks, The fruits Venetian boyhood licks, A voice with operatic tricks ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... last, "I feel, and I think naturally, very sore at the cruel wrong that has been inflicted upon me, but I cannot forget that in my boyhood I was always received with kindness by your wife, and for her sake, and that of your daughters, I am most anxious your reputation should remain untarnished. I am willing to believe that this crime was the result of ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... old man. "I remember! Six hills in a row. Busters!"—looking wonderfully knowing, and, with feeble forefinger raised, nodding and winking at his great-grandchild,—as it were across the slim gulf of a hundred years which divided the gleeful boyhood of Joe from the second childhood of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Webster firmly. "From boyhood up I've always had a regular horror of the water. I can't so much as go paddling without an ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... must follow every winding track that opens by my way. Spring has restored to me something of the long-forgotten vigour of youth; I walk without weariness; I sing to myself like a boy, and the song is one I knew in boyhood. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... bereavement which comes to every mother. It comes upon her suddenly, leaving her surprised, wondering, and full of foolish little fears that in the boyhood of her boy she may not hold so big a place as was given her to hold through ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... volume of one of the most interesting and important collection of letters ever published in France. The correspondence dates from Victor Hugo's boyhood to his death, and none of the letters have been ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... encouragement of luxurious habits during childhood; the weakened sense of responsibility, on the part of the parent, which is often caused by the transference to others of authority and supervision during boyhood or girlhood; the undue stimulation of the love of amusement, or of the craving for material comforts, during the opening years of manhood or womanhood; the failure to create serious interests or teach adequately the social responsibilities which wealth ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... between his waiting suite. The scent of the pines had stirred his heart with memories. He was thinking of the last time he had been here, years before—well, not really so many years before, only four years, and yet it seemed like a recollection of his boyhood. He paused inside the threshold to remove his cloak. A hand, with a curious lack of duplication to it, stretched itself forward. The Maimed Man turned abruptly to see a servant with one arm bowing toward him. For a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... threw his arms round his boyhood's companion, who uttered a low sigh, and would have sunk to the stony floor ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up, and gave me good-day. I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named LEONIDAS W. Smiley—REV. LEONIDAS W. Smiley, a young minister of the Gospel, who he had heard was at one time a resident of Angel's Camp. I added that if Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, I would feel under ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... reminiscences, however, are full of poignant episodes. For instance, let us take an incident which occurred in his early boyhood when he found out what sort of man his father really was—a sombre event in the life of any boy, much more so ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... think of something he had not been told, he was asked what his head was for; if he did something off his own bat, the question arose what business he had to think. In either case he went to the mast-head. Of course, at a certain age one "turns to mirth all things of earth, as only boyhood can;" and the contemporary records of the steerage brim over with unforced jollity, like that notable hero of Marryat's "who was never quite happy except ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... the daughter of an old clergyman of my acquaintance telling me a pathetic and yet typical story of the end of one of these friendships. Her father and another elderly clergyman had been devoted friends in boyhood and youth. Circumstances led to a suspension of intercourse, but at last, after a gap of nearly thirty years, during which the friends had not met, it was arranged that the old comrade should come and stay at the vicarage. As ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... were all bent now upon the holiday scenes of the past. As they finished the meal and cleared away and washed the dishes they related incidents of their boyhood's time, compared, reiterated, and embellished. As they talked they grew jovial, ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... seated than Wild Bill threw himself upon the sled, with one leg under him and the other stretched at full length behind. This was a method of steering that had come into vogue since the Trapper's boyhood, for in his day the steersman sat astride the sled, with his feet thrust forward, and steered by the pressure of either ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... they chatted quietly, their thoughts naturally turning again to England, and the scenes of their boyhood. ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... are hideously poor. The Irish gentleman doctor of my boyhood, who took nothing less than a guinea, though he might pay you four visits for it, seems to have no equivalent nowadays in English society. Better be a railway porter than an ordinary English general practitioner. A railway porter has from eighteen ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... following quaint description of "Nancy's boy baby," as reported by Mrs. Eleanor Atkinson in her little book on "Lincoln's Boyhood." ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... that of a real school, interesting, diversified, and full of striking incidents. The athletics are technically correct, while the characters are true and consistent types of American boyhood and youth. ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... blessed a certain respectable tradesman, in a certain town in Germany, with a large and promising family of children. He had married very early the beloved of his boyhood, and had been left a widower with one motherless baby almost before he was a man. A neighbour, with womanly compassion, took pity upon this desolate father, and more desolate child; and it was not until she had nursed the babe in her ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... could not bear so much. Perhaps he was reminded of the only other fingers which had had a right since his boyhood to touch him so. Yet he would not repel the gentle hand, and to avoid doing that he did another very uncommon thing; he drew Esther down into his arms and put her on his knee, leaning his head against her shoulder. It was exceeding pleasant ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... towards the snow-clad New Hampshire hills. "I've meant to write the story of the 'Cochrane craze' sometime, or such part of it as has to do with my family history, and you shall read it if you like. I should set down my child-hood and my boyhood memories, together with such scraps of village hearsay as seem reliable. You were not so much younger than I, but I was in the thick of the excitement, and naturally I heard more than you, having so bitter ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... purpose of renewing my acquaintance with Fiammetta. Before, however, I had achieved that object this thought occurred to me: "You are upon a fool's errand; turn back, or you will destroy forever one of the sweetest of your boyhood illusions! You seek Fiammetta in the delusive hope of finding her in the person of Mrs. Henry Boggs; there is but one Fiammetta, and she is the memory abiding in your heart. Spare yourself the misery of discovering in the hearty, fleshy Lincolnshire hussif ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... younger man was re-asserting itself. This was what any one—looking at the whole situation from the Aldershot point of view—would at the outset demand? But if Macleod had known all that was implied in the question, it is probable that a friendship that had existed from boyhood would then and there have been severed. He took it that Ogilvie was merely referring to the thousand and one obstacles that lay between him and ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... districts, and consequently knew nothing of the practice of other places; rents were low, and the same families continued in the farms from generation to generation, pursuing the same routine of Agriculture which their fathers and grandfathers had pursued "time out of mind". In the days of my own boyhood, nearly seventy years ago, I spent some time at a solitary farmhouse in North Wiltshire, with a grandfather and his family, and can remember the various occupations and practices of the persons employed in the dairy, and on the grazing and corn lands. I never saw either a book or newspaper ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... more entirely due to the intercession of that man of all men, the defender of injured innocence, and the champion of all unfortunates, the most honorable Mr. WASHBURNE, American Minister, &c. He told them that he had known me from boyhood; that my father died in the lunatic asylum, and dying, bequeathed his intellectual characteristics to his son, which was all he had to bequeath. The King said it was more than likely, and so ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... captain's two dear daughters are aboard, and five other ladies. The ship has been driving many hours, has seven feet water in her hold, and her mainmast has been cut away. The description of her loss, familiar to me from my early boyhood, seems to be read aloud as ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... some day when they were disgracefully prosperous, to ride all the way up to Daylight's boyhood home in Eastern Oregon, stopping on the way at Dede's girlhood home in Siskiyou. And all the joys of anticipation were theirs a thousand times as they contemplated the detailed delights of ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... at one another, with a merry audacity that makes him smile! Then a strange voice, a burst of higher melody, a warble nearer, farther, fainter, a "sweet jargoning" among them all, that lifts his soul in unconscious praise. At first there is a glimmer of mystery, then he remembers,—it is his boyhood's home. There were just such songs in Aunt Marcia's time, when he slept up under the eaves of the steeply ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... such a weary abiding-place. Now, with the last whispers of that dear heart before him, the whole bitter sense of his loss came upon him, and he covered his face, sighing heavily. Back came the remembrance of the long and happy days of boyhood, with visions of the shining meadows where they strayed together; with visions of careless, joyful hours, when they sailed and fished and hunted the woods for purple grapes and glossy nuts; with visions of those calmer days when ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... classics, aristocracy, and cricket, all consummated at Oxford, he proceeded to go through the last performance of fashionable education, and give himself the final polish for St James's; he proceeded to make the tour of Europe. What induced him to recommence his boyhood, by returning to Oxford at the ripe age of twenty-five, is among the secrets of his career, as also is the occasion of his being expelled from the university; if that occasion is not to be found in some of the burlesques of religion which he had learned amongst the fashionable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... they say? These, this free-born nation's wives and mothers, Bowing, where you proudly stand, to pray! Can you coldly look upon their faces, Pale, sad faces, seamed with frequent tears; See their hands uplifted in their places— Hands that toiled for all your boyhood's years? ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... heredity, to which he owed his mental habit, the answer might be found in the abnormal character of his early education, his acquaintance with the world rather than with books, the extensive travels of his boyhood, his ardent pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and without regard to the emoluments and endowments of learning. He was trained in realities even more than in ideas; and hence he is original, forcible, clear, an enemy of all philosophic indefiniteness and obscurity; so that it may well be ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... term I always heard connected with her pretty name in my boyhood, when the old people, who had remembered her very long ago, mentioned her, as they used, very kindly, a term of endearment that had belonged to her, and in virtue of the childlike charm that was about ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... after minute passed, and he showed no signs of moving. Aynesworth found himself presently engaged in watching him. Thoughts must be passing through his brain. He wondered what they were. It was here that he had spent his boyhood; barely an hour ago the two men had stood before the picture of his father. It was here, if anywhere, that he might regain some part of his older and more natural self. Was it a struggle, he wondered, that was going on within the man? There were no signs of ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... battle-field wounded and exhausted, an officer of the brigade to which the writer belonged, rode up, passed me his canteen, and enquired if I knew him. A negative answer was given. "I am Tom Bunting," he replied. "You know me now, don't you? We used to play together in our boyhood days in Virginia; keep the canteen. I will let your people know about you." So saying he dashed away to his command; he belonged to a Massachusetts regiment. There was quite a large number of mulattoes who enlisted under Butler, at New Orleans, and served in white regiments; this ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... The official reception of the Turkish ambassador in 1721 was the subject chosen, and under the direction of Charles Parrocel became a superb work, full of court magnificence of the day and a valuable portrayal to us of the boyhood of the king. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... of grass and moss and daisies, which I had myself designed; the curtains of pale blue silk, that fell like a cataract over the windows; the old-fashioned bed, with the chintz furniture, on which I had slept from boyhood. "Now I shall sleep," I said to myself. "My ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... had not always worn a gold-embroidered coat, nor always sat so much at his ease as he did in Grandfather's chair. He was a poor man's son, and was born in the province of Maine, where in his boyhood he used to tend sheep upon the hills. Until he had grown to be a man, he did not even know how to read and write. Tired of tending sheep, he apprenticed himself to a ship-carpenter, and spent about four years ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... all the ways of poverty were clear to her. Poverty, to Ruth, was a word signifying a not-nice condition of existence. That was her total knowledge on the subject. She knew Martin was poor, and his condition she associated in her mind with the boyhood of Abraham Lincoln, of Mr. Butler, and of other men who had become successes. Also, while aware that poverty was anything but delectable, she had a comfortable middle-class feeling that poverty was salutary, that it was a sharp spur that urged on to ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... his boyhood enemy. This winter was the last that he spent at home. He rode the Limestone range that summer, and according to cowboys' gossip was fast developing all the qualities that pertained to the best ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... out with the most notable events of his boyhood days, among them his troubles with an old negro virago, wherein he gets his revenge by throwing a nest of lively hornets under her feet. Then come his flight and a trip, to St. Louis, hundreds of miles on foot, his ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... little else to tell of my father's boyhood, as most of his time was spent in the schoolroom. Outside the schoolroom he was conspicuous for high spirits in play, daring in mischief, and independence in everything. But a boy's playtime was so short in Yuchovitch, and his resources so limited, that even ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the "sounding cataract" and the "tall rock," this appetite for the deep and gloomy wood, gave its vogue in Wordsworth's boyhood to Macpherson's Ossian, a book which whether it be completely fraudulent or not, was of capital importance in the beginnings ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... deserts; in the glory of sunsets and the calm of stars. But it is in none of these that he will see deepest into the true Heart of Nature and understand her best. It is amid scenery which he has loved since boyhood, in the hearts of his own countrymen in their own country, that he will see deepest into Nature. And deepest of all will he see when from among his countrywomen he has united himself to the one of his own deliberate choice, and in this union realised in its fulness, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... from boyhood, Louis the trapper was already a tall, strong, handsome man, and Mary felt flattered by his attentions. But when, a month afterwards, he boldly offered her his hand and fortune (which latter consisted of a trapper's costume and a western ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... to spend Saturday and Sunday with their parents. This reduced the number to eighteen. Friday evening a number of the Crows appeared at the "Slaughterhouse," though there was to be a banquet at eight o'clock. With true boyhood appetite, they felt, that a bun in the hand is worth two in the future; and besides, what self-respecting boy would refuse to take care of two meals where he had been in the habit of only one? It would be flying ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... had many reminiscences in common, and these dated from the period of our boyhood upwards. One of these I must relate to you, since it forms a sort of prelude to the harmless experience already mentioned. On the occasion of a certain journey up the Rhine, which we had made together one summer, it happened that he and I independently conceived the very same plan ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... account of Dinah's presence at the farmhouse, Mr. Sherwood proposed to take her with them to Halifax as their hired nurse. He had a kindly feeling for the good, old woman, who was such a faithful and partial nurse to him in his boyhood, and he could not help seeing that she was less kindly treated than formerly, and to his surprise his mother consented to the plan. Dinah made no objection when the matter was laid before her, for like many colored women of her age she had an intense love for children. This love ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... born near Haverhill, Mass., in 1807, and died at Hampton Falls, N.H., in 1892. His boyhood was passed on a farm, and he never received a classical education. In 1829 he edited a newspaper in Boston. In the following year he removed to Hartford, Conn., to assume a similar position. In 1836 he edited an antislavery paper in ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; but such is the inherently rhythmical strain of the English language, that the bad writer—and must I take for example that admired friend of my boyhood, Captain Reid?—the inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his earlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as any one may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the production of bad blank verse. And here it may be pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose it might be ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... never crying that the grapes were sour; of a man uniformly cheerful and of good courage, living in that forgetfulness of self which is the truest antidote to despair. And yet there was not quite wanting the note of pain to jar the harmony and make it human. Richard Elton, his chum from boyhood, and vicar of Somerton, in Midlandshire, handed to the coroner a letter received from the deceased about ten days before his death, containing some passages which the coroner read aloud:—"Do you know anything of Schopenhauer? I mean anything beyond ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... not Fulvia, 'tis thou, Cleopatra, and thou alone. Many women have looked favourably upon me from my boyhood up, but to never a one have I known such desire as to thee, O thou Wonder of the World, like unto whom no woman ever was! Canst thou love me, Cleopatra, and to me be true, not for my place or power, not for that which I can ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... itself adorned with a white rosebud in the button-hole. Fawn-colored trousers strapped over narrow patent-leather boots, and a tall white hat, whose broad mourning-band was a perpetual memory of his mother, who had died in his boyhood, completed his festal transformation. Yet his erect carriage, high aquiline nose, and long gray drooping moustache lent a distinguishing grace to this survival of a bygone fashion, and over-rode any irreverent comment. Even ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... social, and that the mind and character should first be formed in the home. There the individuals who afterwards form society are dealt with in detail, and fashioned one by one. From the family they enter life, and advance from boyhood to citizenship. Thus the home may be regarded as the most influential school of civilisation. For, after all, civilisation mainly resolves itself into a question of individual training; and according as the respective members of society are well or ill-trained in youth, so will the community ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... still in the youthful whirl of the kind of world that he would like to create. He has not yet really settled what story he will write, but only what sort of story he will write. He tries to tell ten stories at once; he pours into the pot all the chaotic fancies and crude experiences of his boyhood; he sticks in irrelevant short stories shamelessly, as into a scrap-book; he adopts designs and abandons them, begins episodes and leaves them unfinished; but from the first page to the last there is a nameless and elemental ecstasy—that of the man who is doing the kind of ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... charging lions inspired me with unrest and longing—the longing to bid the farm farewell and start down the road for Africa. Africa! What a picture it conjured up in my fancy! Then, as even now, it symbolized a world of adventurous possibilities; and in my boyhood fancy, it lay away off there—somewhere—vaguely—beyond mountains and deserts and oceans, a vast, mysterious, unknown land, that swarmed with ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... pretty, adjoining bedrooms on the second floor, looking out on the French side. Marthe threw herself on her bed and fell asleep almost immediately, while her husband, with his elbows on the window-sill, sat gazing at the peaceful valley where the happiest days of his boyhood had been spent. ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... eighth year; his father, absorbed in official work, and not caring to leave the child to the management of servants, had placed him at that early age in a college directed by priests. Julien thus passed his second term of childhood, and his boyhood was spent behind these stern, gloomy walls, bending resignedly under a discipline which, though gentle, was narrow and suspicious, and allowed little scope for personal development. He obtained only ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... announcing the permanent character? Is not great sensibility born with its irritable fibres? Will not the deep retired character cling to its musings? And the unalterable being of intrepidity and fortitude, will he not, commanding even amidst his sports, lead on his equals? The boyhood of Cato was marked by the sternness of the man, observable in his speech, his countenance, and his puerile amusements; and BACON, DESCARTES, HOBBES, GRAY, and others, betrayed the same early appearance of their intellectual vigour and precocity ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... sport of boyhood that we never outgrow our love for. Some of the most enthusiastic fishermen are gray-haired men. We often hear about the boy with the bent pin and the piece of thread who catches more fish than the expert fisherman with modern, up-to-date tackle, but I doubt ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... boys with their long whiskers discusses him over th' sivin-up game, an' says wan iv thim: 'What ye think iv th' kid's speech?' ''Twas a good speech,' says th' other. 'It carries me back to me own boyhood days. I made a speech just like that durin' th' Mexican War. Oh, thim days, thim days! I lead th' ace, Mike.' An' afther awhile th' Boy Demostheens larns that while he's polishin' off his ipigrams, an' ol' guy, ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... now lying almost athwart stream, with her high, square stern gallery overhanging the sloping shore below the hotel, looking as if the old craft had taken the ground and fired the gun that had startled us as a signal of distress—so, at least, with the vivid imagination of boyhood, thought I! ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Then, "You will!" said he, not in blustering fury, but in that cool and smiling malevolence which had made him the terror of his associates from his boyhood days among the petty thieves and pickpockets of Grand Street. He laid his hand gently on her shoulder. "You hear me. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... said Agelastes, "more accessible to fear than they are to self-interest. They are indeed, from their boyhood, brought up to scorn those passions which influence ordinary minds, whether by means of avarice to impel, or of fear to hold back. So much is this the case, that what is enticing to other men, must, to interest ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... be he farmer or of other profession, finding himself prosperous in life, sets about the very sensible business of building a house for his own accommodation. Looking back, perhaps, to the days of his boyhood, in a severe climate, he remembers the not very highly-finished tenement of his father, and the wide, open fireplace which, with its well piled logs, was scarcely able to warm the large living-room, where the family were wont to huddle in ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... and, despite Herodotus, I believe that Iran borrowed her pathologic love from the peoples of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and not from the then insignificant Greeks. But whatever may be its origin, the corruption is now bred in the bone. It begins in boyhood and many Persians account for it by paternal severity. Youths arrived at puberty find none of the facilities with which Europe supplies fornication. Onanism[FN399] is to a certain extent discouraged by circumcision, and meddling with ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the Bible, and had received his mother's kiss and blessing, he laid himself down with a thankful heart, in the little garret-room, as in his childish years. The young artist's dreams that night, were a mingled crowd of fancies; the memories of his boyhood reviving in their old haunts, accompanied by more recent images brought from beyond the Ocean, and linked with half-formed plans and ideas for the future. Among these visions of the night, were two more distinct than the rest; one was a ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... "Poems by Thomas Little," has been the subject of much, and perhaps merited, condemnation. Of Moore's own feeling in reference to these compositions of his mere, and thoughtless, boyhood, it may be right to quote two of the dearest of his friends. Thus writes Lisle Bowles of Thomas Moore, in allusion to these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... have seen the day I would have liked it all the better. I read and wrote at the bitter account of the French retreat from Moscow, in 1812, till the little room and coal fire seemed snug by comparison. I felt cold in its rigour in my childhood and boyhood, but not since. In youth and advanced life we get less sensible to it, but I remember thinking it worse than hunger. Uninterrupted to-day, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... of the coupe. Harlequin, and Colombine, and Humpty-Dumpty; shapes which came out of nowhere and instantly vanished into nothing, for all the world like the absurd pantomimes of his boyhood days. He kept close to the curb, scrutinizing the numbers as he went along. Never had he seen such a fog. Two paces away from the curb a headlight became an effulgence. Indeed, there were a thousand lights jammed in the street, ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... very kind to try to excuse my fault," said he, "but the truth is I have always been a coward—from boyhood up." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... great deal of experience of women," pursued the general. "In my boyhood days I was a ladies' man. And of course since I've had money they've swarmed round me like bees ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... was born in the city of Strasburg, January 10, 1833. Of his boyhood we have no very particular account. At eleven years of age, however, he essayed his first artistic creation—a set' of lithographs, published in his native city. The following year found him in Paris, entered ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... impels our people from the moment they first enter the school-house until they are snatched from the scene of their over-wrought strugglings. At the school, the child is treated as a man. The fresh air, the blue sky, the bright and happy hilarity of boyhood are too often proscribed indulgences. And this is called, not murder, but education. Those who survive it, having been taught that an American youth should never be satisfied with the present, that excelsior should be the only motto, and that all pleasure should be denied, health sacrificed, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... Having, as he felt, thus equipped himself for the hero of an American "Good Society" novel, he went on board a "liner," where there would naturally be susceptible young ladies. One he thought he recognized as a girl with whom he used to play "forfeits" in the vulgar past of his boyhood. She sat at his table, accompanied by another lady whose husband seemed to be a confirmed dyspeptic. His remarks ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... from the rest and repaired to his quiet lodgings—rooms which he had occupied for many years in succession whenever he went that way on tour—and once safely bestowed in them he pulled out a certain old-fashioned trunk, which he had owned since boyhood and lugged about wherever he went in two continents, and from it, after much methodical unpacking, he disinterred a brown paper parcel, neatly tied up with green ribbon. From this parcel he drew a thin packet of typed matter and a couple of letters—the type ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... "If we only could," says he. "And then—— Well, there you are—saddled with the task of caring for another human being, of keeping him in good health, of molding his character, of planning and directing his whole career, from boyhood on." ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... from awe, And which could never from me trembling draw, And sight no knowledge giving me at this time, Through hidden virtue which from her came forth, Of ancient love felt now the potent worth. As soon as on my vision smote sublime The heavenly influence that, ere boyhood's days Had fled, had thrilled me and awoke my praise, Unto the leftward turned I, with that trust Wherewith a little child his mother seeks, When fear his steps controls, and ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... better and brighter days in the far-off time of his youth; but none with so much sunshine of prosperity in them that the chill, the depression, the narrowness of means, in his declining years, can have come upon him by surprise. His life has all been of a piece. His subdued and nerveless boyhood prefigured his abortive prime, which likewise contained within itself the prophecy and image of his lean and torpid age. He was perhaps a mechanic, who never came to be a master in his craft, or a petty tradesman, rubbing onward between passably to do and poverty. ...
— The Old Apple Dealer (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... home ran through his mind as he sat before the camp fire and tranquilly smoked his pipe. The drivers were busying themselves cleaning the harness, the mules were docilely browsing, the air was filled by a fragrant odor of coffee. His memories went back to his boyhood days. He recalled what the old nurse had told him about a twin brother. How strange it would be if he ever turned up. Such things were possible, of course, but hardly probable. No, the chances were that he was dead. If he had lived, how different everything might have been. ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... "I spent my boyhood in Paris; some of it. Her address, if you please." He produced a crisp note for a hundred francs. "Do you ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... his boyhood met Johnson and Gibbon. 'Johnson was in his rusty brown and his black worsteds, and Gibbon in a suit of flowered velvet, with a bag and sword. He condescended, once or twice in the course of the evening, to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... death and of resurrection to a new and higher life. But why circumcision should form the central feature of such a drama is a question to which as yet no certain or even very probable answer can be given. The bodily mutilations of various sorts, which in many savage tribes mark the transition from boyhood to manhood, remain one of the obscurest features in the life of uncultured races. That they are in most cases connected with the great change which takes place in the sexes at puberty seems fairly certain; but we are far from understanding ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and sixty-nine years without once calling in the family medical adviser. It is recorded, however, that he was born and that he died, and he therefore certainly passed through that stage of existence called Boyhood. And as he was nearly two hundred years old at the birth of his first-born, it is reasonable to suppose that the adolescent period was frightfully prolonged in his case. Just imagine a youngster of a hundred and ten or fifteen stealing apples ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... remembering with a pang that the place I had called home was mine no longer. Those among my friends who know the history of my boyhood understand to some extent my loathing for the cards and dice. It is perhaps unreasonable,—I might be the first to deem it so in any other man,—but when I count up the woe they brought my mother,—father and husband slaves to the same frenzy,—how ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... it sounded. "Know'st thou not me, who many a time and oft, Pour'd balsam in thy hurts when sorest wounded? Ah well thou knowest her, to whom for ever Thy heart in union pants to be allied! Have I not seen the tears—the wild endeavour That even in boyhood brought thee ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... the place was Caen, and his full name (his great- grandson and biographer vouches for it) was Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur. The boy was well enough brought up, but without more than the attention that his birth gave him the right to expect; he divided the years of his boyhood between Caen, where his father's town-house stood, and the College du Mont, where the Jesuits gave him his education. A letter dated 1785 and addressed to his children tells us all that we know of his school-days; though it is said, too, that he distinguished himself in mathematics. ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur |
