"Decrepitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... years crawled like snails. But the sum of them rose by leaps and bounds to an appalling total. Alice found two grey hairs in her red-gold locks. Will had to use glasses for reading fine print at night. From their point of view, decrepitude, senility, dotage stared them in the face, while the bright voyage of life which they were resolved to make only together, was threatened with shipwreck among the ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... Arsinoe to accept his escort; for the festival would be beginning soon after midnight, the streets would be full of rough and impudent people, and a bunch of feathers would be about as much use against the drunken slaves as her black scarecrow, who had been falling into decrepitude even before she had done the stupidest deed of her life and roused the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ecstasies that thrilled the soul of Grattan as he gave utterance to the spirit of expiring freedom in those orations that rank among the world's masterpieces? The snows of age melted and the decrepitude of years was flung aside, and his eyes gleamed with strange fires as he beheld sodden corruption struck dumb and hang its guilty head; when he saw the wavering drink fresh courage with each new outburst, and men ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... communed incessantly with her God, and that read His name in every trivial incident, in every stone and flower, in the sunbeams, the stars, and the whispering breeze. In that ancient town, crumbling into the final stages of decrepitude, she dwelt in heaven. To her, the rude adobe huts were marble castles; the shabby rawhide chairs and hard wooden beds were softest down; the coarse food was richer than a king's spiced viands; and over it all she cast a mantle of love that was rich enough, great enough, to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... is winter, now we know, Full surely, thou canst never fail? Forgive our weak untrustful woe, Which deemed thy glowing face grown pale. We know thee, mighty to prevail. Doubt and decrepitude depart, And youth ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... — N. age; oldness[obs3] &c. adj.; old age, advanced age, golden years; senility, senescence; years, anility[obs3], gray hairs, climacteric, grand climacteric, declining years, decrepitude, hoary age, caducity[obs3], superannuation; second childhood, second childishness; dotage; vale of years, decline of life, "sear and yellow leaf" [Macbeth]; threescore years and ten; green old age, ripe age; longevity; time of life. seniority, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... but your nest is shattered by the lightning! (He takes up his cloak and liberty cap.) In passing from your threshold, I leave the curse, due to decrepitude, behind me. I devote you and your son ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... days when the later Irish Party had entered upon its decrepitude some of its leaders sought to maintain a sorry unity by shouting incessantly from the house-tops, as if it were some sacred formula which none but the unholy or those predestined to political damnation dare ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Draper's Dogma of Youth and Decrepitude of Nations. Statesmen Prophets. General Claim for All Genius. Instances of Secular Prediction: Cayotte's of the French Revolution. The Oracles of Apollo. Vettius Valens' Twelve Vultures. Spencer's of the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Church is such that it can be dragged into a professorial squabble, and made the tool of a faction in bringing about a most disastrous condemnation of a proved truth, how did the Church at that time differ from any human organization sunk into decrepitude, managed nominally by simpletons, but really by schemers? If that argument be true, the condition of the Church was even worse than its enemies have declared it; and amid the jeers of an unfeeling world the apologists sought ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... observed, that no man, however weakened by long life, is so conscious of his own decrepitude, as not to imagine that he may yet hold his station in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Habitual austerity of demeanor Ostentation and lavish expenditure A person of exquisite tact Intolerant of bumptiousness The obvious danger of dallying This was grossly overstated A mass of calumny and exaggeration Inimical to religion Fraught with peril I venture to ask Attributed to mental decrepitude A strange phenomena It argues a blind faith Insatiable whirl of excitement A substratum of truth Under some conceivable circumstances Bubbling over with infectious joy Frigid dignity and arrogant reserve A profound contempt The fine art of hospitality Grim morsels of philosophy A tinge ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... back fifteen years afterward, poorer than when he went away, broken in health, old to the point of decrepitude, bedraggled, unkempt and prideless. And once more Thomas Bingle took him in and provided the prospective death-bed for him. They made the old derelict as comfortable as it was in their power to do, and sacrificed not a little in order that he might have ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... and charity. Certainly my father did not like to die, though he now wished to do so. My mother, later, often spoke, in consolation for us and for herself, of his dread of helpless old age; and she tried to be glad that his desire to disappear before decrepitude had been fulfilled. But such wise wishes are not carried out as we might choose. The sudden transformation which took place in my father after his coming to America was like an instant's change in the atmosphere from sunshine ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... period Nature, instead of being darkly, deeply, beautifully green, has rather the shade of a dingy, dirty, melancholy gray. Snow covers the ground—not by any means the glistening white robe of Winter—but a rugged substitute, damp, and discolored. It is snow, but snow far gone into decay and decrepitude— snow that seems ashamed of itself for lingering so long after wearing out its welcome, and presenting itself in so revolting a dress—snow, in fact, which is like a man sinking into irremediable ruin and changing ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... almost unique for a certain scenic squalor and gypsy luxury of color: sag-roofed barns and stables, and weak-backed, sunken-chested workshops of every sort lounge along in tumble-down succession, and lean up against the cliff in every imaginable posture of worthlessness and decrepitude; light wooden galleries cross to them from the second stories of the houses which back upon the alley; and over these galleries flutters, from a labyrinth of clothes-lines, a variety of bright-colored garments of all ages, sexes, and conditions; while the footway underneath ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... gave way under the strain. William's handkerchiefs, being regularly used to perform the functions of blotting paper among other duties not generally entrusted to handkerchiefs, were always in the last stages of decrepitude. ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... but surprised perhaps into sudden passions of love, and still more surprised perhaps by the joys of fatherhood and motherhood; with children of all ages growing up, pretty and engaging and dirty and amusing and naughty, fading one by one into dull and sober age, and into decrepitude, and the churchyard at ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... From October, 1789, to September, 1791, this Assembly was in session in Paris, endeavoring to bring order out of chaos and to fashion a new France out of the old that was dying of exhaustion and decrepitude. Enormous was the task, but even greater were the achievements. Although the work of the Assembly during the period was influenced in no slight degree by the Parisian populace, nevertheless it was attended by comparative peace ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Rome stand thus; there is some hope of the elections taking place, but it is an uncertain one. There is some latent idea of a dictatorship,[597] but neither is that confirmed. There is profound calm in the forum, but it is rather the calm of decrepitude than content. The opinions I express in the senate are of a kind to win the assent of others rather ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... beauty, when harmonious contour and colouring animated the face, and it was enthroned at its full height on a kind of esplanade paved with long slabs of stone. But was it then more sovereign than it is to-night in its last decrepitude? Almost buried beneath the sand of the Libyan desert, which now quite hides its base, it rises at this hour like a phantom which nothing ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... and green jerseys, with knitted sashes about their waists, and red and blue and green tuques on their heads. Drunken rows were their delight, and fights so fierce that many a man came out battered and bruised to death or to life-long decrepitude. They were sitting on the benches that ran round the room, or lounging against the bar singing, talking, blaspheming. At the sight of Macdonald Dubh and his men there fell a dead silence, and then growls of ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... destroyed, it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be largely, though incompletely, recorded. Nor have any signs of halting or of decrepitude manifested themselves in our own times. As in Dr. Wallis's days, so in these, "our business is, precluding theology and state affairs, to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries." But ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,—which are not always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April, or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to decrepitude; with a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particularly awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward agencies; ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... into an angry inward argument against his suggestion of the savings bank. It was an argument he had often rehearsed, often declaimed, and at bottom it all came to this—without that box under his bed, his life would have sunk to dulness and decrepitude; he would have been merely a pitiful and lonely old man. He had neither wife nor children, all for the hoard's sake; but while the hoard was there, to be handled any hour, he regretted nothing. Besides, there was the peasant's rooted distrust of offices, and paper ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pain shot through his anatomy, the bundle stirred, and instantly resolved itself into the quaintest figure of a little, old, bowed Indian woman that it is possible to picture. But, notwithstanding her extreme age and apparent decrepitude, the extraordinary old creature displayed marvellous activity. In an instant she was on her feet and beside the pallet, peering eagerly and anxiously into Harry's wide-open eyes. The result of her inspection appeared to be satisfactory, for ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... knowledge is not the tree of life: it is, in every case, the tree of death; of decrepitude, madness, misery. He prefers the voice of the tempter—"Thou shalt not surely die." Nay, he will say at last,—"Better be as gods awhile, and die: than be the crawling, insufficient ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... own state policy, but likewise to one possessing in itself a far more profound vitality than the alien creed, which although omnipotent as an art-influence, had never found deep root in the intellectual soil of Japan. Buddhism was already in decrepitude, though transplanted from China scarcely more than thirteen centuries before; while Shinto, though doubtless older by many a thousand years, seems rather to have gained than to have lost force through all ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... yard, and separated from it by a fence, was the barn yard, a spacious quadrangle flanked on three sides by barns, stables, and sheds, which were large and finely planned, but which now shared the general appearance of decrepitude. The fence, which separated one yard from the other, was broken down, so that the barn yard dwellers, calves, pigs, and poultry, wandered at will in search of amusement or fodder to the very door of the kitchen, and so ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... thought, kneeling so humbly—of the boys dancing before the altar, fresh and young? Was he thinking of their white souls darkening with the sins of the world, or of the troubles, the disillusionments of life, and the decrepitude? Or was it of himself—did he think of his own youth, so long past, so hopelessly gone, or did he think that he was old and worn, and of the dark journey before him, and of the light that seemed so distant? Did he regret his beautiful Seville with the blue ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... in Jersey City. His office (23 Nassau street) swarmed with applicants for aid, and he seemed now to have quite lost the power of refusing. In no other respects, bodily or mental, did he exhibit signs of decrepitude. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... careless hand of a master who is satisfied if they but sign his decrees, with the i's properly dotted, and the t's unexceptionably crossed. They are the crumply officials who melted into defencelessness and moral decrepitude after Frederick the Great, and again at the glance of Napoleon, and who owe the little stiffness they have to the fact that Bismarck lived. It is one of the things a full-blooded man is least able to bear in Germany, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... him. Indeed, in her tenderness and his real love for her he won back all his youth again; and he found it of a truer and sweeter quality than he had known even when his years were few, while the gay old-bachelor life he had long led seemed to him a period of miserable loneliness and decrepitude. Mirrored in her fond eyes, he saw himself alert and handsome; and, since for the time being they were to each other all the world, we may be sure there was nothing in the world then to vex or shame Tonelli. The promises of the future, too, seemed ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... Tree, &c. (Vol. iii., p. 203.).—The allusions in Hall's poem, stanzas iii. & v., refer to the fine allegorical description of human decrepitude in Ecclesiastes, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... its scaly bark holding the snow. Against evergreens it shows its ruggedness specially well. It presents forms to attract the artist. Even when gnarly and broken, it does not convey an impression of decrepitude and decay but rather of a hardy old character bearing his burdens. In every winter landscape I look instinctively ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... himself? What was there in him that any girl could find even remotely attractive—his middle-aged habits, his decorous and conventional mind, his clumsy dress, his grizzled hair? He felt of himself that he was ravaged with age and decrepitude, and yet in his folly he had suggested this visit, and he had thrown the girl he loved out of her lonely life, craving for sympathy and interest, into a set of young men all apt for passion and emotion. The thought of Guthrie with ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... therefore well imagine that the air is perfectly good there; the blood is pure; the people are healthy; subject to few diseases in the vigour of life, and without decrepitude in old age, which they carry to a far greater length than in France. People live to a long and agreeable old age in Louisiana, if they are but sober ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... hypothecation etc. The longer the time between the making of the promise and the period fixed for its fulfillment, the less certain is the latter, where the security is simply the person of the debtor. It is chiefly in very uncivilized nations and also in nations in their decrepitude, and during periods of anarchy, and in despotisms, that personal security stands higher than any other. The same is true, though for other reasons, in very energetic civilized nations, where the people put ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... foes,—then life becomes a miserable thing for them. But that is not for long. Fate meets them in the forest trails or the flowing water-paths; and they have grown too dull to see, too heavy to flee, too indifferent to contend. So they are spared the anguish of slow, uncomprehending decrepitude. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... before his eyes; yet, also, that he was not come to the foolish caution of the wise, whom failure leads to doubt their own powers—as if we were not meant to fail in our idols forever! Being, then, not come to this spiritual decrepitude, fitted still to exercise a blessed contempt for the Wisdom of the Ages, it is plain that he could as yet see an idol go to bits without dismay, conscious only of the need for a new and ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... never stationary—they must necessarily expand or shrink, according to their vitality or decrepitude. Japan now is culminating; and by the fatal law in question it is impossible that her statesmen should not long since have entered, with extraordinary foresight, upon a vast policy of conquest—the game in which the first moves were her ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... fifth century of the Christian era China had fallen into a state of decrepitude. The second dynasty of the Tsins was near its end. For a century and a half it had held the imperial power, but now it had fallen a prey to luxury, one of its latest emperors dying from prolonged drunkenness, another being smothered in bed by his wife, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... my countryman Bergh would luxuriate in this scene!" I said as we stood looking upon the various dumb exhibitions of so many phases of sickness, of decrepitude and of mishap—quaint, grotesque, yet pathetic withal—in the precincts of the Jain hospital. Here were quadrupeds and bipeds, feathered creatures and hairy creatures, large animals and small, shy and tame, friendly and predatory—horses, horned cattle, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... and soprani. Baffo walks beside us in hypocritical composure of bag-wig and senatorial dignity, whispering unmentionable sonnets in his dialect of Xe and Ga. Somehow or another that last dotage of S. Mark's decrepitude is more recoverable by our fancy than the heroism of Pisani ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... undertow of death. There was no evidence in his appearance of being a "fence." He looked rather an aged Hebrew who simply wished to go his way. The white semi-circle of whisker under his chin, the trembling hands, the bald head, like a globular map with the veins as rivers, all attested extreme decrepitude. He was dressed in a light suit of fluttering linen that blew about him as if his legs were topmasts and he was a ship running in close-reefed on a stormy coast. He has lived in this city for many years, and has been twice married. The second wife and he did not get ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. He seems to have made them only in order that they may reproduce their species in an ignoble manner and then die like ephemeral insects. I said reproduce their species in an ignoble manner and I adhere ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... with the shabby green baize cloth, which stood in the centre of the room. There were a variety of uncomfortable chairs, an ink-splashed drugget, and red walls covered with pictures which had been banished from other rooms as they acquired the requisite stage of decrepitude and grime. ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... From the methods she employed to effect this change, it may be suspected that the remedy was equivalent to the Hanemannic maxim: "Similia similbus curantur," a strange application of a curative agent in a case of moral decrepitude, however valuable and effective it ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... unconscious of my presence. Like the one I had at first seen in the hold, they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest. Around them, on every part of the deck, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... as our first bishop. He is now in his sixty-eighth year, having been born in Durham in 1717. He lived to the age of nearly eighty- eight, and one who remembered him In his latest years says: "He rises to my mind the very ideal of age and decrepitude—a small, emaciated old man, very lame, his ashen and withered features surmounted sometimes by a cap, and sometimes by a small wig— always quiet and gentle in his manner." Such a condition as is ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... past a beginning, is as much a matter of certainty as that they will at some future time cease to be. Stars, like organic beings, have their birth, grow and arrive at maturity, then decline into a state of decrepitude, and finally die out. The duration of the life of a star, which may be reckoned by millions of years, depends upon the length of time during which it can maintain a temperature that renders it capable of emitting light. By the constant radiation ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... do the majority rally round? Truths so stricken in years that they are sinking into decrepitude. When a truth is so old as that, gentlemen, it's in a fair way to become a ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... continually thrown off in the waste-weir of our great commercial and manufacturing cities and towns, whose population, without the infusion—and that continually—of the strong, substantial, and vigorous life blood of the country, would soon dwindle into insignificance and decrepitude. Why then should not this first, primitive, health-enjoying and life-sustaining class of our people be equally accommodated in all that gives to social and substantial life, its due development? It is absurd to deny them by others, or that they deny themselves, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... his library, on the second floor of his residence, a pleasant old-fashioned brick house at the corner of York and Yarmouth Streets—a slender man, not very tall, I judged (though I did not see him standing), not very strong at the moment, but with nothing of the decrepitude of old age about him, for all his seventy-seven years. Upon the contrary he was, in appearance and manner, delightfully alert, with the sort of alertness which lends to some men and women, regardless of their years, a suggestion of perpetual youthfulness. Such ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... was something indescribably vulgar and common. Looking at certain details of that countenance you would have thought him a debauched husbandman, or a miserly peddler; and yet, above these vague resemblances and the decrepitude of a dying old man, the king, the man of power, rose supreme. His eyes, of a light yellow, seemed at first sight extinct; but a spark of courage and of anger lurked there, and at the slightest touch ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... inconstancy of man in his [various] ages: green in his childhood; fiery in the age of his virility; white in old age; and bald in his decrepitude." But his greatest change is in his customs, for he is a continual Proteus, and an inconstant Vertumnus. [94] Thus does ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendor of the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation, and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the limb affected was much shrunk and contracted, my general health, which was of more importance, was much strengthened by being frequently in the open air, and, in a word, I, who in a city had probably been condemned to hopeless and helpless decrepitude, was now a healthy, high-spirited, and, my lameness apart, a sturdy ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Owen had a weakness unworthy one of the shining lights of the bench, it lay in thinking that his fifty years were only thirty, and that he was yet a young man. Other men than the Judge have labored under the same delusion, and found sick rooms and decrepitude necessary to disabuse them. Probably nothing in his daughter's power to utter would have made him so angry. He had only ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... States were slaveholders themselves and northern soldiers did not understand that they were fighting to free Negroes. The condition in which they were on arriving, moreover, was a new problem for the army. Some came naked, some in decrepitude, some afflicted with disease, and some wounded in their efforts to escape.[9] There were "women in travail, the helplessness of childhood and of old age, the horrors of sickness and of frequent deaths."[10] In their crude state ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... consents to Circe's blandishments, till he by chance is witness to her transactions with her beasts. Disgusted with her treachery and cruelty, he tries to escape from her, but is taken and brought back, when with reproaches she banishes him, sentencing him to pass a thousand years in decrepitude and pain. He returns to the sea, and there finds the body of Scylla, whom the goddess has not transformed but drowned. Glaucus learns that his destiny is that, if he passes his thousand years in collecting all the bodies of drowned lovers, a youth beloved of the gods will ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... suffered myself to stumble on the night before, there could, of course, not be the faintest doubt. And yet, directly I saw him, I recognised that some astonishing alteration had taken place in his appearance. To begin with, he seemed younger,—the decrepitude of age had given place to something very like the fire of youth. His features had undergone some subtle change. His nose, for instance, was not by any means so grotesque; its beak-like quality was less conspicuous. The most part of his wrinkles ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... doing it still, or at least that part of it which, at the age of one hundred years, fittingly remained for him to do. He was tapering off, building the crown of his good stack. When Death, the great Nimrod, should come to Old Dalton, he would not find him ready caught in the trap of decrepitude. He would find him with his boots on, up and about—or, if in bed, not there except as in the regular rest intervals ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... dissatisfaction. It may there be confined to a pain he would be free from, or a pleasure he dreams of. Always the future charms him, and as advancing years increase the number of his disappointments and bring with them the pains of decrepitude, he also recurs to the past, when youth was his, and the world was bright and gay. Thus it comes that most nations speak of some earlier period of their history as one characterized by purer public virtues than the present, one when the fires ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... remote antiquity. While the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome have largely perished in the convulsions that followed the breaking up of the Roman empire in Europe, when the kingdom of China fell into disorder and decrepitude this one great teacher stepped forward to save the precious record of historic fact, philosophical thought, and of legislation as well as poetry, from being swept away by the deluge of revolution. Confucius showed his wisdom by the high value he set upon the poetry of his native ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... temporarily change the position of those who had brought about the Revolution. I rendered an account of this interview with Barras to General Bonaparte the first time I had an opportunity of conversing with him after your return from Egypt. I sounded him; and I was perfectly convinced that in the state of decrepitude into which the Directory had fallen he was just the man we wanted. I therefore adopted such measures with the police as tended to promote his elevation to the First Magistracy. He soon showed himself ungrateful, and instead of giving me all his confidence he tried to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... see how many men and women he can find in middle life, or later, who are thoroughly well. Occasionally only do we meet with an example of vigorous health continued to old age; hourly do we meet with examples of acute disorder, chronic ailment, general debility, premature decrepitude. Scarcely is there one to whom you put the question, who has not, in the course of his life, brought upon himself illness from which a little knowledge would have saved him. Here is a case of heart disease consequent ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... enervated. During the term of nearly fifty years that I lived with him, I received, according to Indian customs, all the kindness and attention that was my due as his wife.—Although war was his trade from his youth till old age and decrepitude stopt his career, he uniformly treated me with tenderness, and never offered ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... day. As I entered the silent building, I was seized with a fond, childish uneasiness, such as may come upon a mother when she leaves her babe a moment. The eternal security which nothing had ever disturbed within the bounds of the old sacred walls, the decrepitude of the servants, the way in which the doors always stood open, so that beggars would sometimes enter the drawing-room without meeting any one and without giving umbrage—the whole atmosphere of peace and trust and isolation—formed a strange contrast to the thoughts of strife, and the cares with ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... fund was formed, in the Episcopal Church, to pay aged ministers pensions, so they would never be destitute. This brought the greatest happiness to many of them who were approaching decrepitude. Letters came in from ministers who had worried in silence for years, with no one to trust but the Deity, whose plans might be strange. They described how they had wept with relief, when this fund ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... swept before the wild disorder of the French. Men began to believe that the art of war had been hitherto unknown, and that the enemy had at length mastered the exclusive secret. Monarchy came to be regarded as only another name for weakness; and civilized order for national decrepitude. A kind of superstition stole over the minds of men; the signs of European overthrow were discovered in every change; calculations were calmly raised on the chances of existence to the most powerful dynasties; the age of crowns was in the move, the age of republics was in the ascendant; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... upon it by its Creator, as the letters were on the tables of the law, and was it thus left to bear its eternal testimony to His beneficence among these clouds of Heaven? Or is it the descendant of a long race of mountains, existing under appointed laws of birth and endurance, death and decrepitude? There can be no doubt as to the answer. The rock itself answers audibly by the murmur of some falling stone or rending pinnacle. It is not as it was once. Those waste leagues around its feet are loaded with the wrecks of what it was. On these perhaps, of all mountains, the characters of decay ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... began to comprehend what the owner meant by "keeping it up." With Gail Hamilton, I had supposed the entire land of this earth to be pretty much the same age until I adopted the "abandoned." This I found was fairly senile in its worthless decrepitude. ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... repeated and almost surpassed, on this dreadful event, which, notwithstanding all the subsequent disorders and the lapse of time, is still fresh in the recollection of its inhabitants and of Germany. Neither age, beauty nor innocence, neither infancy nor decrepitude, found refuge or compassion from the fury of the licentious soldiery. No retreat was sufficiently secure to escape their rapacity and vengeance; no sanctuary sufficiently sacred to repress their lust and cruelty. Infants were murdered before the eyes of their parents, daughters and wives violated ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... the son, "let me interpret it then into prose. Monarchy as an institution is dying, and it can either die in foolish decrepitude, or it can die mightily, merging itself in democracy for a final blow against bureaucratic government. All that is written in my book. That is why I am now able to express myself so well: these periods are largely a matter of quotation. The right role for monarchy to-day is, believe me, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... that passes daily beneath my window, with its ever-shifting pictures of sorrow, of decrepitude ill-matched with want, new motherhood, and mendicancy, with uplifted eye and palm—to look down upon all this with only a passing sigh, as my worthy but material fat landlady does, would imply a spiritual blindness ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... wash away all your complaints; the sea air and such an oriental season must cure every thing but positive decay and decrepitude. On me they have no more effect than they would have on an Egyptian queen who has been embowelled and reserved in her sycamore etui ever since dying was first invented, and people notwithstanding liked to ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... or permanently derange them. Madness, or idiotcy, may utterly extinguish the most excellent and delicate of these powers. In old age the mind gradually withers; and as it grew and strengthened with the body, so does it with the body sink into decrepitude." ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... up from her stool, and—when or how it came about, Curdie could not tell—the same instant she stood before him a tall, strong woman—plainly very old, but as grand as she was old, and only rather severe-looking. Every trace of the decrepitude and witheredness she showed as she hovered like a film about her wheel, had vanished. Her hair was very white, but it hung about her head in great plenty, and shone like silver in the moonlight. Straight as a pillar she stood before the astonished boy, and the wounded bird had now spread out ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... small? For this difficulty Carlino promptly found a remedy. The star will be there. It may be minute, lost in an immense profundity, but it will be there. The girl does not see it, but the priest sees it with the long-sightedness of decrepitude. Later, through faith, the girl discerns ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... distingue de loin a leur teinte grise et blanchatre melee de sillons d'un rouge peu fonce. A l'est les montagnes calcaires laissent le granit a decouvert, et lui demeurent comme adossees. Celles qui leur succedent offrent des marques, effrayantes de decrepitude; leurs cretes sont demantelees, et leurs flancs sont lesardes et herisses de rochers suspendus. Le fond de la vallee semble enseveli sous les debris de cette montagne a demi ecroulees. On trouve, parmi les ruines, des blocs de plusieurs milliers de pieds cubes. ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... sorrow, all things wear in him An aspect of Eternity: his thoughts, His feelings, passions, good or evil, all Have nothing of old age;[403] and his bold brow 20 Bears but the scars of mind, the thoughts of years, Not their decrepitude: and he of late Has been more agitated than his wont. Would he were come! for I alone have ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the teaching of the seventeenth-century moralists who had preceded him, and also had taught us that we should mistrust our passions and disdain our enthusiasms. To see how completely Vauvenargues rejected the Christian doctrine of the utter decrepitude and hopeless inherent badness of the human mind, we have but to gather some of his sparse thoughts together. He says, in defiance of Pascal and the Jansenists, "Mankind is the only source of our happiness, outside that there is nothing." Again, "As it is the ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... one by death. For long or short is not in things that are no more. Aristotle saith, there are certaine little beasts alongst the river Hyspanis, that live but one day; she which dies at 8 o'clocke in the morning, dies in her youth, and she that dies at 5 in the afternoon, dies in her decrepitude, who of us doth not laugh, when we shall see this short moment of continuance to be had in consideration of good or ill fortune? The most and the least is ours, if we compare it with eternitie, or equall it to the lasting of mountains, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Mr. S., a very handsome old gentleman, of venerable and powerful appearance. He had snowy hair and a long white beard, but from under shaggy eyebrows there blazed out great black eyes which warned the beholder that the snow was an ornament and not a sign of decrepitude. The eve of my baptism at length drew near; it was fixed for October 12, almost exactly three weeks after my tenth birthday. I was dressed in old clothes, and a suit of smarter things was packed up in a carpet- ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Some there are who invest them with almost supernaturally noble qualities, while they attribute every conceivable enormity to their enemies the Turks. Each of these views is incorrect. The Osmanlis, whether it be from a consciousness of their own decrepitude, or some other cause, appear to have lost the spirit of cruelty which characterised their more successful days; and it is a matter of fact that the atrocities committed by their Christian antagonists in the Greek War of Independence, ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... ages of previous courage, continence, and religion—it was the fullness of passion in the life of a Britomart. But the mid-age and old age of nations is not like the mid-age or old age of noble women. National decrepitude must be criminal. National death can only be by disease, and yet it is almost impossible, out of the history of the art of nations, to elicit the true conditions relating to its decline in any demonstrable manner. The history of Italian art is that of a struggle between superstition ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... It also explains the number of degenerate works, the gradual degradation of style, the destruction of all sense of expression, the neglect of dramatic properties, the contempt for the true, the grand, and the beautiful, and the cynicism and decrepitude ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... herself in contrast to such blue eyes and pink skins and such yellow hair: that Nubians were much more appropriate and that nothing could be more trying than Saxons, even for a bride. She told me I mustn't make fun of her old age and decrepitude. She said that the Saxons had such cheerful, bright faces and looked such infantile giants that she really must have them. So I let her have her way. The Nubians stand the heat better and the Saxons were ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... inherit the people, as if they were flocks and herds. Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals. It signifies not what their mental or moral characters are. Monarchical government appears under all the various characters of childhood, decrepitude, dotage; a thing at nurse, in leading-strings, or in crutches. In short, we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government than hereditary succession. By continuing this absurdity, man is perpetually in contradiction with himself; he may accept for a king, or ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... begotten upon (his two wives) Devayani and Sarmishtha. And of Devayani were born Yadu and Turvasu, and of Sarmishtha were born Drahyu, Anu, and Puru. And, O king, having virtuously ruled his subjects for a long time, Yayati was attacked with a hideous decrepitude destroying his personal beauty. And attacked by decrepitude, the monarch then spoke, O Bharata, unto his sons Yadu and Puru and Turvasu and Drahyu and Anu these words, 'Ye dear sons, I wish to be a young man and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... activity enough, to compel a nobler animal than himself to carry him to the place where he is to perpetrate his wickedness; while I, had I the weakness to wish to put his wretched victim on his guard, and to save the helpless family, would see my good intentions frustrated by the decrepitude which chains me to the spot.—Why should I wish it were otherwise? What have my screech-owl voice, my hideous form, and my mis-shapen features, to do with the fairer workmanship of nature? Do not ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... it was carried by a majority of forty-two to eleven. In all these votes his majesty concurred, although during the noble earl's life he had opposed an application made to him to settle the pension he enjoyed in reversion to his second son, William Pitt, until, at least, decrepitude or death had put an end to him "as a trumpet of sedition." His majesty, however, could not carry his resentment beyond the grave, and perhaps pleased with the last noble sounds of his trumpet, he gave his warm assent to the honours and rewards which parliament ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... building I could never look at without the greatest interest. I knew so many of the old inmates, and so many pleasant hours had been passed there. What a blessing it has proved to thousands of England's brave tars, who would otherwise in their decrepitude have been cast helpless on the cold world! Above the hospital is another magnificent institution connected with it, I believe, where the sons of naval officers, as well as seamen, receive a first-rate nautical education. I ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... and without a shock, that which should decline declines, and what should grow old grows old; wrinkles appear upon things condemned, on castes, on codes, on institutions, and on religions. This work of decrepitude is, in some sort, self-acting. A fruitful decrepitude, under which germinates the new life. Little by little the ruin progresses; deep crevices, which are not visible, ramify in the darkness, and internally ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Marshal d'Harcourt—This museum contains a chronology of monuments, both antique and modern, from 2500 years before our era down to the present time, beginning with those of ancient Greece, and following all the gradations of the art from its cradle to its decrepitude—Sepulchre of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... into the secret of expression, and of nature's sympathy with human moods. This poor, worn, sad, old face, in which beauty and hope shone once, and where resignation and memory now dwell; this trembling figure, to whose decrepitude the bending staff confesses as she totters down the hill; the gathering gloom of the sky, in which one ray of promise for a bright to-morrow shines from the setting sun; the mute witnessing of the trees upon the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... it really necessary to reach the point of decrepitude, in order to profit by an experience, actually useless at that time, as is ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... diplomatic intercourse with Turkey, and sought a pretext for war. In 1844 the Czar visited England, doubtless with the purpose of winning over Lord Aberdeen, then foreign secretary, and the Duke of Wellington, on the ground that Turkey was in a state of hopeless decrepitude, and must ultimately fall into his hands. In this event he was willing that England, as a reward for her neutrality, should ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... the one was a people which, by the help of the surrounding ocean and its own virtues, had preserved to itself through ages its liberty, pure and inviolated by a foreign invader; the other a high-minded nation, which a tyrant, presuming on its decrepitude, had, through the real decrepitude of its Government, perfidiously enslaved. What could be more delightful than to think of an intercourse beginning in this manner? On the part of the Spaniards their love towards us ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... yoke-fellows, but that, like two ill-tempered hounds, coupled by a tyrannical sportsman, they should drag on their indissoluble fetter, snarling and growling, and pulling in different directions? What can be expected for their wretched offspring, but sickness and suffering, premature decrepitude, and untimely death? In this, as in every other institution of civilised society, avarice, luxury, and disease constitute the TRIANGULAR HARMONY of the life of man. Avarice conducts him to the abyss of toil and crime: luxury seizes on his ill-gotten spoil; and, while he ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... hand that trembled when it rested, like that of an aged man grasping a staff. I feared for a moment he was acting, he spoke so like himself, miserable though he appeared: but it was his well-known native old style in a state of decrepitude. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of pianodum, sans teeth, sans wire, sans everything—he saw the dark-eyed girl and reined his horse. As he did so, she seated herself upon the hair-cloth stool, pressed a white finger to a discolored key and smiled at the not unexpected result—the squeak of decrepitude. While her hand still rested on the board and her features shone strongly in relief against the fire like a cameo profile set in bloodstone, a figure approached, and, leaning gracefully upon the palsied instrument, bent over her with ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... state line, however, they would be as safe as in Europe, for the present Union of the states was not yet formed, and the loose and nerveless bond of the old Federation, then in its last stage of decrepitude, left the states practically foreign countries to each other. His idea was then to get the family over into New York without delay, with such remnants of the farm stock as could be got together, and leaving them for the winter at New Lebanon, just the other side the border, to go on ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... happy land in the remote north where the inhabitants enjoy a natural pefection attended with complete happiness obtained without exertion. There is there no vicissitude, nor decrepitude, nor death, nor fear: no distinction of virtue and vice, none of the inequalities denoted by the words best, worst, and intermediate, nor any change resulting from the succession of the four Yugas." See MUIR'S Sanskrit Texts, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... order to the servant and shortly a vehicle stands at the door. It is a lumbering old open carriage that has evidently been grand in its day—with two white horses that match it in age and decrepitude. In the best of spirits we drive off. The Baron talks Spanish with the driver and answers all ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... and then remained at that period however long they might live; Only when they died did their accumulated seasons come upon them; the girl turning pale, and wringing her pretty hands in sympathetic concern when I told her there was a land where decrepitude was not so happily postponed. The Martians, she said, arranged their calendar by the varying colours of the seasons, and loved blue as an antidote to the generally red and rusty character of ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... it limited itself, as in Spain, to ensuring that no infection of heresy or freethought should reach any part of its dominions. All this had a deadening effect; and the surprising thing is, not that the Spanish Empire should have fallen into an early decrepitude, but that it should have shown such comparative vigour, tenacity, and power of expansion as it actually exhibited. Not until the nineteenth century did the vast natural resources of these regions begin to undergo any rapid ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... God. If, then, your colony had cause to protest against the infliction of this evil in a limited degree, how much stronger must be your opposition to a system which will bring into your streets, your houses, your hospitals and prisons, the crime, insanity, decrepitude, and pauperism ever consequent on transportation, aggravated by transmission through a country in moral ruin. Were we to appeal to a principle of selfishness in addressing our countrymen, we might remind you that the reputation of this entire hemisphere is compromised ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... well able to know the physical comforts of food and rest, and attendance; he was in his second childhood, in his ninetieth year, and was unconscious of the debt he owed her; even, with a curious caprice of decrepitude, he disliked her, and noticed nothing, except the raven when it shrieked its "Tue! Tue! Tue!" But to Cigarette he was as sacred as a god; had he not fought beneath the glance, and gazed upon the face of the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... hundred-years' fast; and he sat down with the others at the common table to dine. But he had no sooner tasted the first spoonful of soup than his whole frame underwent a change. From a ruddy youth he became an old man in the last stage of decrepitude. His comrades scarce had time to hurry him upon a bed ere he breathed his last. Some pretty verses, attributed to Alaric A. Watts, commemorate a similar incident, said to have happened to two sisters who were nuns at Beverley Minister. They disappeared one evening after vespers. After ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... child is the point upon which the whole force of it is directed to play.—Such a thing would batter the whole universe about our ears, brother Shandy, said my uncle Toby—if it was so-Unhappy Tristram! child of wrath! child of decrepitude! interruption! mistake! and discontent! What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world—what evils in thy passage ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... the use of the word "grandfather," given you an idea of decrepitude and old age, in the case of Bobby's grandfather, I wish at ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... skull; he allowed his beard to grow, and cut it off with scissors when its length annoyed him; he was bent like a field-laborer, and the condition of his clothes had reached a degree of wretchedness which his decrepitude now rendered hideous. Thought still animated that noble face, whose features were scarcely discernible under its wrinkles; but the fixity of the eyes, a certain desperation of manner, a restless uneasiness, were all diagnostics ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... ground where they stand was grassy and fertile. These trees, if standing at that time, must assuredly have been in their infancy. The encroachment of the sea and subsequent change of conditions account well enough for the present decrepitude, but their general similarity in size and apparent age point rather to introduction ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... vary according as we see him in public or in private life. On the stage he is all spangles and activity; off the stage, seediness and decrepitude are his chief characteristics. It is usual for him to enter upon his public career with a tremendous bound and a hat and feathers. After standing upon one toe, he raises its fellow up to a line with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Sixtus IV., brought up in the golden days of Lorenzo de' Medici, he survived the Franco-Spanish struggle for supremacy, watched the progress of the Reformation, and only died when a new Church and a new Papacy had been established by the Tridentine Council amid states sinking into the repose of decrepitude. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... about a good deal in my time, and am grown foolish now, and out of bloom. But I do not hold the perverse belief of old men generally, that I am wiser than I was. And I hope I may never grow wise; 'tis a sign of decrepitude. If I thank God for life, it is not by virtue of any riper wisdom that has come to me with age, but because I have always taken a pleasure in life. Age gives no riper wisdom; age gives ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... endeavoring, I fell sick. Ye brought me here, and I supposed the end, And went to sleep with one thought that, at least, {185} Though the whole earth should lie in wickedness, We had the truth, might leave the rest to God. Yet now I wake in such decrepitude As I had slidden down and fallen afar, Past even the presence of my former self, {190} Grasping the while for stay at facts which snap, Till I am found away from my own world, Feeling for foot-hold through a blank profound, Along with unborn people in strange ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... in the upper stories of the houses opposite. These houses opposite, compared with Gable Inn, are of a mushroom modernness, and yet are old enough (having begun with a debauched and sickly constitution) to have fallen into an almost complete decrepitude. Their stately neighbour seems to be less grimy with the London smoke than they are, has always been less susceptible to outside evil influences, even of that unescapable sort, and drives them to an added ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... feared death, whatever might await him after—conscious of a useful and blameless life. He died as he had desired to die, standing alone with me under the moonlit sky, unconfined, escaping from the decrepitude of old age, still in the full possession and maturity of his talents, and in ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... and, in 1300, having reduced the city of Prusa, in Bithynia, he made it the capital of his dominions. The Sultans who succeeded him for some generations, all men of vigor, and availing themselves not less of the decrepitude which had by that time begun to palsy the Byzantine sceptre, than of the martial and religious fanaticism which distinguished their own followers, crossed the Hellespont, conquering Thrace and the countries up to the Danube. In 1453, the most ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... into the masonry of buildings or lying about at random. Mommsen has collected numbers of them in his Corpus, and since that time some sixty new ones have been discovered. And then—the stone lions of Roman days, couched forlornly at street corners, in courtyards and at fountains, in every stage of decrepitude, with broken jaws and noses, missing legs and tails! Venosa is a veritable infirmary for mutilated antiques of this species. Now the lion is doubtless a nobly decorative beast, but—toujours perdrix! Why ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... hopes were rais'd Of his dear safety—whom, howe'er belov'd— However strong in health, and firmly built Like a fine statue of the antique world, As if he might have reach'd a century Without decrepitude, we ne'er again— Nor we alone, no other human eye— Can e'er behold! Then had I painted him Returning, as he lately left our shores, With all the fairness and the bloom of youth— The light brown hair, and its soft yellow gleams, Brightened with silver; thickening into shade, Now ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... present aspect. Old age is not venerable when it embodies itself in lilacs, rose-bushes, or any other ornamental shrub; it seems as if such plants, as they grow only for beauty, ought to flourish always in immortal youth, or, at least, to die before their sad decrepitude. Trees of beauty are trees of paradise, and therefore not subject to decay by their original nature, though they have lost that precious birthright by being transplanted to an earthly soil. There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness ...
— Buds and Bird Voices (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... upon a rock, with my bristling head swung high, breathing through wide nostrils all the savour of the world. For I had come marvellously from decrepitude to strength. I had writhed from the bonds of age and was young again. I smelled the turf and knew for the first time how sweet that smelled. And like lightning my moving nose sniffed all things to my heart and separated them ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... latest to decline, are often vigorous in the decrepitude of age. The curious mind is still striking out into new pursuits, and the mind of genius is still creating. ANCORA IMPARO!—"Even yet I am learning!" was the concise inscription on an ingenious device of an old man placed in a child's go-cart, with an hour-glass upon it, which, it is said, Michael ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Christ. Thought had become weak and illogical. Trusting to the influence of the senses, which were at first believed to be infallible, scepticism of the worst nature influenced all classes of the people. Epicureanism, not very bad in the beginning, had come to a stage of decrepitude. To seek immediate pleasure regardless of consequences was far different from avoiding extravagance and intemperance, in order to make a higher happiness. Licentiousness, debauchery, the demoralized condition of the home and family ties, made all society ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... had been the extent of Parkinson's comment on the unusual proceeding. After leaving the station they turned sharply along a road that ran parallel with the line, a dull thoroughfare of substantial, elderly houses that were beginning to sink into decrepitude. Here and there a corner residence displayed the brass plate of a professional occupant, but for the most part they were given up to the various ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... Instances of decrepitude and deformity, are rarely known to exist among them: this is probably owing to the manner in which they are tended and nursed in infancy. It is not necessary that the mother should, as has been ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... about how to rule other people. That it cannot make its government govern or its education educate we may take as a trifling weakness of oligarchy; but pleasure we do look to see in such a class; and it has surely come to its decrepitude when it cannot ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... of the abandoned old men, of the view of the proceeding which could make him acquiesce in it. The victims do not always take this view of the matter. This custom was common to all the tribes which roamed the prairies. Every one who lived to decrepitude knew that he must expect it. A more recent authority says that Poncas and Omahas never left the aged and infirm on the prairie. They were left at home, with adequate supplies, until the hunting party returned.[1009] That ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... a child, and from birth to decrepitude at every stage of its life; as infancy, childhood, ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... before he would have been startled by the change which the past few days had wrought in this brilliant nobleman's appearance. He was little more than a shadow of his former self. And seen at this hour, before placing himself in his valet's hands, before his premature decrepitude had been concealed by the artifices of the toilet, he was really frightful. His face was haggard, and his red and swollen eyelids betrayed ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... less than transformation. In Barnet's old birthplace vivacious young children with bones like india-rubber had grown up to be stable men and women, men and women had dried in the skin, stiffened, withered, and sunk into decrepitude; while selections from every class had been consigned to the outlying cemetery. Of inorganic differences the greatest was that a railway had invaded the town, tying it on to a main line at a junction a dozen miles off. Barnet's house on the ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... store of wealth would be destroyed in the fury of contending triumph and defeat. Already the defenceless citizens had suffered through the barbarity of the Janisaries; and, in time of storm, tumult and massacre, beauty, infancy and decrepitude, would have alike been sacrificed to the brutal ferocity of the soldiers. Famine and blockade were certain means of conquest; and on these we founded our ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... suffer first. The native Hawaiians, though a good-natured folk, were relentless towards the aged, weak, sick, and insane. These were frequently stoned to death or allowed to perish of hunger.[1017] In Fiji, the aged are treated with such contempt, that when decrepitude or illness threatens them, they beg their children to strangle them, unless the children anticipate the request.[1018] In Vate (or Efate) of the New Hebrides, old people are buried alive, and their passage to another world duly celebrated ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... cramped in your hand, my dear fellow," said he (for in those days youths did not call each other "old man"—with sad sense of their own decrepitude). "Bob, you are losing your freedom of touch. You must come out of these stony holes, and look at ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... are marked by strong sense and knowledge of mankind; but our most useful lesson will perhaps be derived from considering this man of the world, full of information and sparkling with vivacity, stretched on a sick bed, and apprehending all the tedious languor of helpless decrepitude and deserted ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... legalized prostitution, which nest it had itself created—scattering its remains over the hospitals, jails and streets of the big city. Even to this day a few of the former proprietresses who have remained alive and have reached the limit of decrepitude, and quondam housekeepers, fat and hoarse, like pug-dogs grown old, recall this common destruction with sorrow, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... goal. Nineveh and Babylon on the banks of the Euphrates, Thebes and Memphis on the banks of the Nile, had been reduced to dust, sinking from old age and weariness into a deadly numbness beyond possibility of awakening. Then decrepitude had spread to the shores of the great Mediterranean lake, burying both Tyre and Sidon with dust, and afterwards striking Carthage with senility whilst it yet seemed in full splendour. In this wise as mankind marched on, carried by the hidden forces of civilisation from east to west, it marked ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... palmy season, seven hundred years ago, could make an Emperor wait barefoot, in penance-shift; three days, in the snow, has for centuries seen itself decaying; reduced even to forget old purposes and enmities, and join interest with the Kingship: on this younger strength it would fain stay its decrepitude; and these two will henceforth stand and fall together. Alas, the Sorbonne still sits there, in its old mansion; but mumbles only jargon of dotage, and no longer leads the consciences of men: not the Sorbonne; it ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... disregarded. It serves no good useful service. It enables comfortable people to delude themselves that all that can be done is being done to mitigate the misfortunes which the poor bring upon themselves. It obscures the truth that modern civilization has been perverted into a huge manufacturing of decrepitude and disease, of poverty and prostitution. The reason we talk so much and listen so eagerly when our magnificent benevolences are the subject is that we do not wish to be disturbed—and that we dearly love the tickling sensation in our ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... about, no slavish subject to meet; no change of seasons overtakes them. The heaven and the earth take the places of Spring and Autumn. The king or emperor of a great nation cannot be happier than they." How would you be if death should never overtake you when ugly decrepitude makes you blind and deaf, bodily and mentally, and deprives you of all possible pleasures? How would you be if you should not die when your body is broken to pieces or terribly burned by an accident—say, by a violent ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... existed in the British possessions, and not, as in the South, mixed up with his every-day life; if the first face with which he had become familiar as a babe had been a black face, the face of his mother's 'slave' loving him, and nursing him, and he, in turn, had tended his old 'Mammy' in her decrepitude, his imagination would have contained some other pictures than those in the lines which you quote. Had there been a Mrs. Cowper, I fancy she would have been like this lady; and perhaps we should have seen Mr. Cowper acting the kind part of this lady's husband toward a slave-mother and her ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... Several of these trees have been cut down, but one of them is still standing and of substantially the dimensions given above. It must have reached the limit of growth a hundred years ago and now shows very evident signs of decrepitude. This may be due, however, to the loss of a square foot or more of ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... last dread mood Of sated lust, and dull decrepitude. No law, no art, no faith, no hope, no God. When round the freezing founts of life in peevish ring, Crouched on the bare-worn sod, Babbling about the unreturning spring, And whining for dead creeds, which cannot save, The toothless nations shiver to ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... revolutionize the art of war, whose prudence and foresight were unparalleled, whose correctness of judgment was a thing to wonder at. And in contrast to that picture of Germany he pointed to France: the Empire sinking into senile decrepitude, sanctioned by the plebiscite, but rotten at its foundation, destroying liberty, and therein stifling every idea of patriotism, ready to give up the ghost as soon as it should cease to satisfy the unworthy appetites ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... old power of Genoa, who conquered Pisa, abased Venice, planted colonies in the East, and discovered America. Line 10: throws the blame of Genoese decrepitude upon ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... indeed could scarce have escaped the fate of his brother-in-law, though his conduct then, and subsequently, showed more energy than that of the others. Couthon hugging in his bosom the spaniel upon which he was wont to exhaust the overflowing of his affected sensibility, appealed to his decrepitude, and asked whether, maimed of proportion and activity as he was, he could be suspected of nourishing plans of violence or ambition. "Wretch," said Legendre, "thou hast the strength of Hercules for the perpetration of crime." ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... all is a deserted mining village, and there are many such—the shaft having been worked out, or an unquenchable subterranean fire left to smolder in neglect. Here the tipple has fallen into creaking decrepitude; the cabins are without windows or doors—these having been taken to some newer hamlet; ridge-poles are sunken, chimneys tottering; soot covers the gaunt bones, which for all the world are like a row of skeletons, perched high, and grinning down ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... the castle. It is stern in its decrepitude; its very aspect is historic. It was built by a king of Navarre, Sancho Abarca, known as the Strong, so long ago as the tenth century; the facade facing the square is somewhat later, and the other facade was rebuilt by Charles V. We pass through the entrance-way ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... however, despite the prodigious care that the great magnifico, Don Juan Belvidero, took of himself, the days of decrepitude came upon him, and with those days the constant importunity of physical feebleness, an importunity all the more distressing by contrast with the wealth of memories of his impetuous youth and the sensual pleasures of middle age. The unbeliever who in the height of his cynical humor ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... this growth of nations from youth to decrepitude, and, coming back at last to himself and to his own laud and time, breaks forth into a lament ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... anchorage at the Wallabout, whether from decrepitude, or the intolerable burden of woes and wrongs accumulated in her wretched hulk,—but sank slowly down at last into the subjacent ooze, as if to hide her shame from human sight, and more than forty years after my father pointed out to me at low tide huge ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... resolved to decline all overtures, by taking refuge in his decrepitude; but the attorney's steady ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... peripatetics were seen extended on sofas, or feebly promenading under shelter of the bulwarks; while persons who prided themselves on their dignity sustained ignominious falls, or clung to railings in a state of tottering decrepitude, in an attempted progress down the saloon. Though we had four ledges on the tables, cruets, bottles of claret, and pickles became locomotive, and jumped upon people's laps; almost everything higher than ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... for a brief space under her successors, those weakest and wickedest of English kings, the ominous and ill-starred Stuarts, and which she still maintains in her hale and superb old age, savoring, after nearly nine centuries of increasing might and scarcely interrupted rule, in no respect of decrepitude ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... to be very old, was so serene in his sleepy mood, "so safe from all decrepitude," and ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne |
